Our seasonal Key Holder Residency program is an opportunity for artists to have 24/7 access to the studio in exchange for working 4 hours a week for IS Projects. Each of the Key Holders is given unlimited access to the facilities and exposure to other artists at varying stages in their careers. Key holder responsibilities include making sure that the shop runs smoothly and assisting with open studio sessions and custom printing projects. They are ambassadors to the shop and should be knowledgeable in various printmaking and/or book arts processes. Keyholder residents will be given an orientation to the studio but are expected to have a functional knowledge of the techniques they wish to utilize and work independently on their own projects. Residents are responsible for their own materials and housing.

Our Key Holder Residency is 12 weeks and is regularly offered in:

Summer Dates: June - August
Application Deadline: April 15

Fall Dates: September - November
Application Deadline: July 15

Winter Dates: December - February
Application Deadline: October 15

Spring Dates: March - May
Application Deadline: January 15

To apply:

Email brooke@isprojectsfl.com
Subject: Key Holder Residency
The body of the email should include your contact information (phone, email, website), the season(s) and year you are applying for (Summer, Fall, Spring 2021/22) and one (1) PDF as an attachment.

The PDF should contain:

• Statement of Intent which answers the following:
  - Why would you like to participate in the program?
  - What printmaking or book arts experience do you have?
  - What projects would you like to work on while in residence?

• CV

• Artist Statement

• 5-10 images of your work labeled:
  Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions with optional brief description

Chee Bravo is a printmaker and multimedia artist. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies, Chee Bravo’s artistic work ranges from two-dimensional works in printmaking and painting, to three-dimensional bricolage, to multimedia and interactive installations. Her cumulative approach to her work reflects her traditional beginnings as a printmaker, her long career in graphic design, and her childhood growing up in the culturally diverse Caribbean islands before emigrating to the U.S.

She exhibits nationally and internationally. Throughout her graphic design and fine art careers she has been recognized with several awards. Her most recent award is a distinguished 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has also received a Betty Laird Award and national awards in the advertising sector, including a prestigious Addy Award. Her works can be found in the Trenton City Museum and Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission permanent collections (NJ), the Frost Museum permanent collection at Florida International University (FL), the Brooklyn Art Library (NY), Frontline Arts/PCNJ of NJ and private collections. Bravo received her BFA in printmaking at the Florida International University in Miami.

SUMMER 2023 - SUMMER 2024

Katelyn Kopenhaver is an interdisciplinary artist and troublemaker. Originally from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Kopenhaver received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and currently resides in Miami, Florida. Conceptually, Kopenhaver is preoccupied with societal oversight: choice, commodity, safety, violence, information, power, and personal action. She weaves the overlooked realities that hover just below our day to day consciousness—the occurrences we knowingly disavow or are conditioned to suppress and relentlessly presents such denial into an existence of unavoidable truth we must now confront and, therefore, question and respond to.

SPRING 2023 - SUMMER 2024

Yuko Yamaguchi was born in Japan. She is a monoprint artist and a professional textile designer. After studying art foundations under Yikino Fukasawa, who is a Japanese style painter and a Kimono designer, she entered Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. She started to study printmaking to create her style. She was recommended to continue studying printmaking at The Art Students League of New York by Sylvie Covey, who is a professional printmaker and professor. She eventually received a scholarship from the Art Students League, where she then developed her unique technique. Her works are in the collections of New York Library and Giorgio Armani, as well as private collections.

SUMMER 2024

Juana Meneses is a Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist with a rich background in painting, artist books, printmaking, and collaborative artmaking practices. She blends diverse creative practices to explore the depth of personal identity construction, placemaking, and the influence of nature on our narratives. Originally hailing from Colombia, her artistic practice blends a variety of cultural perspectives.

Juana spent a decade in the vibrant art scene of Los Angeles before relocating to Miami in 2012. Her formal education in the arts includes a B.F.A. in Studio Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she honed my skills in painting and drawing, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, completed in 2006. Currently, She is a Professionally Certified K-12 art educator, a professor of art education in a graduate program, and the manager of community programming at a Miami Beach museum of contemporary art.

Her relocation to Miami market a significant shift in my practice towards greater collaboration and community involvement. This evolution has been recognized through prestigious grants, including the Ellie Teacher Travel Grant from Oolite Arts, the WaveMaker Grant for co-creating Portable Editions L.A.B., and a current Key Holder Resident at IS Projects.

