In 2026, ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th anniversary of its Artists-in-Residence program. Since its founding in 2006 by Suzanne Fiol, the program has offered emerging artists the space and support to experiment, collaborate, and share new projects with the public. As we celebrate this milestone year, ISSUE continues its commitment to nurturing artists who challenge conventions and expand the field of sound, performance, and interdisciplinary practice. We’re proud to announce the 2026 Artists-in-Residence Webb Crawford, Eden Girma, and rocío sánchez, and invite audiences to join us in celebrating the next generation of boundary-pushing artists.
ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program has served a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support artists in the local community. The program encourages selected NYC-based artists to take unprecedented creative risks in reaching the next stage in their artistic development, providing residents with a stipend plus production, marketing and curatorial support to create and present up to three new works over the course of a year.
Webb Crawford is a guitarist, tenor banjoist, improviser and instrument-builder whose work considers relationships between maker, instrument, and player, traditional design conventions, and established performance practices. As a luthier, Crawford focuses on modern reconstructions of historical stringed instruments, recontextualizations of those instruments within experimental music, and the exchange dynamics of multi-player sound objects. They have developed a percussive approach to the electric guitar and tenor banjo, drawing influence from Piedmont-style fingerpicking, “chicken-picking”, and permutation-based processes. In 2017, they worked with MASS MoCA to restore instruments built by composer and luthier Gunnar Schonbeck, and later created replicas of Schonbeck’s “triangular cellos” for Bennington College. Crawford has led and participated in instrument-building workshops at The Cooper Union, Connecticut College, the Bennington Museum, and Carnegie Hall (with Bash the Trash), and has worked for ten years as a guitar repair technician. Their work also involves ongoing projects with Michael Foster, Chuck Roth, Joey Sullivan, Zosha Warpeha, Jack Langdon and Sean Ali.
Eden Girma is a multi-instrumental musician, vocalist, producer, and composer hailing from Madison, WI. Through a genre-bending ear and a poetic lyricism, they bring to life immersive and dynamic sonic environments that not only resonate with individual hearts, but brings people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy. Girma draws strength from the transportive, transformational power latent in sounding and listening; voice, text, synths, and field recordings are emotive entry points into radical vulnerability, and blur lines between dreams, memory, and reality both embodied and hoped for. They employ practices of improvisation, playfulness with time, lush harmonic movement and polyphonic dissonance, alongside technologies of interactive and generative music, to wield songs and soundscapes as healing interruptions of daily life, imaginative excavations of marginalized histories, and uplifting counterpoints to isolating, disconnecting societal scripts. Girma additionally performs and releases solo music under the moniker aden, exploring realms of popular music and songwriting with a sensitivity guided by jazz, impressionism, and experimental electronics. Girma's 2026 residency is part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.
rocío sánchez is a Mexican cellist, composer, improviser, and educator whose work bridges composition, field recordings, virtual animation, and collage. Their music explores the rich sonority of the cello, aiming to expand the instrument’s color by preparing it with recycled materials. sánchez’s sound world spans from the manipulation of the prepared cello, adapting it into a unique instrument that morphs throughout the performance—from soft kalimba-like tones to static, roaring wails created through the manipulation of VHS tape. Their work has been presented at Klangspuren Festival (AT), the Darmstadt Summer Courses (DE), Red Ecología Acústica México (MX), Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC RPI), Carnegie Hall, Roulette Intermedium, the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, and The P.I.T. (Property Is Theft, NYC), among others. They have also been a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California San Diego where they have premiered solo and ensemble programs. sánchez received a BM from UABC México and a MM from SUNY Purchase College. They divide their practice between New York City and Mexico, focusing on performer-composer approaches and cello pedagogy.
