THE ROCKING S ART RANCH: artist studios and an artist residency

The Rocking S Art Ranch welcomes summer artists in residence: Eduardo Orea, Kristen Miologos, Morgan Leigh, Devin Pope, Camille Misty, and Yezmin Villareal

applications for 2026 are closed. Occasionally we have cancellations which will be posted here and on our Instagram page!

Dylan Fitzgibbons grew up in Chaska, Minnesota, where he lived for 27 years of his life. In that time, Dylan attended Minnesota State University, Mankato where he received his bachelors of science in psychology and his bachelors of fine arts in ceramics studio art. During Dylan’s undergrad, he participated in the Undergraduate Research Center Symposium, which allowed him to research electro copper plating sciences and techniques that would later be applied to his ceramic works. Dylan received the “Outstanding Presentation Award” for his research. Dylan was accepted to Arizona State University in the fall semester of 2020 with a Teaching Assistantship offer and is now investigating different technologies and sciences that could be incorporated with his ceramic works. Currently, he is focused on Arduino programming, animation, copper electroplating, and simple electronic circuitry.

Jen Urso (b. 1997) Jen will be using the quiet space at Rocking S Art Ranch to focus on research and writing related to her long-term project “Leaving Land to Itself.” This project disrupts habits of landscape management, looking to our connection with our environment and the slow processes of soils, plants, insects, wildlife and ourselves.

Bio: Jen Urso is a multidisciplinary artist creating works that utilize public interventions, performance, drawing, mapping and technology to honor a sensitive approach to our environment and community that respects the unseen and unspoken. Her work typically takes place in the public via occupation, immersion and discovery. Jen has exhibited and performed across the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, receiving numerous grants and awards. She is a runner, gardener, thinker and questioner who also creates hand-drawn maps for her business Steady Hand Maps. Jen received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art from Carnegie Mellon University. She lives and works in Phoenix, AZ. 

Paul Elliott is a Tucson based artist whose creative exploration is based in observation. He has
worked in every medium in an attempt to crack narrative codes and refresh pop culture. Paul
has worked as a photographer, seamstress, stagehand, denim expert, barista, videographer,
archivist, server, disc jockey, illegal bartender, ice cream scooper, book goon, fashion designer,
shop girl, marketing assistant, intern, visual merchandiser, potter, illustrator, purveyor of film,
dancer, sandwich artist and much, much more! 

Tyler Grimes

Sometimes under the moniker Grimeography, Tyler J. Grimes’ (b. 1994 in Wilmington, DE) multimodal works ponder paradoxes in order to provoke reconsiderations of one’s perception of (and purpose in) reality. His work spans video installation, new media, photography, performance, and ecologically-engaged art projects. Synthesizing insights from various schools of thought allows his research to intersect media-ecology, the cognitive sciences, and mindfulness-awareness practices. 
 
Grimes has a background in visual communications, which is supplemented by a Photographic and Electronic Media MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been awarded research grants, admittance into artists residencies, has been exhibited internationally, and incorporated into award-winning film productions. His writings and pedagogy place him in positions where he regularly lectures on media/communication theory, speculative philosophies, production techniques, and aesthetics. He is currently engaged in doctoral studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

As a queer person I see how hypocrisy, bigotry and censorship has made life frightening and shameful for my community, especially for younger people. While the LGBTQI+ community makes significant strides in terms of societal acceptance, political fear-mongering attempts to take away fundamental rights. As an older, queer person, I’ve seen this pattern of scapegoating and finger-pointing at our community so often before.

Informed by the intersection of a complicated upbringing. My Catholic school-life was immersed with rituals, confessionals, civility, and verbal abuse. Juxtaposed with a loving home-life that was secretive, sad, chaotic, and violent. It seemed that danger was always around the corner. I compare my childhood home life to the current political landscape we find ourselves in.

In the work I do, I navigate the beauty of ritual with the hopelessness of penance. Parochial and political, my work offers both a celebration of sadness and a hopeful triumph over it. In a seemingly aggressive world, I hope to find a place of comfort and connection and share it with, not only my community, but with the community at large.

Linda VuorentivaA member of the jury which evaluated my university work before graduation gave me this advice: “never stop telling stories”. I’ve taken that advice to heart and am always looking for new ways to build narratives in my art. I’ve made work for a variety of fields, including comics, animation, new media, and video games.

I draw inspiration from both intangible and real-world sources, and often the two are woven together. I often explore facets of my own psyche as well as the universal human experience. Human rights, environmental issues, and other social causes are also incredibly important to me, and my explorations of fantasy, sci-fi, myth, and folklore often include a layer of social commentary. I may tell a story about witches in a high fantasy setting, but those witches will be trying to dismantle a fascist government. I may illustrate notable women from Greek myths, but their stories will be viewed and interpreted through a feminist lens.

SUMMER 2025 artist in residents

José Eduardo Orea Domínguez DMA

I am a Mexican composer, theorist, and clarinetist. I hold a degree in clarinet performance from the Instituto Superior de Música del Estado de Veracruz, a double degree in music theory and composition from the University of New Mexico (UNM), and a master’s degree with a focus on advanced theory and composition from UNM. I recently obtained my doctorate degree in Music Composition with Digital Media at Arizona State University.

My top earned awards include: first place within the National Competition of Musical Interpretation, (Mexico 2013). First prize in the contest “Young Composers” launched by the Xalapa Symphony Orchestra (Mexico 2019). First prize in the Scott Wilkinson Composition Competition (2021). First prize within the XI ECI Encuentro entre Compositores e Instrumentistas at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata in Argentina (2022). I was chosen as one of only eight Latin-American composers for the residence Germina.Cciones 2022 (Chile), where I wrote a piece for the renowned Mexican ensemble Trio Siqueiros. Most recently, I was awarded the Composer-in-Residence position at ASU Wind Symphony & Symphony Orchestra (2023-2024). My music has been played widely across Mexico and the United States, with an expansion to latitudes such as Chile, Argentina, and Spain.

