Trillium Arts is honored to announce Annie Kyla Bennett, Angela Cunningham, Nina Kawar, Nava Lubelski, Mar Perez-Albela, and Katey Schultz as the recipients of Trillium's HEAR (Helene Emergency Artist Residencies) awards. These extraordinary artists, who are working in a variety of disciplines and hail from locations around Western North Carolina, will be in residence at Trillium during the months of February through May. The awardees were selected from a substantial application pool by a panel review process. The panel was composed of Trillium Arts Board members who based their selections on the combined criteria of artistic merit and demonstratable storm related need. HEAR opportunities are at no cost to the artists and in fact offers them a financial honorarium.

The HEAR project specifically supports artists residing in Western North Carolina who were significantly impacted by Hurricane Helene. Phil Reynolds, Trillium Arts President and Co-Founder notes, “Core values at Trillium include being nimble and responsive to artists’ needs. Considering the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Helene on so many regional artists, Trillium leadership felt compelled to move quickly. In early December 2024 we launched an application process for HEAR. The outpouring of interest from both applicants and donors for HEAR confirmed the value and need for this offering.”

The original plan, as stated in December was that with sufficient funding, Trillium would award four artists. But due to the tremendous generosity of donors, Trillium exceeded its fundraising goal for the project and is now able to increase the number of awardees to six.

HELENE IMPACT
The awardees all incurred significant damage due to Hurricane Helene. Damages ranged from complete loss of studios, equipment, inventory, the inability to work, and incredible physical and emotional strain. As one artist stated, “As a full-time artist, this event could potentially end my career. I am currently displaced from my studio and home and trusting that I will be able to find both soon so I can return to making my creative work. A residency in March could allow space for contemplation and possibilities of new creative projects to come to fruition.”

HEAR Artists Will Receive:

A $700 relief stipend
Private accommodations for up to seven consecutive nights in a one-bedroom, ground floor suite. Learn more about the artist suite HERE.
Welcome dinner
Restorative time to reflect, rejuvenate and create
Use of the grounds, including firepit, hot tub, waterfall area and walking path
Access to a variety of supplies and onsite creative spaces that include a contemplation gazebo and a 380 square foot open air, covered workspace. Learn more HERE.
Basic kitchen supplies and all household goods (towels, linens, paper products, etc.)
Access to high-speed fiber optic internet and laundry

MEET THE AWARDEES

**"Heart Garden" by Annie Kyla Bennett**

Annie Kyla Bennett
Asheville, NC
Visual Art
www.anniekylabennettart.com
Creative Director, Art Garden AVL
www.artgardenavl.com
Assoc VP, River Arts District Association
www.riverartsdistrict.com

Conceptual painter exploring allegory and ecology, both social and environmental. Queer Appalachian artist, gardener, and mutualist. Annie Kyla Bennett is painting stories of hope for the future, centering plants and our relationship with Nature. Annie is a co-founder and the creative director of Art Garden AVL, an arts collaborative creating economic opportunity and inclusive representation for artists from underserved communities. Annie is also a founding member of Medicine Heart Murals, an artist collective working to highlight environmental urgency through public art.
Annie grew up in rural Alaska, homesteading with artist parents. They first moved to Asheville in 2007 and spent many years on the road creating art all over the country before nesting into a permanent gallery space here in 2019. Annie collects books, tools and seeds. They find inspiration in Nature and in the places where ideas intersect.

Residency Intentions:
“I will be working on dialing the details and finishing touches on The Mother Plant, a show I’ll be debuting at Asheville Fringe Arts Festival this March. The Mother Plant is an interactive, immersive art exhibition celebrating phytoremediation and all of the potentials for Regenerative Land Stewardship and renewable resource management that collaborating with the Cannabis plant can afford humanity. This installation is an exploded presentation of an art book by the same name, which is the culmination of almost 10 years of research, writing, and art making. The show includes over 40 artworks and 40 short creative writing pieces that synthesize the research going into each art piece, from cultural and historical traditions to modern scientific advancements.

I have two oil paintings in progress to finish for the show, and I have to decide how I’m going to manage replacing the three smaller watercolor pieces that were lost in the flood. I will either try to recreate them close to how they were, or create completely new works from the same drawings. We’ll see. I’ve been working with Fringe Fest for several years now as a venue director/stage manager, but this is my first time participating as an artist, and I am so excited!”

