HARLEM, NY.- Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer and Cullen Washington, Jr., have been selected as the 2012–13 artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since its founding in 1968, the Studio Museum has held a strong commitment to nurturing and advancing the careers of visual artists of African descent through the competitive and prestigious Artist-inResidence program, an eleven-month studio residency awarded to three emerging artists each year.

“I am delighted to welcome Steffani, Jennifer and Cullen to the Studio Museum community,” says Assistant Curator and Artist-in-Residence program coordinator Lauren Haynes. “Our artists in residence are truly at the heart of the Museum, and we all look forward to the insightful conversations and amazing work coming in the year ahead.”

Chosen from a pool of over 200 applicants, Jemison, Packer and Washington will join the ranks of over 100 highly regarded alumni of the residency program. Beginning October 1, 2012, each resident will receive a free non-living studio space on the Museum’s third floor, a $20,000 fellowship, and a $1,000 materials stipend, along with access to Studio Museum staff and other scholars and art professionals, both formally and informally. All three artists are participants in The Bearden Project, (2011–12) and will be included in the Museum’s upcoming group exhibition Fore (November 8, 2012 to March 10, 2013). An exhibition of their work, curated by Haynes, will be presented at the Museum from July to October 2013.

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, in 1981. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA from Columbia University (2003). Informed by her background in literature, Jemison creates work in video, photography and mixed media, often using language or story as a foundation for conceptual investigation. Jemison contextualizes her studio practice through curatorial and social projects including Future Plan and Program, a publishing project she founded in 2011, and “Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet,” an ongoing collaborative project in the form of a reading room and discussion group. Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally at venues including LAXART, the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Jennifer Packer is a painter and a 2012 MFA graduate of the Yale University School of Art, where in 2011 she received the Gamblin Paint Prize and a Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship. Packer uses portraiture to explore deeply personal experiences as well as the grand, convoluted narratives of art history. Embracing dissonance, she creates paintings that contradict themselves, depicting sorrow and exhaustion in vibrant, attractive color and lovingly painting scenes of escalating discord. Packer was born in Philadelphia in 1984 and received her BFA from the Tyler University School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2007.

Cullen Washington, Jr. holds an MFA from Tufts University / School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2009) and a BA from Louisiana State University (1994). Born in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1976, Washington incorporates found objects bearing evidence of southern culture and social memory into works combining and juxtaposing drawing, video, sculpture and photography. Drawing on a myriad of art-historical and pop culture references, Washington transforms everyday items into complex new cosmologies. Washington’s work has been included in exhibitions at the deCordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (Boston), The Rialto Art Center (Atlanta) and the CUE Art Foundation (New York).