Momus Residency: To Build and Sustain

Dr. Kemi Adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Director of The Black Embodiments Studio at the University of Washington. Her writing and curatorial projects use performance as a site and methodology for theorizing the contours of contemporary black queer life. She has two books under contract: Feels Right: Black Queer Women’s Choreographies of Belonging in the Neoliberal City (Duke University Press) and Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press), co-edited with Kareem Khubchandani and Ramón Rivera-Servera. Her most recent writing has appeared in GLQ, Women & Performance, and in the Routledge Handbook of African American Art History. Adeyemi’s work extends into the realm of contemporary art practice. She works as choreographer Will Rawls’s dramaturge, and has written on and for artists including Tschabalala Self, Jovencio de la Paz, Indira Allegra, Brendan Fernandes, and taisha paggett. She curated Amina Ross’s 2019 solo show at Ditch Projects, and co-curated Unstable Objects in 2017 at the Alice Gallery. As Director of The Black Embodiments Studio, Adeyemi runs an arts writing incubator and curates a public lecture series dedicated to developing discourse around contemporary Black art and artists.

Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer and the editor-in-chief of Jupiter Magazine. She is building a “sweet black writing life” as inspired by the words of poet Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist tradition more broadly.

Sky Goodden is the founding publisher of Momus, an online platform for art writing and criticism; and co-host of Momus: The Podcast. Goodden has published in numerous catalogues, art books, and publications including Momus, Frieze, Art in America, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She is based in Montreal.

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, the Believer, Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and Oxford American, where she was a contributing editor. She was an Editor at Momus from 2022-25 and is a contributor. Lynne is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is the inaugural recipient of the Beverly Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association.

Elisabeth Nicula is an artist and writer in San Francisco. Her essays have appeared in Momus, Small Press Traffic’s The Back Room, SFMOMA’s Open Space, New Life Quarterly Magazine, PAPER Magazine, and elsewhere. Smooth Friend is her small press for publishing new short fiction and poetry online and in pamphlet-style books. Her latest publishing project, San Francisco Review of Whatever, is a print magazine for critical writing on art and other subjects. She amassed over 100,000 photographs of two California scrub jays during a five-year period of deep observation and friendship. 

Lauren Wetmore is a Canadian writer, editor, and curator based in Brussels. She is Director of Programs for Momus, co-host/producer of Momus: The Podcast, and is a member of the Board of Directors of rekto:verso magazine. She is co-editor of The Employee, with Joshua Schwebel (Art Metropole, 2025) and has contributed to publications from Lenz Press, Mousse Publishing, and Sternberg Press. As a critic she has been published by frieze, MadaMasr, Spike Arts Quarterly, and C Magazine, among others. Wetmore has held curatorial positions at MUDAM (Luxembourg), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Frieze Projects (London), Mophradat (Beirut/Brussels/Cairo), the Barbican Art Gallery (London), The Banff Centre, and she has curated independant projects for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and Fundació AAVC Hangar (Barcelona). Wetmore has received grants and awards from Creative Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Goethe-Institut, and the Flanders Arts Institute.

Emily Alesandrini is a writer, curator, and art historian working in New Orleans and New York. Her research concerns contemporary representations of race and gender with a particular focus on aesthetics of opacity, ornament, and the diasporic body in art by women and artists of color. She is the founding editor of Slip magazine and her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The Offing, Burnaway, and BOMB, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Alesandrini participated in Burnaway’s 2023 Arts Writing Incubator. She was a 2025 AICA Art Critic Fellow, a 2025 Momus summer resident, and an Andy Warhol Short Form Art Writing grant winner. Alesandrini graduated from Smith College, earned her MA in Art History from Tulane University, and continues her studies as a doctoral student in Art History at Bryn Mawr College.

eunice bélidor is a Montréal-born curator, author, and researcher. She is currently curator and programmer of the Avant-garde section at the FIFA, and Scholar-in-residence at Concordia University, teaching in their new Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Practices. Her current curatorial methodology focuses on epistolary writing and its intersection with radical hospitality, care, as well as affective and speculative archiving. racial issues. She has published essays and reviews in various publications, books and journals, notably in C Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Vie des Arts and Espace. Her exhibitions have been presented in Canada and Europe, more recently at Centre Clark, the MAI, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art Contemporain and at Galerie de l’UQAM. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation–TD Bank Group Emerging Curator in Contemporary Art Award (2018). She has held curatorial and managerial positions at articule, the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University (Montréal), and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Madeline Bogoch is a writer and MA student at Concordia University whose work is focused primarily on experimental moving image practices. Her writing has been published in C Magazine, Galleries West, Peripheral Review and others. She is a member of the programming committee for the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF), and a Project Coordinator at Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Mario Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist, farmer, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of humanity, nature, and the sublime. His inquiry began with Forest Notebooks (2023), a project mapping entangled relationships between forests, scientific inquiry, and existential reflection through visual art, writing, and fieldwork. Drawing from traditional knowledge, philosophy, ecology, and aesthetics, his practice merges extensive research with collaboration—engaging local communities, scientists, and artists to create work that is both contextually rooted and universally resonant. Forest Notebooks has since grown into an international dialogue, from its 2025 publication launch at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (in collaboration with Chimurenga’s Black Ecologies series) to exhibitions at Los Angeles’ Oxy Arts. In 2026, the project expands further with the Forest Notebooks Residency, fostering global exchange and deeper ecological engagement. Mario studied at the University of the Arts in Cuba, and he holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Lav Mrenović is an independent art writer and curator based in Belgrade, Serbia. With an education in art history, his main interests revolve around the topics of the globalization of contemporary art, structural inequalities in the art world, and post-internet art. For years, he has been active in the local independent scene, mainly as an editor of magazines and exhibition catalogues, a writer for online media, a curator of group and solo shows, and an activist in art workers’ initiatives. Recently, he has focused on expanded forms of art writing—blending with fiction, essay, and the colloquial language of social media. Currently, he is thinking about the future of art production and interpretation beyond ossified institutional frameworks.

Christina Nafziger is a Chicago-based art critic, editor, and curator who writes about arts and visual culture across the Midwest. Her writing investigates and works to uncover hidden hierarchies and notions of power within arts and cultural ecosystems, and turns her attention to artists whose work does the same. This often takes her to artists with research-based practices and artists with practices that engage with archives. She is also interested in geopolitics and the ways in which location affects identity and art making, particularly in rural spaces and throughout the Midwest. Christina is Managing Editor at Sixty Inches From Center, a nonprofit arts publication and archiving initiative. She is also co-editor of Sixty’s inaugural book “Chicago Artists + Archives Project: Case Studies in Collaboration” (2023).

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. She has been writing alongside artists’ practices for over ten years, contributing texts to publications, galleries, and artist-run projects across Canada and internationally. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, where her dissertation research on artists’ writing and experimental criticism is supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship and a York University Provost Dissertation Award.

Neyat Yohannes is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles. She covers visual art, film, tv, music, books, and pop culture via an intersectional lens. She also contributes exhibition texts, catalog essays, and print/web copy for various arts spaces. Her writing has been supported by residencies with The Black Embodiments Studio and Momus. Her personal practice is rooted in memory work and uses tools like critical fabulation to fill the gaps in narratives that haven’t prevailed in the public consciousness. At the moment, she’s working on a speculative account of Eritrea’s post-independence, 1980s diaspora and its eventual social dissolution.