About Us

Craft + Photography Artists

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media. Museum visitors have the unique opportunity to visit the artists’ studios and watch the artists at work. Interacting with the resident artists is a great way to learn about a range of craft processes and techniques. In turn, the artists receive a unique opportunity to gain exposure, make connections with the Houston community, and help educate the public about craft.
Photo by Katy Anderson.

Bennie Flores Ansell

Medium: CRAFT + PHOTOGRAPHY
Residency:
September 1, 2022 –
December 1, 2022

Born in Manila, Philippines, Bennie Flores Ansell is a Houston-based visual artist. Working in themes that address migration patterns, light, shadow and murmuration forms, her work deconstructs and re-contextualizes photographic materials. She creates objects, installations, colorful light projections and photographs by manipulating and re-contextualizing 35 mm art history slides, mirrors, and other artifacts born from the medium of photography. She says that by breaking down the fundamentals of photography into light drawings, her projections distill meaning into a more transparent form. “The objects and installations carry weight, occupy space, and deconstruct image materials to reconstruct the presence of a missing image.”

Flores Ansell is a professor in the Art Department at the Houston Community College and previously taught at the High School of Performing and Visual Arts. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Houston and a BA in photography from the University of South Florida. She was awarded an American Photography Institute Fellowship at New York University and was an artist-in-residence at the Asia Society Museum in Houston. Her works are in many private collections and have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the International Center for Photography, Festival De La Luz in Argentina; the Daegu Photography Biennale in South Korea; Uno Art Space, Stuttgart, Germany; and Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City.

To learn more about Bennie Flores Ansell’s work, visit: https://www.benniefloresansell.com/.

Stephanie J Woods
Photo by Johannes Barfield.

Stephanie J. Woods

Medium: CRAFT + PHOTOGRAPHY
Residency:
June 1, 2022 –
August 31, 2022

Stephanie J. Woods is a multimedia artist from Charlotte, NC, currently based in Albuquerque, NM, where she is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary art at the University of New Mexico. Her work fuses a relationship between photography and fiber. Her passion for interdisciplinary practices and material language is evident through her collaborations and implementation of symbolic materials that examine performative behavior, domestic spaces, and alternative realities that reference Black American culture and her experiences growing up in the American South.

Woods earned an MFA in new media sculpture and is the recipient of several residencies and fellowships, including Black Rock Senegal, the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, ACRE Residency, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists Residency, and Penland School of Craft. Her work is featured in the permanent collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, in Richmond, VA. She has also exhibited her work at Smack Mellon and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, both located in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Art Papers, Burnaway, and the Boston Art Review.

To learn more about Stephanie J. Woods, visit:

https://www.stephaniejwoods.com/

Hillerbrand+Magsamen

Medium: Interdisciplinary Craft + Photography Residency
Residency:
February 1, 2021 –
May 30, 2021

Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s practice utilizes collaboration, process, and media experimentation through video, photography, installation, sculpture, and interdisciplinary performance. They explore their relationships to each other and society with an uncanny sensibility that merges the real and unreal, blurring boundaries between life and art, and often include their two children, Maddie and Emmett, in their work.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work has been presented at festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), CounterCurrent Festival (Houston, TX), and Diffusion Photography Festival (Wales, UK). Exhibitions include the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Center for Photography Woodstock (Woodstock, NY). They have received grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Austin Film Society, Houston Arts Alliance, and Experimental Television Center and participated in numerous residency programs, including Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), I-Park (East Haddam, CT), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), and Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM).

Stephan Hillerbrand is an associate professor at the University of Houston. Mary Magsamen is the curator at Aurora Picture Show. For more information, visit http://www.hillerbrandmagsamen.com/.

The application for the 2025 – 2026 cycle opens December 1, 2025. It’s free to apply!

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media.

The application for the 2025 – 2026 cycle opens December 1, 2025. It’s free to apply!

The Artist Residency Program is designed to offer time and space for craft artists to focus on their creative work and interact with the public. The program supports emerging, mid-career, and established artists working in all craft media, including but not limited to clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood and mixed media.

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