The Harvestworks New Works program is excited to announce the 2025 recipients! These artists have been commissioned to develop innovative projects in the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art, and Music) Lab. The applications for 2025 New Works Residency were reviewed by Michael Schumacher, Composer, performer and installation artist, Ivana Dama, sound artist and Harvestworks Executive Director Carol Parkinson. Additional recommendations were submitted by composer Kevin Ramsay. The awarded artists in 2025 are: Itziar Barrio, Zorica Colic, Shawn Decker, James Lewis + Floy Krouchi , Elliott Sharp + Janene Higgins, Henrik Soederstroem, Sylvain Souklaye, and Sara Stern.
During her residency at Harvestworks, Itziar Barrio will be working on a project called Material, a trilogy of multi-disciplinary projects that explore the intersections of technology, labor, identity, and matter. This ongoing work brings together collaborations with scientists, technologists, a bodybuilder, and a robotics engineer, among others, fostering a dialogue between the physical and digital, human and machine.
Itziar Barrio is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC. Her survey exhibition, curated by Johanna Burton (L.A. MOCA Director), took place in 2018, and her monograph was published by SKIRA in 2023. She is a 2024 Guggenheim and NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow.
Her work has been presented internationally at venues such as the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, MACRO Museum Rome, and MACBA Barcelona. Additional exhibitions include PARTICIPANT INC NYC, ARTIUM Museum Spain, and the Havana Biennial.
Artist-in-residence Zorica Colic will work on A Voice and Nothing More, an immersive multi-channel sound installation that explores the voice as speech. In a darkened room, the audience is enveloped by multiple voices—sometimes speaking individually, at times engaging in an apparent dialogue, and occasionally overlapping into a dense cacophony, punctuated by moments of silence. Through this interplay of sound and absence, the work investigates the materiality and meaning of the voice.
Zorica Colic is a visual artist and educator, born in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and based in New York City. She was a resident artist at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, Institute for Electronic Arts, and International Summer Academy in Salzburg, among others. She is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts.
Artist-in-residence Shawn Decker will work on Grass, an immersive multi-channel ambisonic sound installation that builds on his previous explorations of natural ecosystems. This project delves into current research in insect biology, focusing on the sounds generated by large populations of insects—such as crickets and cicadas—and their dynamic shifts between synchronicity and divergence as a form of communication. Through this sonic investigation, Grass seeks to reveal the intricate rhythms and patterns embedded in these natural soundscapes.
Shawn Decker lives and works in Chicago, IL, as well as collaborating internationally with various artists – most frequently, Jan-Erik Andersson in Turku, Finland and Anne Wilson in Chicago. . He is a Professor who teaches in the Art and Technology / Sound Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also recently been a Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing for the past 5 years. Additionally, he is a founder and partner of the Sketchbook craft brewery in Evanston and Skokie IL.
Artists-in-residence Floy Krouchi and James Brandon Lewis will collaborate on FKBass meets Molecular Systematic Music, a composition that merges electroacoustic music with jazz and free jazz. Drawing inspiration from the principles of DNA and biology—selection, repetition, mutation, determinism, and chance—they will explore new processes and aesthetics through the unique pairing of FKBass and tenor saxophone. The piece, structured in seven to nine movements, will be developed through conversations and preparation before being recorded in New Orleans at producer Mark Bingham’s studio.
Floy Krouchi is a sound artist, bass player, and electroacoustic composer. She co-founded Mafucage, a collective ensemble of experimental women musicians, in the 1990s in Paris.
She leads her project, “Bass Holograms,” in various forms—either solo or collaboratively—forming the “Bass Holograms Ensemble,” as in New York with Chess Smith, Mark Bingham, or Emilie Lesbros, as well as in New Orleans, or in a duo with drummer Benjamin Sanz.
James Brandon Lewis is a critically- acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation,Macdowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has been described as “ a saxophonist who embodies and transcends tradition” by The New York Times, and a promising young talent having listened to the elders by Jazz Legend Sonny Rollins. The saxophonist has balanced a deep, gospel -informed spirituality with Free-Jazz- abandon and hard-hitting funk-meets-hip-hop underpinning – Rolling Stone Magazine.
Artists-in-residence Janene Higgins and Elliott Sharp will collaborate on Substance, an opera inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and its impact on modern Western thought. Rather than a historical pastiche, the work will focus on Spinoza’s exploration of the infinite across all dimensions. His vocation as a lensmaker informs both the sound design—using acoustic “lenses” for processing—and the staging, where digital video processing creates a visual sense of looking deeply inward or outward into the universe.
Janene Higgins is an American media artist whose work focuses on print, motion design, and video art. Her videos and digital media have been described as “abstract narratives: undefinable journeys filled with sudden layerings and allurings.” Her videoart began as a direct offshoot of her work in motion design, incorporating collage, text, and image-layering into a time-based artform. Her work in video includes single channel pieces, installation, live video performance, and projection design for theater.
Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
Artist-in-residence Henrik Soederstroem will work on No One Is There, a project that builds on his previous series Troubles of Presence I-IV. Exploring how meaning is ascribed to everyday consumer objects and virtual artifacts, the work draws on Mark Fisher’s concept of the “eerie” as the presence of an unknown agency. Using vernacular horror aesthetics, liminal spaces, and tropes of haunted media, No One Is There investigates the histories embedded in these objects and the entanglement of the virtual and physical. Through media art, Soederstroem critically examines the perceived interchangeability of mass-produced items, revealing their political and ecological entanglements.
Henrik Soederstroem is a multidisciplinary artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He works with computer graphics, interactive and generative video, sound, spatial installation and sculptural objects. His work explores the limits and critical points of aesthetic, technological, social and linguistic systems. In recent years his focus has been on virtual worlds, their methods of meaning-making and their paradoxical relation to our physical reality, often seen through metaphors drawn from horror, the supernatural and folkloric.
Artist-in-residence Sylvain Souklaye will work on Invisible Straitjacket, a live performance project that explores the intimacy of sound, poetry, movement, and architectural space. Investigating the friction between social, cultural, and spiritual conditions, the work examines how sound, language, and spatial design shape audience experiences and memories. In a world where technology functions as both a collective language and ideological framework, Invisible Straitjacket seeks to create a “sonic linguistics in motion,” bridging human emotion and machine intelligence.
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker and author. His craft and mission go beyond and deeper than the question of identity. Following the idea of the rhizome, Souklaye digs in the sensitivity and history laying in the interiority of broken bodies, environmental urgencies and political retribution.
Artist-in-residence Sara Stern will develop a multi-channel soundscape for a new durational stop-motion animation filmed in the salt marsh of Provincetown, MA. Expanding on her exploration of “landscape drag,” the project investigates the shifting identities of the Breakwater, a dramatic site where tides transform the environment from ocean to desert. During her residency at Harvestworks, Stern will spatialize the score and create a live performance system, integrating theremin, voice, and electronic music to trigger dynamic audio and video effects in both pre-recorded and live contexts.
Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. She works between and across multimedia performance, moving image installation, sculpture, architectural intervention, and animation.
Stern has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (LIC, NY), Anthology Film Archives (NY, NY), The Watermill Center (Water Mill, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore), and the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA).
