Residency Program
Risograph Residents
2025
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Penumbra Foundation Risograph Publication Residents.
This year’s jury was composed by: Leah Ollman, Victor Sira, and Magdalena Wysocka.
Look out for the publications produced by our residents, coming Fall 2025.
Sandra Erbacher
Sandra Erbacher is a German interdisciplinary artist living and working in Providence, RI. Her collages, photographs, installations and artist books critically engage with the archive as an active site of the ongoing production and negotiation of history.
She has earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014) and her BFA from Camberwell College of Art, London (2009). She also holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Erbacher has exhibited nationally and internationally, at Penumbra Foundation, Rueff Gallery, Purdue University, Cuchifritos, mh PROJECT, The International Studio and Curatorial Program, Stellar Projects, Spring/ Break, Grin Providence, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, and Space, Portland.
Most recently, Erbacher has participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency (2024). In previous years, she won a Center for Book Arts Residency, and a Manhattan Graphics Center Scholarship (2023), and participated in the 2019 Artist Alliance Lower East Side Studio Program, the 2017-18 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and the 2015 NARS Foundation Residency. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the 2014 Chazen Prize to an Outstanding MFA Student and the Blink Grant for Public Art 2013.
Her work is part of the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the James M. And Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, the Tedeschi Collection, Montreal, and numerous private Collections in the US and Europe.
sandraerbacher.com
Proposal: Crowd Psychology
Image © Sandra Erbacher, courtesy of the artist.
“Is there strength in numbers? Sandra Erbacher's captivating project urges us to consider the power—often malignant—of masses that subsume individual identity. “Crowd Psychology" generates tough, relevant questions about agency, collectivity and authority.” -Leah Ollman
““Crowd Psychology’ is an artist book that examines the volatile and mesmerizing nature of collective behavior. Engaging with Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 text The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, this project interrogates the mechanisms that shape mass psychology—impulsiveness, contagion, suggestion, and the dissolution of individual identity within the collective.
Through a carefully curated juxtaposition of images, ‘Crowd Psychology’ weaves together visual fragments from biology, science, history, warfare, art and design, the animal kingdom, medicine, ethnography, anthropology, and finance. This constellation of imagery reflects the many faces of crowd dynamics—from the natural world’s swarm intelligence to human history’s most charged political spectacles.
At its core, ‘Crowd Psychology’ questions the balance between power and vulnerability within the collective experience. It asks: Where does authority reside? How does the crowd shape belief? And to what extent do we, as individuals, resist or surrender to its force?”
-Sandra Erbacher
Raisan Hameed
Raisan Hameed is an Iraqi-German multimedia artist based in Leipzig. He has recently completed his Meisterschüler with Prof. Tina Bara at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. His work has been featured in various international exhibitions, including the Prix Photoforum Biel, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Carte Blanche Exhibition in Paris.
Hameed‘s practice is defined by a subtle and metaphorical visual language, profoundly impacted by his personal experiences of loss, trauma, and displacement. At the heart of his work is the transformation of intimate visual memories into universal narratives, as exemplified in one of his most acclaimed projects, Zer-Störung. Recontextualizing damaged family photographs that bear the scars of his hometown, Mosul, Hameed explores the destruction inflicted upon his family while reflecting on human themes of resilience and survival. Intertwining personal history with collective memory, Hameed’s practice sheds light on the wounds imposed on societies by political violence.
His work engages with ongoing discourses about conflict and remembrance. Transcending photography, Hameed incorporates various media such as archival research and Google Street View. The enduring relevance of his practice is fueled by a nuanced perspective on our fragile world, one that is perpetually shaped by violence and displacement.
Proposal: Embers of Narrative
Image © Raisan Hameed, courtesy of the artist.
“What stands out is how Hameed rejects photography’s illusion of objectivity, using decay as its own language. The charred sections of his images feel like scars, mapping war’s devastation.” -Victor Sira
“‘Embers of Narrative,’ a series of 46 images, explores the fragility of memory and destruction through thermographic processes. Each image depicts the same motif, the Tigris River, but the blackened areas vary, as they have been added through the deliberate use of fire. This transformation by heat and burning evokes traces of war
and transience.
This project questions the visibility and absence of history in images, reflecting on material decay as part of narrative reconstruction.
The book continues my artistic investigation into the fragility of memory, drawing parallels between photographic decay and historical erasure. By burning and distorting the images, the work challenges the permanence of visual documentation and asks: What remains after destruction? What stories are preserved, and what is lost?”
-Raisan Hameed
Claire A. Warden
Claire A. Warden (b. Montréal, Québec) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in still and moving image media. Her work engages representation, portraiture, legibility, and language in the United States through abstraction and experimental image-making in multi-year projects. Warden’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Pictura Gallery, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and The University of Kansas Art & Design Gallery. Her work has been featured in publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Southwest Contemporary, Strange Fire Collective, Lenscratch, and Light Work’s Contact Sheet. Warden was awarded artist residencies through the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, Art Intersection, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, LATITUDE, ACRE, and Light Work. She received a BFA and BA from Arizona State University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Proposal: Mimesis
Image © Claire A Warden, courtesy of the artist.
"Warden’s series of abstract, cameraless images feels raw and intimate, and would translate beautifully into a risograph-printed artist book. This format could echo the quiet, tactile nature of the work, offering a more physical way to engage with it and further explore the unknown along with the artist.” -Magdalena Wysocka
“The creation of my work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar is pervasive in our culture. When looking at much of my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of color with a diverse ethnocultural heritage and one I increasingly tend to resist. That resistance carries through the work as resistance to definition as well as the hegemonic gaze and, instead, emphasizes opacity and illegibility. […]
I believe it is important to know that the ‘Mimesis’ series is photographic—cameraless photographs—and that I developed a process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter—thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.”
-Claire A. Warden
Finalists
In addition to the 2025 residents, three artists were selected as finalists:
Viviana Peretti (Searching for Lost Lives)
Andrew D. McClees (Avalanche)
Andrés Felipe Vargas (Te traje algo)
Sponsor
The 2025 Risograph Publication Residency Program is sponsored in part
by the Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation and The Joy of Giving Something.
