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The Eliot School Artist in Residence program engages a Boston-based artist each year to work closely with a group of art-passionate teens from our Teen Bridge Program, to produce a body of public art with thoughtful community engagement at its core. Teen Bridge is a year-round, multi-year program combining art education and experience, life skills, mentorship, job training, and employment for student artists in our community-based programs.
Teen Bridge’s pedagogy is deeply rooted in the belief that art and creative skills serve as a foundation for success, no matter what path students choose. Teen Bridge students come from a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences. Our goal at Teen Bridge is to create an environment where teens can connect across difference and be empowered to express themselves creatively, think critically, and use their voices to be agents of societal change.
If you have questions, please contact Teen Programs Manager Taína Vargas.
CURRENT RESIDENCY
2026 • Corey Watanabe
Gardens of Resonance aims to strengthen teen artists’ sense of place through the creation of multimedia works that celebrate their personal relationship with nature. Through a series of site-based workshops inspired by landscape architecture, this residency empowers teen artists to identify how the environment shapes their identity and experiences—positioning their artistic practice as a catalyst for social and environmental change within their communities.
The "Garden of Resonance" is a dynamic, internal landscape that embodies our personal relationship with nature. Its energy is rooted in the interconnected resonance of all beings, serving as the primary source of our creative expression. As artists, we nourish these gardens through the act of creation.
Throughout the residency, students will deepen their relationship with their "Garden of Resonance" through a series of site-to-studio workshops. By engaging with values of home, community, memory, and activism, students will explore individual landscapes and community spaces throughout Boston. At each site, students will use a variety of media to tune their senses to the unique conditions of the environment. Watanabe will introduce students to tactile media, including cyanotype, botanical printing, natural dyes, and sensory charcoal—materials that speak directly to the ephemerality of the landscape. This journey will culminate in the creation of a large-scale "Resonance Tapestry," a collaborative quilt that weaves together the interconnected themes found among each student’s “Garden of Resonance.”
About the Artist
Corey Watanabe (he/him) is a Japanese and Filipino American interdisciplinary artist, landscape architect, and educator. As a biracial descendant of immigrants, his practice is rooted in the power of intersectionality and the richness of diverse histories. Watanabe views the world as a complex web of interconnected relationships, a philosophy that informs an artistic practice centered on activism, tactility, and a deep dialogue with the natural world.
His work explores the fluxes and flows of nature, where human and non-human agencies converge. Watanabe describes his creative journey as the unfolding of an "internal landscape," relying on "visceral traces" (embodied stimuli within the living environment) to guide his hand. Corey holds a BA in Environmental Science & Graphic Design from Northeastern and a master's in landscape architecture from Rhode Island School of Design. This will be his first artist residency.
PAST RESIDENCIES
2025 • Yuko Okabe
"My Recipe, Our Potluck"
Food has long sparked a spectrum of discourse focusing on nostalgia, scarcity, politics, history, artistry, and more. “Breaking bread” and meeting for a meal cross various cultures, stories, and meanings. If we think of food as something that people share, consume, and digest, how can we ruminate on stories in a similar way?
My Recipe, Our Potluck will explore how our communities view cultural resilience and resistance through a lens of food and gathering. Using food as a storytelling vessel, the Teen Artists will collect stories from each other and community members through interactive workshops and interviews. They will speak with community members who touch different parts of the food ecosystem—farmers, grocery store owners, nutritionists—as well as everyday people who consume food as sustenance. They will learn about the technical aspects of how food travels through the industrial pipeline, as well as how we as individuals connect our identities and culture to food.
Together, Yuko and the Teen Artists will translate these stories and observations into illustrated works that use food ephemera, such as menus, recipe cards, and packaging, as framing devices. By using familiar designs that we associate with food, the Teen Artists can personalize and riff off these templates to create something in their own voice. At the end of the intensive, there will be a public exhibition and potluck where we will showcase these works and hold conversations around food, culture, and belonging.
