Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center has announced its 2026 Artist-in-Residence cohort: Victoria Shen, Justin Allen, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Kabir Carter, and Nat Decker as the New Works AIR awardees, with Ka Baird and Maya Man receiving Special Project Awards, and Eden Girma named the 2026 Technology Immersion Program (TIP) recipient. The New York-based nonprofit’s residency runs January through December 2026, with development and production centered on a February start at its Technology, Engineering, Art and Music (T.E.A.M.) Lab.
What the residency actually provides
Selected artists get studio space at the T.E.A.M. Lab, technical assistance from an assigned engineer, and structured opportunities for project feedback, mentorship, and peer support within the cohort — a materially different offer than a stipend-only residency, since it puts specialized audio, video, and interactive-systems engineering support directly behind each artist’s project rather than leaving technical execution entirely to the artist. The program is open to individual working artists, with lead artists required to reside in the U.S., and this year’s application cycle closed with selections announced in late January.
The range of work the program is built for
Harvestworks structures the residency around a deliberately wide set of media: multichannel audio or video installations, live performances built on interactive systems and real-time processing, data visualization, AR/VR-platform work, recording and mastering of new musical or sound compositions, code-based and algorithmic media, and explorations in machine learning. That range shows up directly in this year’s cohort — Victoria Shen’s practice spans experimental sound and instrument-building, Shawné Michaelain Holloway works across video, sound, and net-art-adjacent digital media, and Kabir Carter’s work sits at the intersection of sound art and technology — giving a reasonably representative snapshot of where digital media art practice is concentrated heading into the back half of 2026.
Why a program like this matters for the wider scene
Residencies that pair real technical infrastructure with a defined production timeline — rather than open studio time alone — tend to produce work that pushes further technically than an artist could manage solo, simply because sound engineering, systems debugging, and hardware troubleshooting stop being the artist’s sole responsibility. For a scene where the gap between an ambitious concept and a technically executable interactive or multichannel piece is often the actual bottleneck, that kind of embedded technical support is arguably as valuable as the funding itself.