Amidst a winter wonderland and tucked between snow-covered pines, Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students in creative writing and interdisciplinary arts walked the paths of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe during their biannual 10-day artist residency. The Low-Residency programs are made up of five distance-learning semesters taught by nationally renowned artists and writers from across the country and around the world. Each year – once in the summer and once in the winter – the students spend 10 days on the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe’s Wayne L. Prim Campus fully immersed in their practice, education and the Tahoe environment.

This year, from January 3-12, students gathered in Lake Tahoe in a landscape blanketed in white to learn from renowned artists and writers, and to collaborate in a transformative environment. Each residency is an intensive period of workshops, seminars, readings, artist exhibitions and more. By bringing students from across the country together, many participants found new perspectives that helped them to develop their personal voices. Zoey Vagner is an interdisciplinary artist from San Diego and was on her fourth residency at Tahoe – meaning she’s stayed on the Lake Tahoe campus four times so far throughout her time in the program. Vagner completed her B.S. in Zoology at Oregon State and combines her passion for wildlife, conservation, science, neurodivergence and mental health in her art. 

“I work in many mediums, including sculpture and performance work in 2D art,” Vagner said. “Right now, I'm working with the concept of interspecies empathy and how we perceive certain animals. I'm in my fourth residency right now, so this is my second year and I have one residency left. What's made this program special is all the people that come together here a couple of times a year, and we all collaborate and get to learn about each other's work and inspire each other.” 

One of the prominent features of the program is the chance to spend a week immersed in a beautiful natural landscape that encourages students to discover their voice and develop a passion for place-bound connection. This winter, Dani Kuntz, poet and creative non-fiction writer student, was in her second residency at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Dani reflected on the program as it wrapped up for the 2024 winter season. 

“The residencies are really special. I've never been in Nevada until my last residency, and getting to see both of the seasons at Lake Tahoe, summer and winter, is beautiful,” Kuntz said. “I think it's really inspirational for writers or artists in general to be around such natural beauty. Being able to commune here with writers is very special, and I think it makes it even more special that it only gets to happen a few times a year.”

The landscape inspires not only creative thought – having the place-bound connection gives artists a real, tactile living studio that sometimes finds its way into the students’ art and writing. Jerry David, a multimedia artist and participant of the residency at Lake Tahoe, sometimes uses fabrics, leaves, wood and other natural objects as well as acrylic on canvas. 

“I mostly work on history paintings,” David said. “I do artwork that deals with real-life issues, like our pains, our emotions, past experiences and things that actually affect us as human beings. I use figures to just talk about real-life issues. During the residency, we have classes almost every day and I love working under pressure and I think it pushes me, challenges me to work harder.” 

The residency is especially exceptional for students as they discover new tools for their own work, and as they are taught by faculty who are renowned in their work, constantly pushing the boundaries of art and writing. Interdisciplinary Arts faculty member Katherine Spinella’s research is focused on themes related to the attention economy and our cultural understanding of nature. She has been teaching at colleges in the Portland area for over 10 years and joined the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe faculty in 2023. In one studio session during the residency, Spinella’s prompt for the students was to use artificial intelligence (AI), specifically Chat GPT, to combine creative brainstorming sessions into an art exhibit project proposal. 

“This is my first time teaching graduate-level courses which is really exciting because there're more conceptual prompts and readings and the students have their own basis in their studio practice already,” Spinella said. “It was really fun for me to organize this class and build it around things that are part of my research and that I'm interested in too.”

The assignment helped students discover the interplay between visual arts and AI programs, using Chat GPT as a tool for creating proposals and connecting ideas. Students like Lisa Van Dusen and Rebecca Fahning worked together to create a project proposal, and asked Chat GPT questions like “What kind of project can we make that will be large scale and represent all of these ideas of interconnectedness that can be shared?” They sent the AI program pictures of their brainstorming sessions on paper accompanied by variations on the same question, and it returned with conceptual project ideas that they used as a basis for their proposals.

“We are creating a proposal for a project to answer the questions we are exploring, so I’m excited to see what this tool can do to help us find our initial inspiration.”

And this inspiration to create and discover new truths, both for students and faculty, is ultimately the goal of the residencies at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

More about the Low-Residency programs

The Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts accepts applications every fall and spring. The five-semester programs are designed for people with active lives outside of school. While still considered a full-time program, the ten-day residencies are designed with the understanding that not everyone can commit an entire summer multiple weeks at a time to school alone. Additionally, the residencies are meant to embolden students' desire for more critical dialogue around our relationship to our surroundings, and the role of the artist and writer in addressing these complexities.