ARTIST IN RESIDENCE RECIPIENTS

2025- Miriam Padilla

Miriam is a physician, dancer, and community organizer with a deep commitment to cultural awareness, social justice, and healing through music and dance. As the Executive Director of the non profit organization Bomba Marilé, she has made it her mission to promote the preservation and appreciation of the Puerto Rican ancestral traditions of bomba. Miram uses bomba music, history, and dance as a tool for fostering an inclusive space in which individuals can connect with their heritage, heal through movement, and build solidarity. In every aspect of her work—whether in her medical practice or her artistic endeavors- she strives to create spaces where people of all backgrounds can come together, share stories, and empower one another. Miram believes that by nurturing cultural understanding, amplifying marginalized voices, and using the arts as a vehicle for social change, we can build more uplifting and connected communities.

As the executive director of Bomba Marilé, Miriam dances, sings, and drums bomba. Recently, she began writing bomba songs as a way to share bomba through the lens of living in Utah. For example, she helped write a bomba song with each member of the group, in which each person wrote one phrase about the mountains and what the surrounding landscape means to us, and her identity. Miriam has also written bomba love songs and songs of resistance and female empowerment. She would like to use the week there to write more bomba songs that she could later perform with her bomba group. She hopes to use the songs as a means to express herself and her unique experience as a queer indigenous Puerto Rican woman living in Utah. She has also recently started to use some of her songs in poetry competitions since song is poetry in harmony. Miriam wants to further lift up her talent as a writer and poet and to seek emotional well-being by expressing herself in word, especially acknowledging the stressful and anxiety-provoking times we are currently in.

2024- Mestre Jamaika (Mauro Romualdo)

Mestre Jamaika is an internationally recognized practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian art form of capoeira, and has engaged and positively impacted students and audiences of all ages and backgrounds for over 30 years. Born in the heart of Capoeira’s birthplace and his ancestral land, he’s passionate about honoring his roots by sharing Afro-Brazilian culture and strengthening the community through his work.

Mestre would like to use the time at Alta to explore how capoeira, an art form that was developed and cultivated outside in nature, and use it to reflect on our water, with the Wasatch mountains being the source. Our water crisis in Utah is one he cares deeply about since I’ve lived here for 25 years. My community in Brazil is also experiencing a water crisis that echoes Utah’s in some ways. His parents were born in “quilombos” (communities originating from settlements of Afro-Brazilians who were enslaved) where capoeira was formed. Mestre’s grandparents were farmers, and as a young child he often walked with his grandma to get water from the river. Over the years, their land has been stolen and exploited by a billion-dollar industry that uses destructive monoculture farming practices, polluting and exhausting our essential water sources. Mestre wants to highlight both of these crises and build awareness through his work, and his exploration of movement in nature at Alta can help him with that goal.

2022- Ty Nathan Clark

Ty Nathan Clark is an artist, writer, and award-winning film producer. His work is represented across the US from LA, SF, to Houston and NY. My uncle Conway “Jiggs” Pierson, the world-renowned Sculptor and Raku artist, impacted my drive and passion for the arts at an early age. Ty lives and works from his studio in Waco, Texas with his wife Mande and he is constantly engaged in the art scene on an international level, showing work and mentoring artists.

From his artist statement: “Life has a genesis and a resolution. Many of us struggle with an interpretation of the personal story we are creating. My work takes a critical view of the human memory. In my work, I deconstruct a collaboration of ideas and experiences that exist from our childhood to our adulthood.”