OPEN CALL FOR TUCSON-BASED DISABLED ARTISTS
“Echo Among Us” is a five-week, fully-funded residency prioritizing process over production. Participants will critically reflect on and re-situate their practice in response to the theoretical and practical knowledge gained through the programme via lectures, screenings, site visits and workshops.
Together we will investigate, “How might collaboration amplify the voices of disabled artists who experience the world differently?”
There is no requirement to apply with a project proposal, know precisely what you will create nor show a specific level of technical skill. We want to know what you are curious about - we would like to get to know you and understand what is currently coming up within your practice.
Applicants must be based in Tucson, Arizona, be 18 years of age or older and must not be currently enrolled in formal education.
| HOW DO WE DEFINE DISABILITY?
For the purposes of this residency, disability is intentionally understood broadly and through self-identification. We recognise that disability can be physical, sensory, neurological, cognitive, intellectual, psychological, chronic, fluctuating or otherwise experienced in ways that affect how someone moves through, perceives, communicates with and/or participates in the world.
Disability does not always look or feel the same and not every disabled person has access to a formal diagnosis, medical documentation or a single language for describing their experience. We therefore do not ask applicants to prove or justify their disability. If you identify as disabled and feel that this residency is intended for you - we welcome you to apply.
We also recognise that disability is shaped not only by an individual's body or mind, but by the environments, systems, expectations and barriers around them. Access is therefore understood as something we create together - rather than something an individual must demonstrate their need for.
Should you require support with your application, please email: assistant@shayethiel.com
| TIMELINE
Applications are now open until 13th November, 2026. You should expect to receive the results of your application within 8 weeks of applying.
The residency will take place from 31st May - 28th June, 2027 with a public exhibition to take place in July, 2027 (dates TBD).
| WHAT ARE YOU CARRYING WITHIN YOU?
We are interested in your practice as it exists right now. Perhaps there is a question you keep returning to. Perhaps something has been appearing repeatedly in your work without you knowing why. Perhaps there is a material, sensation, place, memory, sound, movement, idea or experience you have been wanting to explore. Perhaps there is something you have wanted to try but haven't had the time, resources, community or permission to pursue. Or maybe your practice has changed, stalled, become uncomfortable or sits somewhere unexpected.
We want to hear about that.
Rather than asking you to propose a project - we would like to understand where your practice is alive, uncertain or unresolved.
| WHAT DOES THE RESIDENCY EXPLORE?
Throughout the five weeks, we will collectively explore questions around:
- How do we experience and understand our own bodies?
- How does sensation shape memory?
- What can we learn by paying closer attention to what we usually overlook?
- How does our experience of disability change the ways we perceive and navigate the world?
- What happens when individual experiences enter into conversation with one another?
- How can the Sonoran Desert become a site of listening, research and collective exchange?
- What might become possible when artists are given permission to experiment without needing to produce a predetermined outcome?
The residency will include sensory-led workshops, seminars from international artists & researchers, site visits, group critiques and time for independent making.
| AREAS OF INQUIRY
The programme will move through the following:
Week 1. Listening Inward: perception, sensation, internal awareness and self-attunement.
Week 2. Tracing the Echo: dialogue, memory and the ways individual experience has the power to move an entire community.
Week 3. Landscape as Record: the Sonoran Desert as a living body and a site of memory, movement, belonging and exchange.
Week 4. Sounding Together: collective listening, resonance, difference and shared experience.
Week 5. Echo Outward: opening the process to the public through a culminating exhibition and artist-led workshops.
The above themes are not a set curriculum and may fluctuate based on the selected cohort.
| WHO IS THIS FOR?
We are looking to bring together 5 - 8 artists, age 18+ who live in Tucson and self-identify as disabled. Artists working in any medium or discipline are welcome. You may work in painting, sculpture, photography, sound, performance, installation, textiles, writing, ceramics, film, digital media or something that doesn't fit neatly into a category.
You do not need to identify as a "professional artist" or have an extensive exhibition history.
What matters most is your curiosity, your perspective and your willingness to explore alongside others. We are particularly interested in artists who can bring different ways of seeing, sensing, making and thinking into the room. Artists do not need to make work exclusively about disability.