About the Artist: Yuko Okabe
Yuko Okabe (she/they) is an illustrator and cultural worker playing at the intersection of whimsy and community engagement. She has used art and design in her many cross-disciplinary experiences in affordable housing, healthcare, and community development. She also likes making characters, stories, curriculums, murals, and other colorful things.
Okabe holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her illustration practice received recognition from the Society of Illustrators NYC, Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles (SILA), Creative Quarterly, and 3x3 The Magazine of Contemporary Illustration. Through grants and fellowships, Okabe's community arts practice received support from the New England Foundation for the Arts, Tufts University Collective Futures Fund, Rhode Island School of Design's Maharam STEAM Fellowship, and the Enterprise Community Partners’ Rose Fellowship. Okabe is currently a studio artist at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is also an amateur oatmeal influencer @yukoats on Instagram and a member of her niece's highly exclusive sticker club.
2024 • Alejandra Cuadra
"The Preciousness of the Everyday: Vessels of Belonging"
What does it mean to belong within our bodies, souls, communities, and the Valleys of Earth? The Preciousness of the Everyday: Vessels of Belonging creates spaces for reflection and connection around these questions. Interdisciplinary artist Alejandra Cuadra lets her voice speak without barriers through her chosen materials: clay, wood, video, objects of abundance, and the desire for freedom.
This project encouraged Teen Bridge artists and community participants to slow down and honor the preciousness of the everyday as they created vessel forms incorporating clay and mixed media elements. Highlighting personal allegories and memories that shaped their journeys, the artists created Casitas to express a collective sense of belonging. The design of the Casitas is based on ofrendas (altars) and retablos (devotional paintings) that are commonly found in Latinx homes. They are covered with thoughts and imagery that open the door to each individual’s world and heart.
The project culminated in an exhibition in the Piano Craft Gallery featuring the work of the Teen Bridge artists, Artist in Residence Alejandra Cuadra, and community partners, with their voices coming together to create a choir of freedom, belonging, and remembrance. As an immigrant and human being living in these unprecedented times, Alejandra Cuadra has been meditating on displacement, what belonging looks like, who and what is valued, and what is precious to us. Memories can return to us in both physical and spiritual forms, reminding us of what we have endured to stand where we are. As each of us is a vessel for spiritual, mental, and physical matter, the vessels that we create will radiate what lies inside each artist’s heart through their surfaces into the spaces where things can be felt and heard.
About the Artist: Alejandra Cuadra
Alejandra Cuadra is a proud Latina, a citizen of the world, and most importantly a human being. Cuadra embraces clay, wood, video, steel, and objects of abundance to weave, braid, and knot together her history – what was, what is, and what is to come. Feeling neither from here nor there, she seeks to reconnect to her roots in Peru while threading together notions of identity, displacement, traditions, belonging, and a desire for freedom. Her current work reflects her quest for what it means to belong within the body, soul, community, and the rooted valleys of the earth.
Cuadra lives and creates on unceded Massachusett and Pawtucket land. She holds a BFA in Sculpture with a Minor in Public Engagement from Maine College of Art and Design. She has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk School of Art, Monson Arts, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and Twenty Summers at Hawthorne Barn, has interned at Indigo Arts Alliance and The Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, and was an apprentice for ten years at Kemp Pottery in Orleans, MA. She was part of the 2023 Technical Education program at Mudflat. As she continues to pave her artistic path, she seeks to live an inspired life filled with more questions than answers, constantly learning, relearning, and unlearning along the way.
2023 • Feda Eid
"Made in USA"
The 2023 Artist in Residence project explored themes of home, nationalism, borders, pride, and the creation of all things made in the USA. The project built on Artist in Residence Feda Eid’s Made in USA series, an ongoing exploration into her upbringing as an Arab and Muslim in America, and into the up-rooting and re-planting of her parents from seeds of civil war. Through photography, this series delves into questions of intergenerational trauma, inheritances, and the blooming of self from the complex soil of the past. Feda’s Artist in Residence project expanded this exploration in collaboration with young artists from our Teen Bridge program. Teen artists used portrait photography to engage critically with what it means to be American in the “melting pot” of assimilation, discrimination, surveillance, orientalism, and the dominating negative representations of marginalized groups perpetuated by the state, societal norms, and popular media; asking the questions: what will we continue to plant here? What will the future of all things made in the USA be? Do we have the courage to change, to transform, to stitch a new tapestry of collective liberation?
