Come revel in a crucible for art and science at our glorious mountaintop retreat nestled among redwood forests. Each year, Leonardo/ISAST and the Djerassi  Resident Artists Program bring artists and scientists together to explore and transform the boundaries of art and science. At this open house, through talks, readings, studio visits, installations and a sculpture hike, experience a rare glimpse of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the making in an unrivaled setting overlooking the California coast. 

Purchase tickets to this special experience today! 

Photo Credit: Maja Spasova, CALLING YOUR NAME, performance, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, 24 July 2016. (© Maja Spasova)

Resident Bios

Janani Balasubramanian, Artist & Researcher

Janani Balasubramanian is an artist and researcher creating accessible, inviting, and beautiful portals to natural and computational worlds. They work in emerging media, installation, immersive performance, poetry, prose, conceptual art, and public art.

Nicole Buffett, Artist, CEO at Nicole Buffett Studios

Nicole Buffett is an abstract painter whose work integrates modalities ranging from traditional painting and textile design to digital art. Nicole is driven and inspired by the healing aspect of art and the ways in which regenerative agriculture, spirituality, and community all intertwine. Nicole is known for utilizing her work in the NFT space to drive and support ecological and social causes. Some of her impact NFT projects include partnerships with Open Earth Foundation, Liquid Star, Hope for Haiti, Blankets of Hope, The Carbon Fund, and Center for Council.

Teresa Connors, University Lecturer at Concordia University

Dr. Teresa Connors is active in many aspects of creative practice as an acoustic/electroacoustic composer, installation artist, creative coder, opera singer and film scorer. Teresa's works have received awards and support from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and ICMC, have been presented at international conferences, film festivals and galleries, and have been published in leading journals. Her current research as an Associate Researcher with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation expands her exploration of nonlinear creative systems and the use of environmental data as a co-creative device for public engagement audiovisual artworks.

Gloria Florez, Artist at Gloria Florez Studio

Colombian/Australian artist Gloria Florez has a BVA and a MFA by research from the University of Sydney and a BVA Honours from the National Art School Sydney.

Since graduating in 2015, Gloria has participated in numerous group exhibitions and residencies nationally and internationally.

Gloria’s art practice has a continuing interest in the connection between science, conservation and art with reference to sustainability and natural phenomena. 

Since 2019 Gloria has been developing an ongoing collective project in remote and diverse communities that involves working closely with First Nations, children, scientists, artists and writers bringing nature’s power and ephemeral beauty to the centre of our life.

Aiyesha Ghani, Graduate Research Associate at University of Oklahoma

Drawing on their lifetime of intersectional experiences from navigating the depths & boundaries of vastly different worlds, Aiyesha’s interdisciplinary arts & research practice is rooted in interdisciplinary geosciences, place-based research, and archipelagic/trans-oceanic epistemologies. Their work currently explores geographies of displacement, ecologies of care, and identity politics by utilizing ethereality as a portal to notions of contemporary indigeneity, and indigenous futurities. Spanning a wide breadth of mediums, including immersive experience, geospatial programing, data visualization, video, paint, performance, and ceramic, among several others, their work is a response to the current global climate of crisis call to action towards the deeper relationality that has been prevalent in their traditional cultural upbringing. As a mixed Boricua-Indian artist raised among the larger international community abroad, much of Aiyesha’s work is contextualized by critical geographies and island ontologies. They hold an MFA from Confluence (formerly Nomad MFA) through the Hartford Art School, and currently are completing MS in Geography & Geospatial Technologies at the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences with the University of Oklahoma.