Angela Cunningham
Horse Shoe, NC
Visual Art
www.angelacunninghamfineart.com/

Angela Cunningham (b. 1977) grew up in the Bay Area of California. She studied at various art colleges eventually receiving her BFA in Drawing and Painting with a minor in sculpture from Laguna College of Art and Design. After teaching in California at LCAD and Saddleback College from 2005-2007, Angela pursued her passion for the classical techniques of drawing and painting under the mentorship of Jacob Collins at the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York City. She graduated GCA in 2011. She now teaches privately at her own studio near Asheville, North Carolina and teaches workshops at various studios nationwide. Angela is a member of the National Sculpture Society, the Portrait Society and Preserving A Picturesque America. She is also a recipient of various awards including the Morris and Alma Schapiro Achievement Award, Art Renewal Center First Place Scholarship Award, the Alfred Ross Achievement Award and more.

Residency Intentions:
“In this fast-paced world, the art of slowing down to observe and connect is invaluable. I will definitely take time to reflect on my own thoughts and allow some quiet time so I can work on some ideas that l've been wanting to start in my artwork. I'll be doing some idea sketches in drawing, painting and sculpture with the goal of cultivating a few of those ideas into some larger works. I hope to also explore Trillium's wooded outdoors so l can bring into the studio some nature to incorporate into some of the pieces.”

Nina Kawar
Marshall, NC
Visual Art/Sculpture/Jewelry
www.ninakawar.com
www.pure-ritual.com

Nina Kawar is a sculptor and designer whose creative practice explores the human condition, healing, and consciousness. She aims to push the boundaries of porcelain through carving and delicate forms, while her copper jewelry is layered with metaphysics, science, and design. Many of her influences stem from psychology, biology, and spirituality.

Born and raised in a Palestinian American home in Wisconsin, Nina's sculptural work explores her multicultural lens that parallels her curiosity for patterns, perspectives, and evolution. She started her artistic journey in 2005 at San Diego Community College and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 3D Design in 2011. She found her passion for porcelain at Clemson University and received a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics in 2014. She established a studio practice at Marshall High Studios in Marshall, NC, in 2016, which was recently destroyed in Hurricane Helene. As she moves through this change, she continues to create her jewelry and explores music and painting while navigating the next step on her artistic journey. Nina will return to working with clay at an artist residency at Vermont Studio Center in February of 2025.

Residency Intentions:
“While at Trillium Arts in late March of 2025, I hope to drop into an intuitive creative space without distractions. I will be returning from a two-and-a-half-week residency a few weeks prior at Vermont Studio Center where I am granted the opportunity to work with clay for the first time since Helene. Although I do not know what I will create during that time, I hope to use the time at Trillium Arts to finish, refine, or further develop a series of work I started in February. I trust I will also devote time to my other creative outlets which include singing, guitar, writing, and painting.”

**"Riddled " (detail) by Nava Lubelski**

Nava Lubelski
Asheville, NC
Visual Art
www.navalubelski.com
www.traceymorgangallery.com/exhibitions/nava-lubelski
@navalubelski

Nava Lubelski was born and raised in New York City and lives in Asheville, NC. Lubelski's work has been exhibited widely at museums such as the Queens Museum of Art; the Museum of Arts & Design in NYC; the San Diego Museum of Art; the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo; the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC and the Asheville Art Museum. She has shown solo or semi-solo with Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, NC; LMAKprojects in New York, OH&T Gallery in Boston, P|M Gallery in Toronto, Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles and Margaret Thatcher Projects in NYC. Additional solo/group exhibitions have included numerous university, commercial galleries and small museums nationally, as well as venues in Stockholm, Sydney and Berlin. Lubelski's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, LA Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, Art Forum, ArtNews and The Village Voice, was the subject of a feature in American Craft, and has been included in many international contemporary art books, such as Radical Decadence, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and De Fil en Aiguille (Paris: Pyramyd Editions, 2018). She has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Center for Crafts and the North Carolina Arts Council, Lubelski received a degree in Russian Literature & History from Wesleyan University and spent a year as a student in Moscow, Russia.

