Louis
Place
welcome!
at Louis Place announces the 2026 Artist Publishing Cohort
The Artist Publishing Cohort offers personalized support for eight artists with publishing projects in progress. Selected artists receive a $1,000 stipend, participate in bi-weekly workshops for feedback and support, and have access to aLP resources. Read more here.
Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. Tsubota has received recognitions from Aperture and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, and has been an artist-in-residence with Headlands Center for the Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Visual Studies Workshop, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and ARCUS Project (Japan). Her works have been exhibited across the United States and in Japan. Tsubota holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and is presently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design.
Ayana Zaire Cotton (she/they) is a cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. During a biotechnology residency at Ginkgo Bioworks she wrote the non-linear speculative fiction novella Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story in collaboration with creative writing software she engineered at the Recurse Center. Ayana is the founder and steward of Seeda School, named after Seeda — the non-binary biotechnologist living in Cykofa, an abolitionist community seeded by black feminist ancestors in a parallel universe. Seeda School supports a community of practice for black feminist worldbuilding and creative actualization. Through Seeda School they publish a weekly newsletter and podcast For the Worldbuilders. Inside the ecosystem of their speculative practice Ayana braids storytelling, code, facilitation, and interspecies collaboration to engage our collective imagination around the worlds we need in the futures we desire. Photo Credit: Stephen L.A. Miller
Claire Zarouhee Nereim is an interdisciplinary artist who makes books, drawings, sculptures and installations. Her research-driven practice investigates the materiality of language and various relationships between architecture, botany and feminized bodies. She is currently working on a long term project titled The Fork in the Salad, composed of an expansive essay, drawings and sculptures, centered on a metaphor that troubles the idea of “nature,” often mapped onto the feminine and the maternal, as separate from culture. Nereim received an MFA from Cal Arts and a BA from Oberlin College; she lives and works in Los Angeles.
Image Description: Claire is photographed in her studio, smiling at the camera. Her dark hair is pulled back and she wears small silver hoop earrings.
Damien Davis is a Newark-based artist, writer, and educator whose work examines cultural representation, memory, and systems of power through abstraction, language, and archival research. His practice spans visual art, public art, and critical writing, often recontextualizing symbols drawn from Black history, popular culture, and institutional archives. Davis has exhibited at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, and has completed public art commissions with organizations such as MTA Arts & Design. His writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, where he explores questions of visibility, labor, and equity in the art world. He currently holds a curatorial adjunct position in the Integrated Design and Media department at New York University. Photo credit: Redens Desrosiers
Image Description: Color headshot of Damien Davis seated in his studio, wearing a black graphic T-shirt and a thin gold chain. The background includes studio materials and storage bins.
Jasmin Benward (she/they) is a Black, queer writer, musician, and founder of Create the Room, based in Atlanta, Georgia. They are the author of the debut poetry collection Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears (Tehom Center Publishing, June 2025), a body of work that explores sapphic desire, grief, and becoming through lyric intimacy and emotional excavation. Jasmin’s creative practice spans poetry, personal essay, screenwriting, speculative fiction, sound, and performance, often blurring the lines between page and voice. Their personal essays have appeared in Healthline Magazine, Refinery29, and other publications, where they write candidly about identity, care, and embodiment. Rooted in a southern femme sensibility, Jasmin’s work engages lineage, softness, and survival, centering Black queer interiority as resistance. Across mediums, they are committed to storytelling that holds intersectionality, vulnerability, and radical love. Photo credit: LaQuann Dawson
Image Description: Jasmin smiles towards the camera with a brown NY corduroy hat, double gold chain, deep brown lipstick, and an oversized off-black button down.
Josephine Sales is an artist working with moving-image, sculpture, sound, and language, shaped by disability as a way of understanding time. The work unfolds through duration, access, and contingency, attending to how time is lived, shared, and withheld. Sales’s work has been presented at the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Queens Museum, and Kai Matsumiya, New York. Recent engagements include residencies at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine (2021–2023); Rupert (2025); and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, NL (2025–2026). Sales received an MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College (2019) and is Adjunct Part-Time Faculty at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Image Description: A pale, off-white surface fills the frame. Centered horizontally is the italic serif text, “This page intentionally left blank.” Faint reflections and shadows of windows and a human silhouette are visible across the surface, along with subtle screen texture and dust.
Kamaria Shepherd is a Houston-based visual artist, writer, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice examines race, womanhood, and Black femininity. Working across fiction, poetry, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, Shepherd integrates image and text to create narrative-driven works that engage personal and cultural mythologies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Bermudez Projects, Human Resources, and Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Chen’s in Brooklyn; New Release Gallery in New York City; and WIRWIR Gallery in Berlin. Her lithographs have been exhibited at the Houston Museum of African American Culture and the Arthur Rose Museum at Claflin University, and her work has appeared in episodes of The L Word GQ. Shepherd holds an M.F.A. in Image Text from Cornell University, an M.F.A. in Painting from UCLA, and a B.F.A. in Painting from RISD. She has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Frans Masereel Centrum, and was a Visiting Researcher at CAD+SR in Spoleto, Italy. She is currently expanding her novella, Life of a So-Called Texas PreacHer, into a novel and is an art professor at Houston City College.
Lily Jue Sheng is an artist-filmmaker and cinema worker working across the moving image, collage, and poetry. They have screened or read at Anthology Film Archives, The Cinematheque, the Emily Harvey Foundation, Mono No Aware, and The Poetry Project. Recent film festival presentations include Light Field Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, True/False Film Fest, and Kabayitos Microcinema. They have received awards from Creatives Rebuild NY, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Anderson Center at Tower View, and various local arts councils. Their work develops from places and paradigms relative to being a neuro-atypical minority settler (b. Shanghai, China) in labor struggles on unceded Lenape lands where they grew up and are based (New Jersey and New York). Image credit: Kristina Shakht
Image Description: A non-binary femme Chinese American standing in front of a white background. They have shaggy hair, a subtle smile, a light tan, and are wearing a textured yellow and cyan shirt with a pinapple zig zag print.
The Artist Publishing Cohort at Louis Place is made possible in part through the sponsorship of The Field, with funding from Wagner Foundation.