ALUMNI
Below you will find details of Artica Svalbard’s alumni.
At Artica Svalbard, we value our ongoing relationship with former residents and believe in building lasting connections. If you are a past resident and would like to return to Svalbard, we would love to hear from you. Whether you're looking to build upon your previous work or embark on a new project, our doors are always open. While securing your own funding is required, you will have access to all of our facilities and the inspiring environment of Svalbard.
For more information, see our Independently-Funded Residencies page.
In residence: November - December 2025
Amy Hoagland creates sculptural installations that explore the human relationship with nature. She received her BFA from the University of Kentucky, USA, in 2016 and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2022. A recipient of a 2022 Windgate Fellowship for sustainable art presented by Honouring the Future.
In residence: November - December 2025
Kathy Sirico is a Brooklyn-based artist and poet working at the intersection of painting, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Her practice is deeply rooted in climate-conscious making, with climate change and ecological grief forming the conceptual backbone of her work. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BS from Skidmore College, and her work has been exhibited widely across the United States and internationally.
In residence: October - November 2025
David Samuel Stern is a visual artist whose practice examines photography as a physical, craft-based process and its deep relationship with portraiture and time. His work has been commissioned by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, and exhibited at venues including Marshall Gallery (Santa Monica) and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
In residence: November 2025
Emma Henderson is an artist, producer, and arts educator based in the west of Scotland. Working across printmaking and textiles, she creates natural inks through slow, experimental processes informed by textile histories and craft legacies. During her residency, Henderson will develop a shared natural printmaking toolkit and establish a pigment library as a collaborative resource for current and future residents.
In residence: October 2025
Ragnhild Bjørnsen is a researcher in childhood studies at Inland Norway University. Her work centres around children living in hypermobility, whether it is themselves or significant others who move. Through a lens of Psychological Anthropology, she unravels interrelationships of childhood, life-course, and the powerful institutions that influence children and youth's everyday lives. Her case studies include the Norwegian Foreign Service and Longyearbyen, a socially transient Arctic settlement under Norwegian authority.
In residence: August - October 2025
Christian Danielewitz, a Danish visual artist, researcher, and writer, and Bianca Hisse, a Brazilian visual artist and choreographer, come together as a collaborative duo whose work spans across multiple disciplines. Their practices focus on geopolitical issues, the extraction of raw materials, digital materialities, and how spaces are choreographed by economic and social forces. Their collective approach combines visual art, research, and performance to critically engage with urgent global and environmental concerns.
In residence: September - October 2025
Clara Arnaud is a French writer and winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France. Her literary work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores political and ecological themes, questioning our way of inhabiting the world. She has travelled extensively off the beaten track, mostly on foot or horseback, and has also worked as a consultant in international cooperation, leading missions across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Nastassja Simensky returns to Artica Svalbard for a third time, following her residency earlier this year and her initial 2024 residency, which was supported through a nomination by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Her ongoing work explores the unevenly distributed impacts of global energy regimes and extractive processes on particular geographies over time, using fieldwork as a central method.
Janos Nieminen is a data scientist with a background in mathematics and theoretical philosophy, currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy with a focus on counterfactual reasoning. With 15 years of experience as a software developer, Nieminen bridges technical expertise with a deep philosophical inquiry into the political and symbolic dimensions of state presence in fragile environments. He is also working on a non-fiction book about Svalbard, which examines how countries like Russia and China maintain influence in the Arctic through architecture, infrastructure, and everyday routines.
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel works with performance, scent, moving image, sound, and installation. Driven by curiosity and a desire for learning through tacit knowledge, he looks for traces of past traditions and alternative technologies displaced in the present.
Since 2017, Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell have shared a transdisciplinary art practice that moves across performance, research, and ecological inquiry. Together, they explore queer eco-erotic ethics, participatory practices, and vibrational togetherness, engaging deeply with both human and non-human entanglements.
LA IMPRESORA is an artist-led studio based in Puerto Rico, founded and directed by poets Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández. Their practice combines writing, printmaking, and independent publishing to explore themes of identity, place, and environmental interconnections, often through the lens of ecofeminism and land art.
Nastassja Simensky returns to Artica Svalbard following her 2024 residency, which was supported through a nomination by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Her ongoing work explores the unevenly distributed impacts of global energy regimes and extractive processes on particular geographies over time, using fieldwork as a central method. Simensky frequently collaborates with artists and non-artists alike to produce authored and co-authored works across a variety of media—including live performance, sound, text, amateur radio, moving image, and installation.
Endi Poskovic is a Bosnian-born artist whose work bridges the realms of printmaking, memory, and environmental consciousness. Educated in Yugoslavia, Norway, and the United States, he initially trained as a musician, performing across Europe and the Middle East before transitioning into the visual arts. He earned his M.F.A. from the State University of New York in 1993 and has since exhibited internationally, from the Shanghai Print Biennial to the Krakow International Triennial and the International Print Center in New York.
Lilian Kroth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (CH), and works at the intersection of history and philosophy of science and art. In her current projects, she engages with vertical knowledge and remote sensing technologies, (“Seeing like a Satellite. Drawing as a Research Method to Investigate Icy Environments”, 2025; “Aerial Spatial Revolution”, 2024-2027; Swiss National Science Foundation).
Katie Paterson is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic, and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.
VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes, interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators who have worked internationally with a focus on collaborative and research-based performance art and film since 2006. Their works are contextual and situation-responsive, embodying philosophical, ecological, and queer feminist thought.
Ecologist Sanne Moedt and artist Floortje Zonneveld come from different disciplines, but their work converges in a shared passion for the Arctic—its landscapes, ecosystems, and the stories embedded within them. Their collaboration, Shadowing Without a Sunset, bridges scientific research and artistic storytelling, making Arctic science more accessible through creative engagement.
Clara Arnaud is a French writer and winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France. Her literary work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores political and ecological themes, questioning our way of inhabiting the world. She has travelled extensively off the beaten track, mostly on foot or horseback, and has also worked as a consultant in international cooperation, leading missions across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Tomas Colbengtson, winner of the 2024 Queen Sonja Print Award, is a Sami artist whose work examines the impact of colonialism on indigenous communities, with a particular focus on the Sami people. Born in Björkvattnet, Colbengtson’s art draws on Sami history and collective memory. His printmaking often employs materials that cast shadows, reflecting themes of visibility, loss, and resilience within indigenous cultures.