Residency Intentions:
“During the residency I plan to work on a large-scale piece combining stitching and paint, created from discarded vintage linens and memorializing lived experience. This piece is a continuation of a series begun last summer while in residence at Center for Craft in Asheville and for which I don't currently have sufficient space in my home studio.”

Mar Perez-Albela
Asheville, NC
Musician/Songwriter/Producer

@marmusicofficial
marmusicofficial.com
oyelomusicproductions.com
Spotify

Hailing originally from Peru singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, M A R landed in Appalachia 28 years ago to pursue his passion for music. He honed his craft during his years at Mars Hill University, FSU, and later on in Miami, FL where his career took off with the Song of the Year award (2007) for his single Busca Tu Voz. Winner of the Premio Orgullo Peruano (2009), M A R honors with love and loyalty the place where he grew up and began playing and singing at a very young age. Drawing from his South American roots, as well as blues, and folk from his journey through North America, M A R infuses his music with indie-flavored acoustic guitars, and charango: a traditional string instrument from the Andes.

With his second album Lineas 1000, and later with the third release of The One (2015) M A R toured cities in North, Central, and South America. He has shared his music on national radio, and television networks such as Azteca TV, Telemundo, Mega TV, in the US and in Latin America. In 2019, M A R landed a collaboration with renowned LA music producer Billy Lefler (Ingrid Michaelson, Dashboard Confessional) for the making of his EP I AM I, which sold out for its release night in February 2020. After the pandemic, In June 2022, M A R launched a latin-urban song in a “call back to life” called Vuelve a La Vida. Later in August the indie-electronic single Hollow became popular on the streaming platforms in Finland.

As a social justice and equality advocate, M A R strongly believes in bringing people together, and working towards a common goal. Founder of Óyelo Music Productions, and recipient of LGTBO+ Music Forward Foundation Emerging Artist Award 2022, he enjoys collaborating with many like-minded creatives.That same year, M A R debuted an original and autobiographical piece in junction with American-Peruvian artist Gina Cornejo (she/they) at the iconic A Swannanoa Solstice at the Wortham Theater in Asheville, which had him return as guest artist on December 2024. You can catch him solo at a show, or with his band M A R & The Marmeladies, or his newly formed Cumbia band Las Montañitas. Currently, M A R is producing a new single that will be out early Spring 2025.

Residency Intentions:
“I am so stoked and grateful to have this time and space at Trillium Arts! It will give me an opportunity to relax, just be present and create. I intend to use this residency to dive into songwriting! I’ll bring my acoustic guitar, my charango and my mobile production rig with me and I will sit to download the songs that have been waiting to be written. Hopefully a new album!”

Katey Schultz
Burnsville, NC
Writer
www.kateyschultz.com
www.writeability.org/

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which the Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel, both published by Loyola University Maryland. Honors for her work include North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, the Linda Flowers Literary Award, Doris Betts Fiction Prize, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, gold and silver medals from the Military Writers Society of America, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award, five Pushcart nominations, a nomination to Best American Short Stories, National Indies Excellence recognition, and writing fellowships in eight states. She lives in Celo, North Carolina, and is the founder of two businesses for writers: WRITEABILITY, a nonprofit in defense of the imagination; and Monthly Mentorship, a transformative mentoring program for creative writers that has been recognized by both CNBC and the What Works Network.

Residency Intentions:
"I will spend my time resting, reading, and reviewing the first draft of my novel in anticipation of doing some deeper revision work later this summer. There has been little time to simply reflect, since Helene, and so I am also open to following my creative imagination wherever it needs to go during my residency. It will be interesting to see what emerges when I finally have the space for silence, solitude, and relative safety (i.e., no pressing shelter, phone, wi-fi, electricity, road, bridge, or neighborhood safety issues)."

SPECIAL THANKS

Special Thanks to the following supporters who are making the HEAR project possible: the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the North Carolina Arts Foundation's North Carolina Arts Relief Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and South Art's Southern Arts Relief and Recovery Fund; Paul and Janine Allen; Cassilhaus Artist Residency; The Dorothy Fund at The Chicago Community Foundation; Betty and Fred Gittenger; Pamela Green; Karen Tarjan; Brent and Karen Woods.