SUMMER 2024

Ashley Castañeda (They/She) is a Peruvian-American multidisciplinary artist specializing in book arts, illustration, writing, and printmaking. Ashley received their BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently resides in Miami, Florida, on Tequesta land. Castañeda spends their time contemplating text as a disruptor and a window for images; a way to communicate, or translate, both individual and collective narratives. Through artists’ books, they explore intricacies of closeted queerness, Latinidad, language, and gender as part of an intersectional dialogue of decolonization on an inductive scale. They yearn to create imagery and work that meanders uncertainty, while also embracing it. 

Castañeda’s work in Illustration, however, embraces a more positive, fun tone as a balance between the disciplines they work in. In addition to their arts practice, Castañeda works as an art educator in a K-8 setting. When they aren’t working, they like to take afternoon naps with their dog, Aki. 

WINTER 2023 - SPRING 2024

Tiffany Tompkins is a practicing artist from south Florida and currently lives and works there. She is a multidisciplinary artist that graduated with a Bachelors in Fine Arts from New World School of the Arts College. She focuses on discovering a bridge between the real world and her imagined ones.  She creates dreamscape narratives through drawing, printmaking and painting while using book arts, sculpture and installation to reinvent environments that reflect on her experiences in childhood and the transition into adulthood. Her poetic language describes a healthy version of escapism through the use of arts and imagination. 

WINTER 2023 - SPRING 2024

Nina Osoria Ahmadi is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Miami, Florida. They use the body as a medium, along with photography, collage, printmaking, drawing, performance, and video, to illustrate the impacts of constructs like race, gender, and nationality on our physical bodies in context with the natural world. 

They recently graduated from New York University with an individualized major in arts education as social practice. Nina's thesis detailed how education systems are structured to break down creative capacity particularly in BIPOC and low income students-- and how increasing access to art and arts-based learning can heal achievement gaps and empower strong senses of selfhood for BIPOC youth.

Nina was named a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts in 2019 and has since worked creatively with the NYC Commission for Human Rights and the ACLU among other organizations.

They currently teach elementary school art classes in Miami. (And love it!)

SPRING 2023

Marco Caridad is a Venezuelan-born, Miami-based interdisciplinary artist whose diverse and experimental fusion of mediums defies stereotypes. He celebrates the intricate nuances of his experiences as a gay man, mixed-race individual, immigrant, and Latinx individual. His artwork has garnered recognition at esteemed venues such as the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum, Historic Miami Post Office Museum, Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo, DORCAM, Miramar Cultural Center, Koubek Center, and MIFA, among others. Caridad has co-authored two books, "Syllabaries: Images and Words" and "Desarrolla Tu Creatividad con Ejercicios Teatrales," and holds an MFA from The Art Institutes, Miami International University of Art & Design, as well as a BFA from The La Universidad del Zulia. He has shared his expertise as an adjunct professor at Istituto Marangoni and the Catholic University Andres Bello. He has secured artist residencies at the ICA Art + Research Center, MUD Foundation, and IS Projects. Caridad actively contributes to the arts community as a valued member of the board of directors for FAMA and MIFA while also serving as co-president at The One Club For Creativity Miami, furthering the growth and development of the artistic realm.

WINTER - SPRING 2023

Oskar Msellati is a French-American visual artist who specializes in silkscreen printmaking and painting. His work is about the environment around him – the present but also the past. He likes to fuse different environments. His preferred mediums are printmaking, painting, spray paint, letterpress and photography. He gravitates towards layering techniques.

He strives to create aesthetically intriguing imagery of clashing environments, more precisely the clashing of spaces, cultures and times. His art is a reflection of the world as he sees it–chaotic, yet organized, loving and yet dangerous. His artistic process consists of visual documentation often through photography or drawing, followed by through analogue and digital processes manipulations. He uses photography as his initial starting point, and then transposes and transforms these images into mixed media prints, using traditional and more modern printing methods, and often incorporating painting. He makes art because he loves it. From a very young age, he has always been drawn to paint, always having to touch it and mix it. We are eternal students and he is in constant search of the aesthetic that will define him and his work.

SPECIAL SESSION 2022 - SPRING 2023

Charlisa Montrope was born in Castries, Saint Lucia and raised in Miami, Florida. She graduated from the University of Florida, New World School of the Arts with an honors BFA in drawing. Montrope received her Master of Fine Arts in printmaking on a full scholarship and teaching assistantship from the University of Miami.