Community members engaged with the themes of the residency by creating their own self-portraits inspired by صنع في أمريكا (Made in USA). The result is صنع في أمريكا (Made in USA): Crafted Visions, a revelatory glimpse at the self-reflective artistry across our community.
About the Artist: Feda Eid
Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist living on occupied, unceded territory of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People (Quincy, MA). Her work explores heritage, tradition, culture, identity, and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, and adornment linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese parents who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's American journey and her own childhood growing up as an Arab and Muslim in the US. She believes in the telling of personal narratives to broaden our perspectives and to ultimately help us feel the universal emotions that connect us all.
Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been featured and exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Shed NY among others. She was awarded the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Emerging Studio Artist Fellowship in 2018, was a Luminary and 2019 Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and was awarded the 2022 Artist Residency Fellowship at MASS MoCA studios.
2022 • TakeOne + GoFive
"Spaces of Belonging"
How do we shape the spaces that shape us? The 2022 Eliot School Artist in Residence Project—“Spaces of Belonging”—explored this question by engaging Teen Bridge fellows, students from English High School, and members of the surrounding community in the process of planning and creating a public mural at The English High School in Jamaica Plain. Artists in Residence GoFive and TakeOne engaged the community in a process of active place-making that invited them to celebrate the beauty of their community, reconnect with their physical space, and build a sense of belonging amidst the pandemic’s fragmentation. The residency culminated with the unveiling of the mural and an accompanying exhibition at Piano Craft Gallery. The final artwork is a lasting reminder of the power of creativity and the resilience of the school community, young artists, and the surrounding neighborhood.
Teen Bridge and Artist in Residence 2022 were made possible with funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts' Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with generous support from the Barr Foundation.
About the Artists: GoFive and TakeOne
2022 Artists in Residence GoFive and TakeOne are muralists and graffiti artists who frequently work together as a two-person mural crew. Having grown up in Boston, they bring lived experience as Afro-Latin youth finding their way through this city.
Co-Lead Artist Genaro Ortega (aka GoFive) has been providing Boston with creative and inventive public art for more than 10 years. Using paint and aerosol, and drawing on Boston’s rich mural traditions, GoFive has created a lively body of art that pays homage to the unique qualities of the communities in which he works. By painting murals within communities where he has ties, he provides artistically resonant experiences and permanent artistic resources for those neighborhoods. GoFive also teaches design and visual arts at Madison Park Vocational High School. He was recently featured in Underground at Ink Block, organized by Street Theory, and has been described by Boston Magazine as having “serious street art credentials.”
Co-Lead Artist Luis Taforo (aka TakeOne) grew up immersed in hip-hop culture as a member of the Latinx community in Boston neighborhoods including Dorchester, Roxbury, and the South End. Starting in the early 90s, he became part of the African Latino Alliance, which brought together teens and young adults from various neighborhoods and blocks in Boston for positive art experiences at a time when gang violence there was surging. As he developed increased skills with paint, the scale and scope of his art grew, leading to murals of varying sizes and themes.
2021 • Chanel Thervil
"Feel the Flow"
Haitian American artist and educator Chanel Thervil was our 2021 resident artist. Her project, Feel the Flow, guided teen Fellows on an investigation of the body as a vessel, in three parts. Feel the Flow first explored adornment—how we decorate our vessels, with a focus on Aesthetics/Appearance; then Movement—how our vessels move, with an emphasis on the mechanics of the body and how we move through the world; and finally Resilience—how we feel inside our vessels, with a focus on how internal feelings correlate with the external. Each week, she explored these themes via drawing, collage, and fibers. The residency culminated with the creation of mixed media banners that represent each of the teen Fellows.