Natalie Gosnell, Associate Professor at Colorado College

Dr. Natalie Gosnell is an observational astrophysicist, artist, and Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado College. Dr. Gosnell graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Physics in 2008, received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin before returning to Colorado College to join the faculty in 2016. Dr. Gosnell’s research uses observational data from telescopes on the ground and in space to explore the stories of binary star systems. In her role as a teacher-scholar, Dr. Gosnell seeks to bring creative practices into both the physics classroom and her research pursuits. She is also a co-creator and co-writer of The Gift, an immersive installation that animates Dr. Gosnell’s astrophysics research on companion stars and opens up metaphorical space for grief, care, and renewal. The Gift premiered in December 2022 at New York Public Library (co-presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts) and was exhibited for three months in Spring 2023 at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. Her artistic residencies include the Sundance Institute Theater Labs, Brooklyn College, and The Public Theater. She is a 2021 Cottrell Scholar, a member of the Guild of Future Architects, and was awarded the Colorado College Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023.

Eathan Janney, Musician/Scientist

Janney is a musical composer and performer, honored to have shared the stage with artists including Conor Oberst, Jenny Lewis, Son Ambulance and many others. He's also currently a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the Graduate Center of CUNY studying birdsong under the mentorship of Ofer Tchernichovski. His thesis project investigates the structure of birdsong and it's possible similarities to musical structure. Other projects include locateflow.org (link is external), a website dedicated to exploring the nature of creativity and Dirt Works (link is external), which won 4th place in the 2012 Smart Pitch Challenge, an entrepreneurial competition sponsored by IBM, the CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise, the Lawrence M. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College and the Sunshine Bronx business incubator. He also founded and oversees an acclaimed piano-tuning business in NYC called Floating Piano Factory (link is external). Janney received the Centro Stefano Franscini (CSF) award at The Monte Verita Workshop on Music in Neuroscience (2012). newmedialab.cuny.edu

Yxta Murray, Professor of Law at Loyola Law School

Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, social practice artist, and law professor. The author of ten books, her most recent are the story collection, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novels Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021) and God Went Like That (Northwestern). Her next work of nonfiction, Artivism and the Law, is in progress and will be published by Cornell University Press. She has won a Whiting Award, an Art Writer’s Grant, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money For Women, and was a 2021 New York City Arts Corps Grants co-grantee. She’s also been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.

Dominica Phetteplace, Math Tutor

Dominica Phetteplace is a writer and futurist. Her work has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, F&SF, Uncanny, Fantasy, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Tor.com and numerous Year's Best Anthologies. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes and support from Tin House, MacDowell and Djerassi. 

Paulina Sierra, Assistant Professor at Universidad Iberoamericana / Universidad Anáhuac del Norte

Born in Mexico, Paulina obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City). Usually involved with the interactive media art/music scene, she started to experiment with software at different multimedia companies in Mexico City. Tired of the bi-dimensionality the screen provided, she decided to experiment with objects, space and the multiplicity of the media where she graduated with honors from the MFA in Digital+Media department at Rhode Island School of Design.

As a former resident of New Orleans, LA, USA for a number of years (under an O1 Visa), today you can find her in Mexico City, teaching in several areas of design in different colleges, freelancing and developing her artistic projects nationally and abroad (paulinasierra.com). Her work is ignited by impossibility and the social interaction generated around them. The risk starts with a fixation in objects or technologies that perform certain functions around them and examine their essence by challenging the nature of their intended purpose. The idea behind these intentions is decreasing mind standardization, especially when the strict and determined objective of a machine is questioned. This allows to disrupt a stable system and with some luck, a hybrid association that creates the possibility for a new dialogue.

Her interests usually evolve around technique or technology, migration (as multicultural discourse), displacement, reconfiguration and resilience within structures; these are issues she tends to explore by the malleability of the digital media, machinery and mechanisms, physical computing, sound, sculpture and installations.

David G. Stork, Adjunct Professor at Stanford University

Dr. David G. Stork is Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where he performs research and teaches a range of courses, including computer image analysis of fine art paintings and drawings.  He is a graduate in Physics from MIT and the University of Maryland, and studied Art History at Wellesley College.  He has held faculty positions in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Engineering, Statistics, Materials Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges, Clark, Boston, and Stanford Universities, and the Technical University of Vienna.