The Wanlass Artist in Residence is OXY ARTS' year-long residency program that allows an artist to investigate aspects of their practice and share it with the College and the community at large. The program encourages cross-campus collaboration and thoughtful sustained interaction between artists and students.
The Wanlass Artist in Residence Program is made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
2025/26 Wanlass Artist-in-Residence
Roksana Pirouzmand
Roksana Pirouzmand creates sculptural objects and installations that perform in tandem with the artist’s body. Her recent works deal particularly with diasporic memory and forms of care and violence. In Pirouzmand’s pieces, personal experiences are incorporated into installation systems, suggesting the possibility of transformation, deterioration, and movement through interactions between the artist and her work. Pirouzmand is partly driven by a desire to reflect on the conditions of her life as an immigrant, depicting intimate narratives of her experience as an Iranian woman living in the United States. The use of clay and water reflects on the gradual deterioration or perhaps the fluidity of family ties across diasporas. Her installations often involve mechanisms that animate objects through the pulsing presence of her body or sculptural works cast from either her body or those of her mother or grandmother, honoring the lives of the women who have preceded her. Pirouzmand creates conditions for her work to be in motion, colliding into narratives of exile, family bonds, generational trauma, and memorialization.
2024/25 Wanlass Artist-in-Residence
The Industry Opera
The Industry is an experimental company that expands the operatic form, bringing together interdisciplinary artists to create collaborative performances that engage the cultural landscape of Los Angeles. For the past 12 years The Industry has led the operatic, multidisciplinary, and public art fields by developing singular performances in unexpected places.
The Industry creates projects deeply connected to Los Angeles, prizing site-specific approaches that challenge the traditional relationship between the artist and the spectator and the relationship between the spectator and the community. Multiplicity becomes the company's most important characteristic: whether it’s the plurality of viewpoints in productions without a fixed perspective; or the variety of artists involved in a project, who maintain an independent artistic identity while strengthening the integrity of a team; or the cultural diversity of the artists bringing the work to life.