About the Artist: Chanel Thervil
Chanel Thervil is a Haitian American artist and educator that uses varying combinations of abstraction and portraiture to convene communal dialogue around culture, social issues, and existential questions. At the core of her practice lies a desire to empower and inspire tenderness and healing among communities of color through the arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Pace University and a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She's been making a splash in Boston via her educational collaborations, public art, and residencies with institutions like The Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Children's Museum, The DeCordova, The Harvard Ed Portal, and The Cambridge Public Library. Her work has been featured by PBS Kids, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Bay State Banner, WBUR's ARTery, WGBH, and Hyperallergic.
Find out more about her work by visiting her website chanelthervil.com.
2020 • Carolyn Shadid Lewis
"InterGeneration"
Carolyn Shadid Lewis, a multimedia artist and filmmaker, was our 2020 resident artist. Her work, InterGeneration, brought two generations together (teens on the verge of adulthood and seniors later in life) through dialogue and collaborative art-making.
InterGeneration is a series of conversations and a joint creation between teens and their elders that enlivens memory and hope through audio recordings and hand-made, stop-motion animation embedded in a longer film. The project brought these two generations together through storytelling, attentive listening, and collaborative creation. The word “generation” refers to different age groups, but it also refers to art making, production, and invention. Through animating stories of the past and expectations for the future, InterGeneration initiates creative ways of seeing our current moment.
InterGeneration premiered at the Roxbury International Film Festival in 2022. It has since screened in Lebanon, in Canada, and in cities across the US. Stay tuned for a broadcast of the film on PBS member stations in 2025. To learn more, visit intergenerationfilm.com.
About the Artist: Carolyn Shadid Lewis
Carolyn Shadid Lewis is an artist, filmmaker, animator, and educator whose work tells personal stories of belonging. Inspired by her military family and her Irish and Lebanese ancestry, Carolyn’s artwork explores how memory passes down through generations to shape individuals, families, and nations. Oral storytelling and intergenerational relationships have powerfully influenced her life. Consequently, Carolyn now creates opportunities to foster creative exchanges between people across differences in age and culture.
Her award-winning films and installations have shown in festivals and museums internationally, such as at the Sirius Arts Center in Cobh, Ireland, and the Lebanese Independent Film Festival in Beirut. Her work has gained the support of many organizations, including the Irish Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Boston Public Health Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has partnered with Facing History and Ourselves and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Her documentary that began at the Eliot School, InterGeneration is set to have a broadcast on PBS member stations in 2025. Her website is shadidlewis.com
2019 • L'Merchie Frazier
"New Urban Monuments: Stand Up Inside Yourself!"
Monuments stand to materialize memorial practices that shape the American landscape. Recent calls for the literal destruction of certain public monuments respond to ideals for American democracy. Why do these hard relics, which represent a divided America and frame challenges to democratic possibilities, remain to shape public memory in our neighborhoods and parks? How do we create new monuments that engage new ideas emerging from our communities? Through this project, L’Merchie Frazier and Teen Bridge youth collaborated on a project that investigated these questions and engaged the larger public in the process.
Community-based workshops took place in the summer at JP Porchfest and Egleston Farmers Market. The final work was unveiled during Jamaica Plain Open Studios, and a final presentation—an exhibition, reception, and artists’ talk—took place at our partner gallery, Galatea Fine Art, in the fall. Portions of the installation continued on view at Egleston Square Branch Library and will travel in 2020 to the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Artists, as part of Violence Transformed.
