2026 Ultraviolet Residents
blair franklin (she/they)
blair franklin is a Black transfemme artist, facilitator, and echo of something ancient yet familiar. Through mediums of creative writing, movement, and ritual, she seeks to open portals to Black queer and trans divinity and reckons with the insatiable urge to just become the earth. She was previously a Gardarev Center Fellow and a TapRoots Artist in Residence with the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective. blair runs a consulting practice called Alight Alchemy, born out of a need to better sustain our movements through coaching, facilitation, and multidisciplinary healing. Her work centers the belief that the embodied liberation of Black queer and trans people, women, and femmes will ultimately catalyze the abundant worlds we desire.
Carter Shocket (he/him)
Carter Shocket (he/him) is a trans and queer interdisciplinary artist from North Carolina living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His work includes woven sculpture, installation, street art, and other process-based textile art. He believes being trans breaks what we think of as fixed, and in those breaks, magic flows in to allow for new possibilities of being- both of and beyond the body. Shocket’s work explores this world of trans supernaturality- societies that make sacred hormone schedules and communal care calendars, dysphoric ghosts understood to be real, and timelines that fold over and connect us to past generations. By depicting this world that he and other trans people often occupy, Shocket’s work ultimately seeks to connect himself to a larger trans community, lineage, and future.
Shocket regularly exhibits work in New York City with Eleventh Hour Art, the Textile Arts Center, Arts Gowanus, and more. He was an Artist In Residence (Cycle 15) at the Textile Arts Center from 2023-2024, and is showing new work at the Somerville Museum in Massachusetts in early 2026. Notable collectors include the team at Artsy for their NYC Headquarters building. Alongside his studio practice, he is the Founding Director of Trans Art Fest, a new Brooklyn-based festival that exhibits and celebrates trans visual artists.
Danielle Arroyo (they/she)
Danielle Arroyo is a multidisciplinary artist residing in the unceded territory of the Wabanaki. Their practice is guided by the seasons, and involves working with natural and found materials.
Danielle’s work is informed by their experience as a queer, mixed race, BRCA1 previvor. 3 years ago, Danielle tested positive for having BRCA1, and has been drawn to investigating the relationship between genetic mutations, generational trauma, and breaking curses.
Eben Smith (he/him)
Eben began his career in bodywork at age 6, tending to his stepmother's shoulders. At the time she was a waitress, later nursing school and then a nurse. It was his first paid job and he can remember it vividly. How two small hands can help someone feel relief and hard work honored. Eben spent significant time working in Portland kitchens where he had longstanding involvement in multiple community projects; Bomb Diggity bakery and arts project, Local Sprouts Cooperative, and Cultivating Community.
Eben became a licensed massage therapist in 2019 and has been operating out of his own studio in Portland for three years. It has been through this practice he has experienced deep personal healing while helping others manage chronic pain and find relief from stress and trauma. Eben believes body work is a way for trans people to connect to the sacredness of their bodies and to experience physical vulnerability in a safe environment, allowing for connection to the simple pleasures and joy of a physical existence.
Esper Gaspardi (they/them)
Esper is an emerging mixed-media artist and queer farmer from southern Maine. Traditionally they have aligned themselves publicly with their beadwork and creative writing. At the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they began to pursue painting, sculpting, and collage. They are heavily influenced by the religious iconography and ancestral stories from their childhood, the southwestern landscape, and the bold forms and colors used by their mentor Jeff Kahm. To always connect with their Indigenous heritage, they attempt to marry old traditional art styles with the modern world to extract their essence for their personal mixed media works. All of their materials are hand me downs, recycled, or found.
Mai Schwartz (he/him)
Mai Schwartz is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in the Offing and the North American Review, among other journals, and in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics from Nightboat Books. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Yiddish Book Center, and the Leeway Foundation.
His current project, Phalloplasty: the Musical, explores care, community, desire, and discernment amid the horror and hilarity that is healthcare in the US. He can often be found quilting, gardening, and being the most fun uncle to a growing crew of chosen nibblings. Raised in New Jersey and refined in Philadelphia, he currently lives in New York.
James Parker Foley (he/him)
Having completed residencies at Hewnoaks (2025, 2024), Monson Arts (2023), Jx Farms (2022), and Monhegan Island (2021), James knows firsthand that a positive experience at an artist residency can be life-changing. He created Ultraviolet to meet the unique needs of trans artists, which differ from those of their cis-artist counterparts. Ultraviolet is a studio project—a line of creative inquiry embedded within his practice.
James' work is grounded within and inspired by an intimate community of queer artists in Portland, Maine (unceded Wabanki Confederacy Territory).