The cohort will be intentionally curated - not only around individual practices, but around how the artists curiosities might connect with, challenge and learn from one another.
| SELECTED ARTISTS WILL RECEIVE:
- A material stipend
- Shared Studio Space
- Dedicated workshops for the entire cohort - delivered from leading international and local artists / practitioners
- Sensory and site responsive research opportunities
- Group conversation and critiques
- Time and space to experiment
- Opportunities to develop new ideas alongside other disabled artists
- Participation in a culminating public exhibition
- The opportunity to lead or contribute to free public programming
Most importantly, the residency is designed to create time without the pressure to immediately turn that time into a product.
This program is supported, in part, by Night Bloom: Grants for Artists funding through MOCA Tucson and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
| THE SELECTION PANEL
The panel consists of local and international artists / practitioners across various disciplines.
Julia is an artist by training and a cultural producer working across art, ecology, hospitality, and participatory experiences. Her practice focuses on developing and producing projects that bring together artists, communities, places, and ideas - with a particular interest in how cultural experiences can create space for attention, connection and exchange.
Morgain Ghost is a native artist that was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and has lived in Tucson, Arizona for nearly thirty years. She works in oil paint and mixed media.
Morgain’s interest in art started at a young age but was pushed back while she focused on ballet and contemporary dance. Leaving dance due to injury she switched focus to study Studio Art and Art History at the University of Arizona. During this time she also found mentorship with Tucson oil painter and sculptor Mykl Wells.
Miniature vignettes Morgain creates include reproductions of furniture and objects from her own life. These compositions depict stories that are a blend of real and imagined. Her distinctive color palette and mix of textures tie the pieces together, fine detail encourages viewers to interact with the narratives or compose their own.
The sculptural pieces Morgain creates uses clay and paper maché with wire armatures capture movement and emotion inspired by dance, similar to a photograph capturing a moment in time. Some of these pieces incorporate fun and humor while others are of a more serious nature.
Her oil paintings are largely portrait oriented and use repeated imagery to guide the viewer through the pieces. They contain elements of memento mori compositions, often including herself as the main subject of many of the larger paintings.
Morgain continues to create, inspired by her daughter, who breaths new light and whimsy into her art and portfolio.
Shaye Thiel (she/her) is an American-Canadian artist working across sound, performance and perception through immersive, site-specific installations. Trained initially as an oil painter, she works in layers; glaze, erasure and accumulation which allows forms to surface slowly through attention and revision.
This painterly discipline carries into her sonic practice: composition as sediment, listening as texture, time as material.
Her work emerges within a broader shift across sound, neuroscience, and performance - a movement away from art as commodity toward art as a charged field of relation. Here, meaning is not fixed but formed through interaction. Through her installations, she repositions the public from observer to observed, revealing perception as dependent, unstable, and inherently political. Central to this inquiry is Quantum Listening: a practice of attention that understands sound as entangled, co-created and in constant negotiation.
Working in collaboration with neuroscientists, Thiel explores the thresholds of sound, memory and “sensehacking” with a grounded curiosity shaped by her lived experience as a hard-of-hearing artist who wears hearing aids. Her practice approaches listening not as passive reception, but as an active, embodied exchange between body, machine and environment.
Sofia Xenia Economou is an artist and archaeological illustrator whose practice blends classical drawing techniques with contemporary digital tools to examine the enduring legacies of ancient sites and systems. She holds an MA in Digital Direction from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London UK, and a BFA in Drawing from the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, GA, USA. Her academic background is further shaped by studies in architectural history and archaeological illustration, with a particular focus on ancient structures in Greece and Italy.
Her work is driven by an interest in fragmentation, excavation, and reconstruction, both as archaeological processes and as metaphors for lived experience. Informed by a cross-cultural upbringing and complex family histories, Sofia approaches making as a form of self-excavation: identifying ruptures, tracing continuities, and attempting acts of repair. These personal investigations are situated within larger cultural and historical narratives, where the self is understood not as isolated, but embedded within layered systems of place, memory, and inheritance.
Sofia’s practice combines traditional media such as charcoal and graphite with advanced digital methods including 3D scanning and sculpting. Through this intersection, she reconstructs and reinterprets forms across physical and virtual space, creating a dialogue between the tactile immediacy of classical techniques and the expansive, speculative possibilities of digital tools.
Theo’s work revels in contradictions of navigating intimacy in contemporary gay life. His current research uses both archival histories and the ephemeral histories of personal experience to examine how cruising - the queer practice of finding casual sex in public spaces - has shifted in the context of digital life. Looking at the network of interactions facilitated by the semi-public space of Grindr, Scruff and other location-based hook up apps, his interdisciplinary practice interrogates the role these apps play in structuring and mediating relationships within the queer community in ways that are simultaneously empowering and alienating.