About the Artist: L’Merchie Frazier
L’Merchie Frazier is a public fiber artist, innovator, poet, holographer, and Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket. For fifteen years she has been engaged in highlighting and curating the Museum’s collection and exhibits, in providing place-based education and interdisciplinary history programs, projects, and lectures, most recently promoting STEM/ STEAM education pedagogy, and in managing the successful Faculty/ Teachers’ Institutes and their extension, The Cross Cultural Classroom, a benefit marketed to independent education entities, municipalities, and corporations. Since 2007 she has designed and delivered history and art-making projects every summer with MLK Scholar high school students for the Museum of African American History.
2018 • Nora Valdez
“Home/Hogar”
Nora kicked off our 2018 residency on the theme of home/hogar. She and our Teen Bridge youth initiated a public dialogue by exploring the questions: What makes a place home? What makes home safe, and comforting? How do we create a sense of home, and claim a place as home? They created an installation that illustrated these themes and collaborated with the community to tell various stories of home.
View our "Home/Hogar" photo-book on Shutterfly
About the Artist: Nora Valdez
Nora Valdez has worked and exhibited as a sculptor and public artist since 1977. In 1982, she graduated from the College of Fine Arts (Mercedes San Luis, Argentina) with the title of Professor of Fine Arts. From the beginning, she has used sculpture and installations to create images that reflect on the nature of change, the life of the individual, and the natural or societal forces that buffet our souls. Most recently her focus has been on the nature of home, the immigrant experience, and roots/rootlessness. Her thematic concerns are also reflected in her involvement with the community: doing public art projects and giving workshops at a variety of institutions.
2016 • Elisa H. Hamilton and Silvia Lopez Chavez
“Lemonade Stand”
How do you turn lemons into lemonade?
Elisa Hamilton and Silvia López Chavez inspired conversations about resilience as they brought their participatory printmaking cart to four housing developments, in collaboration with our community partners:
- Boys & Girls Club at Franklin Hill
- The Nurtury at Mildred C. Hailey Apartments
- Roxbury Tenants of Harvard
- South Street Youth Center
Read their blog here.
View our "Lemonade Stand" photo-book on Shutterfly
A Creative City Grant Public Art Project funded by New England Foundation for the Arts.
2013 • Beth Ireland
“Turning Around Boston”
In October 2013, we sent woodturner Beth Ireland in her mobile woodworking van to 21 different Boston Public Schools, low-income housing projects, the Boy Scouts' annual Pumpkinfest, and other places where children gather. There, 1,048 children each made a wooden pen or whistle by hand with Beth. In a few cases, we brought out mini-lathes for children to do some wood turning as well.
Beth's first visit was to South Street Youth Center, in Jamaica Plain. The Director wrote: “It was GREAT! The kids loved it. It was such a nice shift from what we’re normally able to offer and the mixture of focus, physical activity concentration, and artistic engagement was really wonderful to behold!”
We believe children benefit enormously from hands-on learning. Woodworking – “shop” – was gone from Boston’s public elementary and middle schools. Along with others, we are working to bring it back. Making things by hand changes children’s relationship to their world, teaches them real-life math and conceptual skills, and engages them in problem-solving and creative risk-taking.
By providing this taste of woodworking, we showed children, parents, teachers, and principals its value – and promoted hands-on learning in our schools. Private schools have it, fancy summer camps have it. Let’s bring lifelong learning in craftsmanship and creativity to all, regardless of income or ability to pay.
Beth Ireland has become a passionate advocate of hands-on learning for all. She spent 2012 traveling across the United States in her van equipped with a mini workshop and a personal living space. She stopped at schools and art centers, in small towns and big ones, covering 25,000 miles and teaching over two thousand people how to turn wood. Jenn Moller collaborated with digital support. Ireland and Moller then traveled to Guatemala, teaching people in a small village to make windows, doors, and household items out of wood.
Beth has written, “I was just going to teach as many people as I could how to make a simple wooden object. It became so much more.”
View our "Turning Around Boston" photo-book on Shutterfly.
See work by Beth Ireland and learn more about Turning Around America.
American Woodturner Journal published this article about Turning Around America in their August 2012 issue.
Read more about Turning Around Boston in the Jamaica Plain Gazette.