 Selected Solo exhibitions include Manmay Lakay: MFA Exhibition, University of Miami Gallery, Miami, Florida (2022) and Charlisa Montrope: An exhibition of paintings and print, The Copper Door B&B, Miami, Florida (2019), selected group exhibitions include Bonnier Gallery, The MFA Showcase (2022) University of Miami, Department of Art and Art History: 2021 Virtual Juried Student Competition Hosted by the Lowe Art Museum (2021), Mindy Solomon Gallery, “For Here or To Go” (2018). Montrope received a Keyholder Residency at IS Projects, Miami, Florida (2022) and Residency at Remarque Print Workshop, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2022) and work is in various private collections throughout Florida, Maryland, and New Jersey. She and her work were featured in VoyageMIA, The Miami Hurricane and in online press releases for the Copper Door B&B and Mindy Solomon Gallery. Montrope currently still resides and works in Miami, Florida.

SPECIAL SESSION 2022 - SPRING 2023

As a multidisciplinary artist and bodyworker, Nat Sassine’s work offers a connection between the rituals of each practice. Nat is exploring anatomical systems and forms as a portal to understanding their own body and the deep interconnectedness to the bodies that have come before theirs and the bodies that will come after theirs and the ecological and social systems of care that are necessary for this aliveness. They are a student of the earth, of decolonizing rest, of movement, and of what it means to have a body in relationship to all other bodies. Anything Nat creates is the curriculum. Nat was born in Miami and grew up in the Florida Keys as a first generation American. They are currently based in Hallandale Beach and Miami FL, on Miccosukee, Seminole and Tequesta land.

FALL - WINTER 2021

Cristina Müller-Karger is a Miami based artist since 2018. As an illustrator, educator and editor, she consider herself to be a changemaker and a social entrepreneur. Over the last decade she has participated in several Arts in Education projects in her home country, Venezuela. She has been using traditional techniques such as etching, screen printing, linocut, monotype and stencil as a performance. Founder of utopía {portátil}, an independent publishing house producing handcrafted books, she aims to open spaces of imagination and creativity in small communities. Her team holds the dream to engage with children and young people, and tap into the power of the press with them as a means to raise those voices that we still have not heard. She is currently working on a series of small posters, exploring the art and study of healing sounds to make them visible through typographical shapes and compositions. The aim is to approach the inner voice and express these noises, acoustics or vibration in a letterpress postcard format.

FALL - WINTER 2021

Lorraine Cruz is a self taught printmaker and graphic artist, currently based in Miami. They’ve dedicated their time to work at several print shops gaining experience in various printmaking methods while also focusing on mastering the screen printing medium. In 2020-2021, Cruz was featured in the Queer Ecology Hanky Exhibit , in which they showcased there first pattern fabric print. Since then, they have centered their practice around fabric & yardage printing as well as natural dyes & pattern making. They have also designed for Florida Student Power Network creating infographics and helped establish the “Abolish Ice'' (2020) initiative fundraiser for immigrant detainees in Miami-Dade County. Currently Cruz is interested in using computer generated graphics as part of their screen printing process in order to create depthful images through color interaction and texture. During this residency, they will be exploring image creation using halftones, bitmapping, dither effects and other computer generated effects through Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Blender & Procreate.

SUMMER 2021

Dona Altemus was born in Miami, FL. She graduated with a BFA from New World School of the Arts in Miami, FL (2012 ) and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Delaware, DE (2018). She has participated in exhibitions including Trading Places II, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2012), MIA_BER, Verein Berliner Kunstler, Germany (2014), Fantastical Vizcaya, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Coconut Grove, FL (2015), Cadence, University of Delaware, (2018), Transphysics, Art & Cultural Center of Hollywood, FL (2016), Outlaw Culture: or Higher Ground, Bridge Red Studios, North Miami, FL (2019) and the AIM BIENNIAL, South Florida (2020). Her solo exhibitions include Closed for the Season, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Coconut Grove, FL (2016), Interlace, Hartford Community College, MD (2018). Dona's art residencies include Vermont Studio Center, VT, Oolite Arts, MIami Beach, FL, Deering Estate, Cutler Bay, FL, Miami Dade College Live Arts program, Miami, FL. She is a current A-I-R at Bridge Red Studios, North Miami, FL.

SUMMER 2020

Alexandra Riesco’s (b. 1994) interest in the sciences and the outdoors feeds into her art practice, which is an exploration of the natural processes that shape the Earth. She studied printmaking as well as biological and earth sciences at Dartmouth College, where she won the Robert Read Prize for work in the graphic arts and the Artist Book Prize in 2017. She is currently working on a series influenced by memory, landscape, and the fluctuations of time as well as a collaborative artist book. She currently lives and works in Miami, FL.