Congratulations to the 2027 Boundless Residency recipients, Jenie Gao, Natalie Woodlock, Emmy Lingscheit, and Aya Krisht!
The recipients will each have a 2–4 week residency with access to our fully-equipped studios to support letterpress printing, bookbinding, papermaking, screenprinting, paper marbling, and related arts. They will be provided a $1,000 stipend per week.
The recipients' applications were reviewed by a three-person jury panel, including MCBA’s Director of Exhibitions & Artist Programs, Anika Schneider, MCBA’s Education Director, Anna Bredeson, and one of the inaugural Boundless Residents C.K. Itamura .
Jenie gao
Jenie Gao (they/she) is a Taiwanese-Chinese American multidisciplinary artist specializing in printmaking, installation and public art, civic practice, and community storytelling. Their research and advocacy work focuses on issues of artists’ labor, cultural power, and resilient community ecosystems.
Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work is in over 40 institutional collections including National Museum of Women in the Arts and Library of Congress. Their recent exhibitions include South Bend Museum of Art, Pratt Munson Gallery at Munson Museum, grunt gallery, and Chinese American Museum of Chicago. Their art residencies include Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta; Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York; Art in the Park with Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation: Decolonization, Art, & Culture; Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, New York; Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and more.
Natalie Woodlock
Natalie Woodlock is an Australian artist and printmaker based in Seattle. She explores queer subculture and temporality in her work, creating heraldic and commemorative screenprinted portraits of her queer friends.
This work has been shown in exhibits at SPACE (Portland ME), The Front (New Orleans LA), The Bureau of General Services - Queer Division (NYC NY), and the Seattle Art Fair. In 2018 Natalie completed an MFA in Printmaking at The University of New Orleans, and has since been involved in many printmaking initiatives and artist residency programs. These have included a Print Fellowship at The Wassaic Project (2021) and participating in the Fabric Workshop and Museum's Graduate Apprenticeship Training Program (2022). She has been an artist in residence at Women's Studio Workshop, Stoveworks, The Peninsula School of Arts, Jentel, Vashon Island Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch, In Cahoots, and UCROSS, among others. Natalie is currently working on her first artists' book "Tearjerker: Brokeback Mountain", a work that illustrates scenes from Ang Lee's 2005 film that brought viewers to tears at a series of screenings she organized. For this work, she was awarded the 2025 Larry Somers Fellowship through Seattle Print Arts. She is currently working towards her first Seattle solo show, at 4Culture Gallery in May 2027. Natalie teaches printmaking workshops in community settings throughout the Pacific North West.
Emmy lingscheit
Emmy Lingscheit is a visual artist working in printmaking, comics, zines, and experimental book forms. Her work explores the teeming strangeness, competition, and symbioses of the biological world, where rigid categories such as individual, species, and sex are increasingly understood to be porous and dynamic.
The experience of becoming a parent has brought other kinds of mutualisms into her work, and renewed focus on how our lives and survival are entangled with those of our fellow humans and creatures. Emmy grew up in South Dakota, holds a BFA in painting from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, and an MFA in printmaking from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She lives in Urbana, IL, with her wife and young daughter, and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
aya krisht 
Aya Krisht is a designer, printmaker, and researcher based in metro Detroit, with roots in the Galilee. Her creative practice, spanning visual work, publishing, essays, talks, and workshops, is concerned with print praxis and anti-colonial cultural production, particularly in the face of imperial hegemonies and erasure, with a focus on printmaking, book arts, and Arabic letterpress and movable type.
In 2025 she completed her Master’s by Research in Typography at the University of Reading. Through research and programming she works to restore knowledge and craft traditions around Arabic letterpress, bridging historical understanding with contemporary practice. Aya’s work is housed in collections including the British Library, Library of Congress, Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and numerous others. She has given talks and workshops around the world. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press, an award-winning independent publishing project.
Jurors
Anika Hsiung Schneider is a narrative artist who draws on lived experiences, memory, and family history. With an Asian Mixed female identity, she resides in a highly racialized body that also exists in a liminal state. This connection to a liminal state of being closely connects her work to themes of loss, transitional spaces, and visualizing the intangible.
Anika received her MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). She currently serves as the Director of Exhibitions and Artist Programs at Minnesota Center for Book Arts and adjunct faculty at MCAD.
Anna Bredeson is a letterpress printer, book maker, and nonprofit arts professional living in Hopkins, Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Book Arts & Printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a BA in English from the College of Saint Benedict. Anna currently serves as the Director of Education at Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
C.K. is a Yonsei, Nikkei interdisciplinary artist based in California. Her conceptual, interactive and performance art serves to engage intergenerational audiences in the exploration of observation, contemplation and expressive imagination.
C.K. is a recipient of the Discovered Award for Emerging Visual Artists of Sonoma County, a recipient of the inaugural Boundless Residency of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the founder and publisher of Kanreki Press, the editor of Chottohon magazine, a co-founder of Book Arts Roadshow, an artist/director on the board of Berkeley Commonplace, and a former director of San Francisco Center for the Book.
C.K. is an Artist-in-Residence of San Francisco Unified School District Library Department, an Artist Mentor of San Francisco Arts Education Project, a Teaching Artist-Lead of Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, and works with schools, libraries, organizations and museums to to create and provide: professional development art-making workshops for educators; hands-on art-making workshops for students; and to make art-making accessible to the general public.
About The Boundless Residency
The Boundless Residency program provides artists living outside of Minnesota the opportunity to create innovative new work at MCBA. This residency provides artists living outside of Minnesota* with the time and space to work deeply on projects that require MCBA’s specialized equipment.
Providing studio access is central to MCBA’s mission, and we are excited to share our unique resources—and expand ties with the national and international book arts communities—through this new residency program.
This program is supported generously by Cathy Ryan and Doris Engibous.
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