Coastal Transitions Participants

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Kadey Ambrose is a basketmaker. Her work, ranging from traditional “using” baskets to inventive woven forms, connects ancient craft and ethnobotanical knowledge with the innovations of living culture. Kadey holds a BAS in Ethnobotany from The Evergreen State College and an MA in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University, both focused on basketry. She serves on the Northwest Basket Weavers Guild board of directors and recently joined the Fairbanks Folk School as Programs Coordinator. Kadey weaves in Fairbanks, where her work is rooted in place, plants, and the belief that creativity is strongest when it happens in community.

Communities: Fairbanks

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Deryn came to Alaska in 2019 for a seasonal position and never left. Just before moving, she was introduced to reed basketry by a dear friend and has since developed a weaving practice using self-harvested materials. Cordova is her home, where she works with the USFS, facilitating and conducting forest data collection throughout coastal Alaska for the Forest Inventory & Analysis program. Conversing with the natural world, getting to know the complex coastal Alaskan ecosystems is where she feels most content and creative. Weaving with barks, roots, and grasses, she enjoys experimenting, sometimes bending the rules of basketry while still honoring its function and tradition. From harvesting, drying, dyeing, and reshaping, she never tires of the slow transformation from raw to refined.

Communities: Cordova

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into the wilderness or a research library. Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Eisner Award, Anisfield-Wolf Award, Washington State Book Award, and others. She’s pivoting her career to become an embedded comics journalist working in long term partnership with field scientists in remote environments, and would love to chat if you want to collaborate with her on this endeavor.

Communities: Juneau

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Linda Infante Lyons is an artist from Anchorage, Alaska of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq ancestry. She earned a degree
in biology at Whitman College, WA and studied art at the Viňa del Mar Fine Arts School in Chile.
Infante Lyons’ work can be found in museum collections such as the Smithsonian National Museum of
the American Indian, Washington, DC, the Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin, OH, the Anchorage
Museum, the Museum of the North, Fairbanks, AK, the Alaska State Museum and the Alutiiq Museum,
Kodiak, AK.
Infante Lyons received awards including the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Native Arts and Cultures
Foundation fellowship, the Bennett Prize finalist award, Rasmuson Foundation fellowships and was artist
in residence at Denali National Park, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Linda resides in Anchorage with her husband, British artist, Graham Dane.

Communities: Anchorage

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Kristin Link is a science illustrator, educator, and mixed media artist based in McCarthy, Alaska. Working across cyanotype, collage, drawing, and field sketching, her practice emerges from direct observation alongside field scientists in remote landscapes. With degrees in studio art and conservation biology from Middlebury College and a graduate certificate in science illustration from CSUMB, she creates art that makes visible the invisible forces shaping our world, including glacier dynamics, nutrient cycles, and climate-driven ecological shifts. A two-time Rasmuson Project Award recipient and author of The Art of Field Sketching (Timber Press, 2026), her current project examines how melting glaciers are reshaping their surroundings across interior and coastal Alaska.

Communities: McCarthy

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Da-ka-xeen Mehner is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores Indigenous identity and equity and examines power structures through a lens of personal narrative. His work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in numerous public and private collections.

From 1994-2000, Mehner served as the founder and director of Site 21/21, a contemporary art gallery in Albuquerque, NM. Da-ka-xeen returned to Alaska in 2000 and earned his M.F.A degree in Native Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2007.

Mehner has been recognized for his work with several fellowships, including the Rasmuson FoundationFellowship, Native Arts and Culture Fellowship, Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and the United States Artists Fellowship 2015

Mehner’s home studio is located in the vast boreal forest outside Fairbanks, Alaska, where he lives with his family. He is currently the Director of the Native Art Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Communities: Fairbanks

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Hannah Perrine Mode is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in Alaska and New England. She works across media – including cyanotype, ice, and clay – to create objects and installations that explore glacial forces, planetary systems, and environmental stewardship. Her research examines how artistic practices can support boundary-spanning collaboration, creative knowledge production, and reciprocal approaches to Arctic science. She serves as faculty with the Juneau Icefield Research Program (Alaska) and has worked with Inspiring Girls* Expeditions (Alaska and New Zealand), the International Arctic Science Committee (Iceland), and Chulengo Expeditions (Alaska and Chile). She will be an artist-in-residence with In a Time of Change (Alaska) and The Arctic Circle (Svalbard) in 2026 and 2027. Her work has been exhibited widely, including permanent public art projects in the California Bay Area and a 2025 solo exhibition at Northeastern University’s Art Center in Boston. She holds an MFA from Mills College, a BS from Skidmore College, and is pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Communities: Fairbanks

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Karyn is a self-taught multi-discipline artist based in Homer, AK. Pen nibs and ink were her first foray into the arts (and continue to be incorporated). While working as a scientist and naturalist, she began creating traditional medieval illuminated calligraphy. Along the way, bookbinding, weaving, pigment making, and papermaking were added to her skillset. She incorporates these diverse skills in her work, weaving them together in unique ways. Karyn’s science background is foundational to her goal of sharing the wonder she finds in the everyday aspects of the natural world, the small things oft overlooked, and the interconnections that we all have with the world around us. Karyn was recently selected for a Rasmuson Individual Artist Award.

Communities: Homer

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Andy Padilla lives in Fairbanks and has called Alaska home for more than twenty years. He grew up in California, where street photography first shaped how he learned to observe and photograph people in everyday life. Travel continues to influence his work, reinforcing an interest in movement, public space, and unscripted moments. His background as a fisheries biologist influences how he pays attention to detail, pattern, and movement, an approach that carries into his photography. His work focuses on unscripted moments, documenting people as they work, rest, and move through daily life.

Communities: Fairbanks

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

My research explores social, ecological and physical “sites of exchange” of coastlines through film, swimming, boating and love stories. I am interested in developing new vocabularies for considering mutual exchanges (hunting, eating, freediving, osmosis) that define contemporary relationships between subsistence cultures and wild places. In the context of widespread ecological destruction, how can arts practice lead us towards a more enmeshed, reciprocal, loving relationship with the world? Can fiction, myth, or traditions help us to imagine and implement beautiful, blue, post-humanist futures? I use documentary films, poems, creative nonfiction and interactive installations to ask what different types of interfaces— romantic attachment, subsistence, cutting fish— can teach us about these landscapes of love and loss.

Communities: Sitka

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

Kim Schuster is an artist and biologist living and working in Homer, Alaska. Kim believes in the connectivity of science and art, since they are both ways of trying to understand and interpret the world. She currently works at the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, where she runs the Phytoplankton Monitoring Program. She has been woodworking for over 20 years and loves using a scroll saw and traditional carving tools to create works inspired by her career. Her ultimate goal is to interpret science through art and to spread knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of scientific concepts through her work.

Communities: Homer

In a Time of Change Artist-in-residence

My name is Theresa Woldstad, and I am an Indigenous Artist and member of the Ketchikan Indian Community. My work history is diverse ranging from an ADF&G Fish and Wildlife Technician operating and maintaining escapement weirs to a Legislative Aide with the Alaska State Legislature. I currently possess two master’s degrees, a MS in Wildlife Biology and MFA with a concentration in Native Arts. My current work focuses on Alaska’s unique fish and wildlife management and regulatory history. This artistic exploration was inspired by my numerous mentors, elders, and my grandfather and father who served as Alaska Fish and Wildlife Enforcement Officers from the territorial days to 2004.

Communities: Fairbanks and Juneau