Meet the 2026 Artists-in-Residence!

We are thrilled to announce our new artists for Mount Auburn’s Artist-in-Residence program, now in its eleventh year.  This year we had a record-breaking 145 artists who applied to the residency and four projects were selected. Between April 2026 and March 2027, the artists will be working on original site-specific creative projects inspired by an in-depth experience at the cemetery. All projects will be presented to the public and announcements will be made on our website, e-newsletters, and on social media.  Continue reading to learn more about the artists and their project proposals.

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detritus dance, founded in 2021 by co-Artistic Directors Caroline Bradbury (she/her) and Claire Lane (she/her), is an artistic collective focused on feminist story-telling through contemporary dance, collage, and text. Their research proceeds a lineage of intersectional feminists working towards dismantling patriarchal systems and values through subversive gender performance. Their most recent performance of Malefica, a work on the history of witches, was performed in Salem, MA. They have taught workshops and professional-level classes with Urbanity Dance Company, Midday Movement Series, and José Mateo Ballet Theater. detritus integrates a breadth of international perspectives including improvisation, Flying Low, and Physical Theater in their dance-making.

Detritus dance will activate the landscape of Mount Auburn Cemetery through a site-responsive, roaming contemporary dance performance installation. Inspired by Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s “Conversations”, gatherings of Bostonian women who sought education on topics of history, mythology, and the literary arts, their dance performance will bring to life the stories of women poets, sculptors, and actors whose bodies and work lay within the Mount Auburn burial grounds. Interweaving the narratives of: writer Margaret Fuller Ossoli; poet Maria White Lowell; actor Charlotte Cushman; and sculptor Edmonia Lewis.

Sara Jordenö is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and researcher working across nonfiction and experimental film, public art, and archival practice. Their work engages testimony, memory, landscape, and care through long-term, community-centered collaboration. Jordenö’s projects have been presented internationally, including at the 60th Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg. At Mount Auburn Cemetery, the residency offers Jordenö a context for reflecting on queer memory, dignity, and the fear of erasure after death, in relation to archival traces, oral history, and experimental film history, through the durational site-responsive project Repose (Our Ashes Mixed).

Repose (Our Ashes Mixed), is a site-responsive work created specifically for Mount Auburn Cemetery. It brings together oral history, experimental film, and archival research to address a fear that quietly shapes many LGBTQ lives: the fear of being erased, misnamed, or rewritten after death. The project takes its historical and emotional starting point in the joint headstone of Anne Whitney and Abby Manning. Writer Annie Adams Fields observed that “the two women complement and repose each other,” language that resonates deeply with Mount Auburn’s founding philosophy of repose as care.  As part of the residency, Sara will conduct archival research at Wellesley College, where Anne Whitney’s papers are held, including letters exchanged between Anne Whitney and Abby Manning.

Sara will also conduct interviews with people from a range of communities, including people of trans and non-binary experiences, from which, they will create an experimental 16mm film and an artist book. The film will be abstract yet emotionally resonant, grounded in Mount Auburn’s identity as a living garden cemetery. Working in the tradition of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, they will handcraft the film by attaching organic materials directly to the filmstrip’s emulsion, allowing light, texture, and movement to carry meaning without narration or representation. These materials—plants, soil, and other natural matter—will be gathered within Mount Auburn.

Lenelle Moïse is a poet and playwright. Fueled by a radical optimism, her creative influences include jazz, nature-based spirituality, queer liberation, and memory. Lenelle’s play K-I-S-S-I-N-G (Huntington Theatre) was published in the Spring 2025 issue of American Theatre magazine. She also wrote, composed, and co-starred in the Off-Broadway show Expatriate. Her poetry collection Haiti Glass (City Lights Books) features rhythmic verse and intimate prose. Lenelle was raised in Cambridge, currently lives in Western Massachusetts, and fills her journals with colorful collages. Visit lenellemoise.com for more.

Lenelle Moïse will create and film original poems at Mount Auburn Cemetery, honoring Ghede, the giddy spirit of death. Her site-specific short film, On Human Rites, will celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of our ancestors' wildest dreams.

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer and educator. His work explores the existential, creative and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving in human and more-than-human contexts. Manifesting as soundwalks, soundscape compositions, experimental archives, and installations, his work has been presented internationally, including at Ars Electronica, Sonorities, and In-Sonora. He has produced sound art work about Arctic Circle, Walden Pond, the Canadian Pacific Coast, and more. His edited book Soundwalking: Through Time, Space and Technologies was published by Routledge in 2023. He is 2026 Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design working on introducing creative sonic perspectives into spatial practices and urban design.

Jacek Smolicki will develop an immersive soundwalk that invites the public to engage with Mount Auburn Cemetery as a site of cultural heritage, ecological diversity, and lived experience. Building on previous work with soundwalks and site-specific listening practices, the project will offer a carefully composed auditory guide that accompanies visitors as they walk through the cemetery, encouraging attentive listening to its historical, environmental, and social layers. The soundwalk will be based primarily on sounds recorded in situ, combined with elements of creative storytelling informed by archival and historical research, memories shared by those who care for and work within the cemetery, and poetic reflections developed during extended soundscape explorations of the site.