560 RR Artist Residency

St. Johnsbury, Vermont (August 26, 2025) – Catamount Arts and Vermont Studio Center are pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of visiting artists to be based in the new live/workspace at 560 Railroad Street in St. Johnsbury, recently renovated by the Northern Forest Center. The 560 Railroad Community Artist program will bring visual and performing artists to St. Johnsbury for 4-6 weeks to lead a variety of community engagement activities, including classes and workshops, discussions and artist talks, open studios, public art projects, performances, and more, in addition to growing their own creative practice.

To kick off the program, Catamount Arts partnered with the Vermont Studio Center (VSC), the renowned artist residency program in Johnson, Vermont, to invite their alumni, all of whom have spent time on the Johnson campus, to participate in the residency program. There was a strong response, and a review committee of local artists and educators selected a group of 9 artists to come to St. Johnsbury in 2025-26 to teach in local afterschool programs and lead arts projects for all ages.

“What sets the 560 Railroad Community Artist program apart is the focus on community engagement,” said Catamount Arts Education Director Anne Campbell. “As an organization committed to integrating the arts in community, and nurturing creativity in people of all ages and abilities, we are looking forward to hosting artists who will share their skills and passions with the community by teaching, leading creative group projects, and inviting community members to connect and converse about the arts.”

This year’s 560 Railroad Community Artists are as follows.

Jen Volansky is an artist, educator, and life coach living and creating in Stowe, Vermont. As a painter and mixed media artist, her work is guided by curiosity, play, and the stories we carry. Nature and personal narrative inspire her creative process, which explores the connection between creativity, wellness, and growth. Jen holds space for exploration, expression, and grounding. Her mission is to support well-being and transformation through the power of art and presence. During her St. Johnsbury residency, she aims to deepen this work by engaging with the community in various ways and creating a new body of work rooted in permission to play, create, and connect.

Rebecca Jacoby is a visual artist working in mixed media on paper and canvas. Her work is based on the natural world of woods, rocks, stones, and plant life and the crumbling buildings and sidewalks of the city. Through abstract processes and the use of color, texture, and collage elements she incorporates into each piece, Jacoby creates colorful, tactile worlds that evoke movement and geographic dreamscapes and celebrate process and materials. Jacoby received an MFA from Pratt Institute and lives and works in Philadelphia.

Gnaomi Siemens is a poet and interdisciplinary artist based in New York City who writes about ecology, culture, and art through a queer, ecofeminist lens. Her work can be found in The Believer, Seneca Review, Portland Review, Epiphany Magazine, Poet Lore, and Action, Spectacle, among others in the US and abroad. Her work has been supported by The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The Arctic Circle, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The British Library, The Poetry Society of New York, American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and The Council For European Studies. Her first poetry collection, The Errant, was a finalist for The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.

Tony Hao is a New Haven, Connecticut-based Chinese-to-English literary translator and writer. Authors he has translated include Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger 童偉格, Chinese essayist and poet Xiao Hai 小海, Taiwanese transgender poet and writer Liu Chen-Chun 劉宸君, and Chinese short story writer Ban Yu 班宇. His words have appeared and are forthcoming in Granta, The Georgia Review, The Common, The Offing, MAYDAY Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been recognized by the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, Art Omi Writers: Translation Lab, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere.

JP Morrison Lans is a Tulsa-based artist whose figurative work blends realism and abstraction to explore how the interior self processes the perplexities of the external world. Her paintings center her own body, family, and symbolic forms—hands, mouths, and inverted figures—as metaphors for desire, self-preservation, introspection, motherhood and recently the dark humor of middle-age womanhood. At age eleven, a visit to the Carole Laroche Gallery in Santa Fe ignited Morrison Lans’ desire to create an art practice, leading to her first solo exhibition at the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition in the year 2000. Since earning her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows in San Francisco and Santa Fe. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Bundaberg Regional Gallery (Australia) and NBC Bank (Oklahoma). Morrison Lans has held residencies at the School of Visual Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Truro Art Center, and in Menorca, Spain, she is also a member of the international artist collective Teleportal.Gallery. Morrison Lans and her child can typically be found experimenting with encaustic and Lego, respectively, in their backyard studio.

Christine Forni of Chicago is a painter and sculptor examining links between human behavior and the natural world. Her work focuses on environmental compassion through poetic connections of habitat, alchemy, anthropology, and memory. She has exhibited at venues including: Ueno Royal Japanese Art Museum and Awagami Paper Museum (Japan), DeCordova Sculpture Museum, (Massachusetts), Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico), Museo Internazionale Italia Arte and Museo di Scienze Naturali (Italy), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago). Forni created Drawing You Outside, an environmental community drawing project collaborating with poets, environmentalists, botanists, historians, physicists, writers, performance and sound artists. Her botanical sculptural drawing installations evolved during the artist’s residencies in Paris at École du Breuil and the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée where she drew enlarged microscopic details of specimens amassed by naturalists.

Jessie Rothwell of Takoma Park, Maryland is a writer, storyteller and musician. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Gargoyle, the Grace & Gravity journal series, Breadcrumbs magazine, and on Minnesota Public Radio’s Classical blog. She has sung Balkan traditional and other types of music with the Balkan women’s vocal ensemble Orfeia and as a member of the band Mezhdou. She participated in Season 19 of AWP’s Writer to Writer mentorship during 2023/2024. She holds an MFA in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts. Find her meditations on life at https://jessierothwell.substack.com/.

Rachael Fowler’s fiction has been published by The Literary Review, North American Review, Prime Number Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and Fugue. In addition to 560 Railroad Street, her writing has also been awarded residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, Nocefresca, Yaddo, and The Studios at MASS MoCA. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where she currently serves as Editor of Mississippi Review and Coordinator of the Young Authors Academy. She lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Sonia Scherr of Norwich, Vermont, writes fiction and nonfiction and enjoys creating opportunities for people to connect with their community through the arts. Now an educator at the nonprofit Egan Maritime Institute on Nantucket, she previously worked as community coordinator at central Vermont’s Cabot School to expand out-of-classroom learning. She has a background in journalism and communications and has published short stories in literary journals, including Gargoyle Magazine, Jabberwock Review, Blue Earth Review and poemmemoirstory. Having grown up in Norwich and lived in the Northeast Kingdom, she is excited to work with the St. Johnsbury community next summer as a 560 Railroad Street Community Artist.