Meet the 2025 Artists-in-Residence!

We are thrilled to announce five new artists for Mount Auburn’s Artist-in-Residence program, now in its tenth year. Between April 2025 and April 2026, 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.

_____________________________

Emily Duggan is a poet, performer, and storyteller. Inspired by her Playback Theater practice, she founded StoryTailor Poems, for which she writes customized poems on the spot – and in only three minutes! She has appeared onstage with the Boston Poetry Slam, Uptown Poetry Slam (Chicago), ArtsEmerson, the Roslindale Square Theater, Deana’s Educational Theater, the Perpetual Visitors Theatre Company, and as a graveyard tour guide with Ghosts & Gravestones Boston. Her poems can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Writers Without Margins, and Academic Psychiatry. 

“Mount Auburn Cemetery: Memory Poems” invites visitors to explore and preserve their memories of Mount Auburn through poetry. Throughout the year, Emily will be stationed in different locations at the Cemetery where visitors will be invited to share their stories about, connections to, and memories of Mount Auburn. Emily will then write a customized/improvised poem based on these stories and the visitors will be gifted a copy of the original piece. Emily will also design a map that marks the Cemetery locations that inspired the poems as part of a self-guided audio walking tour during which visitors may listen to recordings of the poems. She will conclude her residency with a roaming poetry reading in the landscape.

...

Juls Gabs is a digital painter and media artist who redefines traditional painting by merging classical influences with contemporary digital methods. Her work has received notable awards and grants including the European Research of New Creative Spaces in new media and the Revelation Artist Prize Mayte Spinola, among others. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions across the world including the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, the U.K., Sweden, Spain, and France. Her solo exhibitions include works for HallSpace Boston, Onstream Gallery (Rome), Unit 1 Gallery|Workshop (London), Sala Miguel Hernandez (Madrid), and Casa de Cultura Navacerrada (Madrid). She has held former artist residencies in Belgium, Germany, the U.K., and Japan.

Inspired by late 18th/early 19th Century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner’s bold vision of capturing a world in flux, Juls seeks to paint the Mount Auburn landscape of the future—where nature, time, and humanity intertwine in new and unexpected ways. Her exhibition will be created using new technologies where digitalized nature grows from the ceiling forming an ethereal forest. Through this project, she hopes to create a space where nature, memory, and technology converge—inviting reflection on the landscapes we inherit and the ones we have yet to create.

... 

Cara and Lilia are a wife-and-wife artist team based in Somerville, MA. Their recent work has appeared in venues such as the ICA Boston First Fridays, the Harvard Film Archive, Fabrikzeitung Magazine, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the New York Times. Lilia is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard, where she also teaches courses in anthropology and filmmaking. Cara is a science and nature journalist whose second book, Atlas Obscura: Wild Life (2024), is a thoughtful collection of cool species, ecosystem dynamics, and other wonders of the living world. She also writes music and plays guitar for the band sidebody. 

Wife and wife team Cara and Lilia will create a short film that focuses on different kinds of love stories found in the Mount Auburn landscape. The film will explore the unique ways that creatures care for and/or sustain one another. They are keen to include non-romantic and non-human stories in the film such as a devoted birder finding his favorite oriole, a butterfly searching for nectar, a community of American toads singing by moonlight, a family of coyotes protecting their young, a woman being honored in death by a monument “erected by her female friends,” etc. By attending closely to traces of love, care, and affection in the human and nonhuman histories that Mount Auburn contains, Cara and Lilia hope to learn about the conditions necessary to sustain life and love and the role that spaces like Mount Auburn play in those conditions.

 ... 

Lia Pikus is a cellist, composer, and illustrator whose practice centers on art’s ability to cultivate experiences of presence and connection, both within community and in dialogue with the natural world. By drawing and reflecting on natural processes, Lia seeks to help audiences make emotional and sensory connections with their environments. As a Thomas J. Watson fellow (2023), she researched this connective power on a global scale, exploring the role of art in fostering community around the world. This research formed the foundation for her current explorations in live looping as a form of meditative ritual. It is also the central focus of her debut EP, Ritual, released in 2024. Lia was an Artist-in-Residence at Shenandoah National Park in 2024 and at Mothership NYC in 2023. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Religion, Ethics, and Politics at Harvard University.

Lia believes that without ritual we lose not only a structured way to process grief but also a deeper connection to our internal world and to love itself. This leaves us disconnected not just from the depth of our sorrow but from the full spectrum of human emotion. This project seeks to address that absence by using music as a form of ritual. Throughout her residency, Lia will lead a series of sonic rituals (“Grief Meditations”) with her cello in the Mount Auburn landscape designed to cultivate deep listening and create intentional spaces for attuning to grief, impermanence, connection, and love. These gatherings will provide a communal container for feeling deeply, processing loss, and forging meaningful connections with others through shared vulnerability. Lia will conclude her residency with an outdoor concert comprised of original compositions inspired by her own reflections on grief and ritual.