Residencies + Commissions

ISSUE offers year-round opportunities for experimental artists to develop and present challenging new works through residencies and commissioning opportunities.

Upcoming

Artists-In-Residence 2026

Ongoing Series

In 2026, ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th anniversary of its Artists-in-Residence program. 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.

Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship 2026

Ongoing Series

ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Isabella Thorpe-Woods as 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Thorpe-Woods will present a curated series of events that explore the idea of letters as a curatorial prompt, and the ways they both fail and succeed in transmitting meaning or reaching their desired destination.

Past

Holland Andrews: Onè

ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Holland Andrews presents Onè, a long-form vocal & clarinet performance focused on ancestral trauma, cathartic experience, and, ultimately, healing. With emotionality at the core of their compositional style, Andrews is known for expansive works which create massive cathedrals of sound.

More

John McCowen: SOLO CONTRA

John McCowen presents compositions for solo contrabass clarinet for his inaugural performance as an Artist-In-Residence. These works present the concept of the instrument as an acoustic synthesizer. By sustaining multiple sounds simultaneously, the clarinet becomes a harmonic tube where sounds create beating harmonics.

More

Charmaine Lee: Laminals III with Tyshawn Sorey & Ikue Mori

Charmaine Lee presents her third and final work as a 2019 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence, Laminals III, the last of three movements of a new long-form piece for solo voice. The evening concludes with a trio of improvised music featuring Tyshawn Sorey (percussion) and Ikue Mori (laptop).

More

Lindsay Packer: Call and Response: ECHOLOCATION with Fan Letters

Light and color improviser Lindsay Packer premieres her third commissioned work as a 2019 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. In Call and Response: ECHOLOCATION, Packer collaborates with Alex Nathanson and Dylan Neely of Fan Letters in a nonlinear feedback loop of analog/digital chain reactions.

More

Rena Anakwe: Ogwu (the healing)

Rena Anakwe presents the final work of her 2019 ISSUE residency with the premiere of Ogwu (the healing), an immersive purification ritual inspired by the element of fire, staged in collaboration with lighting designer Kelley Shih.

More

Lindsay Packer: Call and Response: TRANSPOSITION with Anaïs Maviel

Lindsay Packer premieres her second work as a 2019 Artist-In-Residence, a collaboration with composer and performer Anaïs Maviel. Revealing the subliminal complexity within the synaesthetic wave behaviors of light and sound, Packer and Maviel conjure the harmonics inherent in their fast-traveling wave forms.

More

loveconductors: ghoul|take III

loveconductors presents "ghoul|take III," curated by 2019 Curatorial Fellow Benedict Nguyen. Directed by Shantelle Courvoisier, loveconductors is a human movement project feat. Renée Colbert, Justin Faircloth, Maestro Flux, Ube Halaya, Shiloh Hodges, Samantha Lysaght, Light McAuliffe, Madeline Warriner, and slowdanger.

More

Ying Liu: PIGTAIL - a Swivel Stool Dance™

Experimental hodgepodge-ist & 2019 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Ying Liu premieres an ambitious new movement work utilizing swivel stools (deconstructed office chairs). Distilling a year-long process into an hour, a cast of dancers have adapted to these chairs as extensions of their bodies.

More

Rena Anakwe: Fast Forward to Silence

Rena Anakwe continues her residency with Fast Forward to Silence, an immersive sound and body collage that honors the air around us. Focusing on sequences shifting between the minute and the rigorous, the piece explores the duality that air possesses through a duet with Jonathan González + lighting from Kelley Shih.

More

Lindsay Packer: Call and Response: DEPTH OF FIELD with Melanie Maar

Lindsay Packer premieres DEPTH OF FIELD, her first commissioned work as an ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. Collaborating with dancer and choreographer Melanie Maar, the artists use light, color, repetition, movement & the reverberations that emanate from their movements to define and redefine the space around them.

More

Artists-In-Residence 2019

Ongoing Series

ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of musician Charmaine Lee, multimedia artist Ying Liu, interdisciplinary performer Rena Anakwe, and light and color improviser Lindsay Packer, as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2019 season.