Past Fellows: Projects & Feedback

Below is a selection of works from past Fellows, who have shared about their experience in the program, and the effects the program has continued to have in their lives.

CHELSEA AMATO (2017-2018)

I didn't enter the program with a plan or goal. Once I was at Succurro, I was able to slow down and regulate my nervous system, allowing creativity to flow. It may not look like much, but the sketches and writings pushed me to explore new concepts and realms that I continue to develop and put into practice. Through SourcePoint meditations, I gain new insights that inform my current work.

I am an artist and SourcePoint practitioner residing in Durham NC. I make herbal body oils (first explored at Succurro) that help to calm the nervous system. I create embroideries or "protest pieces" with social initiatives. I also make botanical collages, many inspired by my time at Succurro. Through my work my goal is to serve the collective. One idea that was born out of the program was to have a recurring arts gathering for folks to work on their craft and exchange ideas. These gatherings started out being twice a year, but I now host them every week. After the program I reworked my website to have a more holistic and encompassing offering, what I call "The Chelsea Rose Universe.”

LAUREN GEYMAN (2019-2020)

I began my time as a Succurro Fellow along the same time frame that I began my private practice as a naturopathic doctor. I was a new practitioner, living in a new city, and beginning a business for the first time. The fellowship helped me rise to the occasion of being a doctor (a doctor who also has permission to be an artist!). I knew when I applied to be a Succurro fellow that I wanted my "project" to be my naturopathic practice itself - at the time I was a recent grad full of information - but I had no patients, no workspace, no funds nor any other tangible elements of a medical practice. These days I am seeing patients several times a week in Brooklyn and online through my naturopathic practice, @umbel_health, which continues to grow at an organic pace I've learned to trust. I continue getting sessions through Succurro (and visit when I can!) but have also integrated the archetypes of SourcePoint and other modalities into my life, in my own way.

ALEX GOLDBERG (2018-2019)

I joined the 2018-2019 fellowship cohort with an understanding that my art creation process had self healing capacities and an interest in further developing pedagogy and practices that could aid others in utilizing these structures to become an agent of their own healing. My fellowship project was an investigation in utilizing process oriented making as a structure to explore the capacity for spontaneous action to activate collective harmony. The Succurro community has become an integral part of my life and practice, a home away from home, in which I study SourcePoint, Breakthrough, am a member of The Succurro Collaborative, and a facilitator of the newest iteration of the fellowship. I also currently work with other communities to continue to explore the relationship between creative practice and health as a professor at Pratt Institute, by facilitating workshops in my studio in Gowanus, and with individual clients.

MAGGIE HERSKOVITS (2019-2020)

The Fellowship freed me from my beliefs that artistic success is based on money earned from creative projects as well as the quantity produced. Once unbound from those ideas, I could see that, for me, being an artist is actually the creative way I live my life in order to keep in true alignment with my values. In that way, the program allowed me to sink into the role of Artist. Since then I have been practicing opening up to trust, in this life and my own intuition. Which, in the hilarious cycle of life, has brought on more money making opportunities making and teaching the art I love.

The project I began in fellowship is called 'Being of Place' and the result will be limited copies of a handmade book compiled of answers from survey questions I sent to folks about the place they live. Also included will be those same questions answered by the plants and animals that inhabit those places, written by me in their voice. A reflection meditation on sense of place and community for all involved, reader included.

Right now, I am about to complete the rough draft of a manuscript for a book to be published by Microcosm Publishing, ETA June 2024, tentatively titled 'An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Herbs and Trees in Your Path'. I lead Urban Plant Walks in partnership with a local apothecary and offer workshops on zine making and botanical storytelling. I am also working towards creating an equal partnership with my husband in raising our curious toddler in this hectic world.

NICA RABINOWITZ (2016-2019)

I'm an educator, community organizer, artist and former Succurro fellow. My practice is rooted in farming and textile systems – creating cloth that heals in community with the plants, animals and microbes that grow around me. My journey as a Succurro fellow aligned with the start of the always shifting and evolving @fiberhousecollective. My time as a fellow, and the modalities we explored, impact not only my personal practice as an artist and educator but by extension the practice and experience of the participants in our programs and the students that move through my classroom.

My final project was an eight sided structure and group movement and felting experience. We are now about to raise a fully formed and reimagined version of this structure to act as our studio and classroom on our site in the blue ridge mountains, insulated with local wool.

LINH MY TRUONG (2018-2019)

The Fellowship provided me with a community of other creatives who inspired me, encouraged me, and kept me accountable in my art practice as I tried to incorporate technology into my art for the first time. Being a part of the Succurro Festival was a magical experience, and it allowed the time and space for me to display my work in a welcoming and open-minded setting. My fellowship project, Winter Circle, is an interactive installation with suminagashi videos projection mapped onto quilted silk. Touching three separate embroidered conductive thread segments activates different video effects and sounds, creating a constantly evolving and never repeating video collage.I have since continued to move towards an art practice that combines technology with textile techniques, and it is also something I now teach to adults and youth as well. I am currently working on another interactive installation revolving around my family's migration from Vietnam to America.