I continue to work on developing theoretical-experimental research, which consists of the exploration of Machine Learning models for spatial audio distributions within VR/XR tridimensional score representations, as well as an experiment in perceptual/cognitive structures for semantic classification systems. One of my main goals is to shine light on the cognitive implications of multitemporal and non-linear musical trajectories.

Devin Pope

I’m a writer living in Tempe, AZ, examining food and land, and how it’s connected to climate, labor, and poverty. My background is in journalism and I’ve worked as a freelance writer and editor since 2014. I run a copywriting and editing studio called Kindred Word, I make zines and linocut illustrations, and my writing has appeared in Orion, BOMB, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. You can find my newsletter, The Good Enough Weekly, at DKP.NEWS. During my time at Rocking S Art Ranch I’ll be finishing a proposal for a narrative nonfiction book about Arizona’s food system, climate change, and social justice. The book grew out of my newsletter and my research into the Sonoran desert’s biodiversity.

Anno Schreier has the theatrical instinct of Richard Strauss: the music of the composer in his mid-thirties possesses an enormous power of imagination, seductive sensuality and fantastic diversity (Stefan Ender commented on the premiere of the opera Hamlet in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna in September 2016) 

Born in Aachen in 1979, Anno Schreier has chiefly gained his reputation as an opera composer. By the premiere of the opera Kein Ort. Nirgends based on a novel by Christa Wolf in Mainz in 2006, he had already developed an individual music theatre style in which he blended and juxtaposed heterogenic set pieces and quasi quotations with a multitude of stylistics, frequently alienated with an ironic or grotesque touch. Schreier continued to develop this approach in tragic and comic works and music theatre works for young people, for example in the chamber opera Mörder Kaspar Brand (2011, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf), the musical comedy with an Arctic theme Prinzessin im Eis (2013, Theater Aachen) and Schade, dass sie eine Hure war (2019, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf). He has produced an increasingly complex and yet always sensually experienceable and dramatically effective conglomerate of highly diverse musical forms with a constant juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy and earnestness and entertainment. In contrast, he has also created works such as Die Stadt der Blinden (2011, Opernhaus Zürich) and Hamlet (2016, Theater an der Wien) which possess a more homogenous musical language with only occasional ‘sprinklings’ of allusions. In 2019, Schreier set the famous fantasy story The Wizard of Oz, based on the novel by Lyman Frank Baum, to music as a family opera of the same name for the Aachen Theatre. His most recent opera Turing (2022, Nuremberg Opera), on the other hand, is based on historical events and dedicated to the life of the famous scientist Alan Turing.

Frequently, Schreier’s purely instrumental works also display literary influences and other non-musical concepts. The cello concerto On A Long Strand first performed in 2015 by Julian Steckel with the Badische Staatskapelle was inspired by a poem by the Irish lyrical poet Seamus Heaney. The dialogue between the soloist and orchestra evokes a walking tour along North European coastal landscapes, also integrating elements from traditional Irish music. 

In his lieder, Schreier has made settings of texts by Eichendorff, Heine und Morgenstern as well as lyrical poetry from earlier periods and the contemporary era. In his ten-movement cycle Fuoco e lagrime for soprano and piano (also in a version for soprano and ensemble) he combines poems and fragments by Michelangelo with new texts by Marcel Beyer, thereby creating a dialogue between the Italian and the German language and between the Renaissance and the present day. In 2019, Schreier composed two large-scale vocal works: for the Kölner Philharmonie he wrote Nils Holgerssons wunderbare Reise for 2 actors, children’s choir and orchestra, an adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s famous novel. While based on texts from the Hindu scripture Rigveda, Der Anfang for choir and orchestra also establishes a connection to Schiller’s Ode to Joy through the question about a creator and is composed as a prologue for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The premiere with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra under Christopher Ward took place on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Sinfonischer Chor Aachen.

Since around 2017, Anno Schreier has combined a musical texture reduced to only a few elements with influences from minimal music and pop music, for example in the compositions Atlantis (2018) for ensemble, Kältefuchs (2019) based on a poem by Marcel Beyer and Zwei Studien zu einer Landschaft (2019) for violoncello and piano. 

Schreier received tuition in piano, violin, organ and music theory at an early age. He studied composition with Manfred Trojahn at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf before continuing his studies at the Royal College of Music in London. From 2005 to 2007, he studied with Hans-Jürgen von Bose as a master student at the Hochschule für Musik and Theater in Munich. Since 2008, he has taught music theory at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. 

Schreier has worked with renowned orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestre National de Belgique, the Brussels Philharmonic, the Sinfonieorchester Aachen, the RSO Vienna, the Ensemble Modern and the Armida Quartet. He was “Composer for Heidelberg” during the season 2009/10. 

Schreier has been the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships awarded by institutions including the German National Academic Foundation, the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the regional capital Munich, the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Wilfried Steinbrenner Foundation and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2010, Schreier received a scholarship from the German Academy in Rome in the Villa Massimo and in 2012 the Young Artist Award from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2016, he was received into the “Young Academy” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and was awarded the German Music Author Prize in the category “music theatre” in March 2017. 

www.annoschreier.deMORGAN LEIGH

KRISTEN MIOLOGOS

YEZMIN VILLEREAL