Clark MFA in Visual Arts

January 2026 Residency

Art Talks Speaker Bios

Susan Cross is interim director of Visual Arts at MASS MoCA, where she has been a curator since 2005. She has organized major exhibitions, commissions, and performances by Alex Da Corte, Liz Deschenes, Spencer Finch, Katharina Grosse, Allison Janae Hamilton (co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah), Steffani Jemison, Guillaume Leblon, Liz Glynn, Richard Nonas, and Simon Starling, among others. Group exhibitions include The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night (2018), In the Abstract (2017), The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor (2014), Invisible Cities (2012), and The Workers (2011), co-curated with Carla Herrera-Prats. Previously, she was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

She has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York. Jonas developed a multimedia installation featured in the United States’ pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Judith Barry is an artist and writer whose research-based practice combines multiple disciplines and forms of artistic production to question technologies of representation. She has exhibited at documenta, Kassel, several Venice Biennales of Art, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Whitney Biennial, NYC, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, Sao Paolo Biennial, Brazil, Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 3rd International Biennale in Nagoya ARTEC ’93, Nagoya, Japan, Sydney Biennale, Australia, Biennial de la Dance, Lyon, and the Queens International, Queens, among many others. In 2001 she represented the US in the 8th International Cairo Biennale in Egypt.

A professor at MIT’s ACT program, she was the longtime director of the MFA program at AIB/LUCAD.

Sarah Workneh is the Co-Executive Director of Sky High Farms, and has spent over twenty years running alternative art educational spaces—first at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency and more recently at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, where she was Co-Director for 14 years. Workneh’s central interests in the history of social movements mixed with models of liberatory education and praxis informs her approach to her work. She has published numerous essays & speeches; has lectured widely at schools & programs around the US; and has served as an advisor to academic, residency, and other non-profit programs, particularly around issues of community building, equity, and strategic planning.

Workneh will be a visiting faculty for the January 2026 residency at MASS MoCA.