Eliot Kim is queer Korean-American interdisciplinary artist and ceramicist living and working in Chicago, IL. Kim has curated shows including Dovetail and Test Case. His work has been exhibited in ARC Gallery and Gallery 1922. From Iowa City, Iowa, he learned his love of bird watching, one of several influences for his animal sculptures. Primarily working in clay and wood, Kim makes sculptures of animals that reflect and embody his childhood home and experiences growing up with Korean immigrant parents. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Incoming Artists-In-Residence 2026-27
Eliot Kim (He/Him/They/Them)
CERAMICS
Henry Evan Thomas (He/Him)
CERAMICS
Henry Evan Thomas (b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator from Plano, Texas. He has graduated from the University of North Texas with a B.F.A in Art Education and a B.F.A. in Studio art with a Concentration in Ceramics, Drawing & Painting, and Sculpture with a minor in Art History in 2022 and recently graduated from Georgia State University with his M.F.A in Ceramics. Aside from his studies, Thomas has experience teaching art in K-12 classrooms, community spaces, and collegiate-level courses.
Henry Evan Thomas has been actively showing his work in juried and invited shows around the country, including Indianapolis Art Center’s Modern Craft 2022 Exhibition, NCECA’S Juried Student Show alongside the 2023 NCECA Conference CURRENT, and Clay Center of New Orleans’s Clay: A Southern Census, among others.
Hanako O'Leary (She/Her)
CERAMICS
Hanako O’Leary is a craft based sculptor and installation artist. She was born and raised by her Japanese mother and North American father in the Midwest. She grew up speaking Japanese at home, but English in school and everywhere else. This deeply influenced her spiritual beliefs, artistic voice, and feminine ideals. Through hand made objects, installations, and storytelling, Hanako explores this relationship with her matriarchal lineage and the complexities of feminine love, sexuality, and power.
Using clay as her primary medium, Hanako has built and exhibited her work in Seattle since 2012. She has been awarded competitive Artist in Residence and lecturer positions at Pottery Northwest and South Seattle College where she regularly teaches classes and workshops. Her major artistic accomplishments include solo shows in galleries such as King Street Station, Frye Art Museum and Gallery 4Culture. Major awards include the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture City Artist Grant, Bernie Funk Fellowship, Robert B. McMillen Grant, Artist Trust Fellowship, and Neddy Artist Award in Open Medium to name a few. Hanako is excited to come back to her hometown of Chicago where she will be part of Lillstreet’s 2026- 2027 Ceramics AIR cohort.
Mal Dadivas (They/Them/He/Him)
METALSMITHING & JEWELRY
Mal Dadivas is a disabled queer trans non-binary metalsmith and jewelry maker originally from Houston, Texas. They received their bachelor’s in studio art with a concentration in metalsmithing and jewelry and a minor in art history, graduating manga cum laude. Their work has been featured in faculty-led exhibitions, as well as national exhibitions such as [queerphobia] Volume. 4 virtual gallery, and Washington Ensemble Theater: Queer Joy Gallery.
The overarching theme throughout Mal’s creative work is the swirling nature of sexual experience, gender, the binary, and its interaction with the LGBTQIA+ community. His work engages the ideas of sex contraceptives, censorship, liminal visual dysphoria, and the struggle towards safe sex in an overtly conservative state. His completed artworks provide a commercialized plastic visual look in contrast with a heavy hand in realized concepts.
Janice Minjin Yang (She/Her)
DRAWING & PAINTING
Janice Yang is a figurative painter whose work is shaped by her upbringing in South Korea and her relocation to the United States in late adolescence. Her practice emerges from this movement between cultures and engages questions of migration, identity, labor, memory, and displacement.
Drawing on symbolic elements from Korean art, Yang creates liminal, illusionistic spaces that exist between places and states of belonging. Through layered surfaces and recurring motifs, her paintings connect everyday labor with shifting ideas of home. Her figures and interior scenes reflect personal memory as well as experiences of cultural transformation.
Yang earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a master’s degree in education from Portland State University and received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, after studying at ArtCenter College of Design. Janice was awarded the Roger Brown and George Veronda Scholarship at SAIC in 2026. She was selected for the Golden Artist Colors Educator Residency in 2021. Her work has been exhibited in New York, London, Chicago, Seattle, Seoul, and Portland.
Cherin Kim (She/Her)
TEXTILES
Cherin Kim is a fiber artist based in Chicago, IL. Her textile portraits investigate archived memory as a vessel for identity construction through the reproduction of personal and public historical documents. Drawing on her upbringing as a Korean born and raised in Japan, her work raises questions about how diasporic individuals form cultural identities in relation to fractured conceptions of “home.”
Kim holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio with a concentration in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2026 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Freeman’s Auctions, Bridgeport Art Center, Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), and DeVos Place (Grand Rapids, MI), among others. She has presented solo exhibitions at the CICA Museum (Gimpo, South Korea), SAIC INCUBATOR, and Art City (Chicago, IL).
Yue Xu (She/Her/They/Them)
PRINTMAKING, BOOK ARTS & DIGITAL
Yue Xu (b. 1995, Guangzhou) is a Chicago-based artist. Xu earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 and her BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, print-based processes, and artists’ books, Xu’s practice draws attention to the overlooked materials, quiet systems, and spatial conditions that shape everyday life. Through shifts in scale, context, and material condition, her works transform fragments—paper, domestic objects, architectural traces, and ordinary encounters—into sites of emotional and spatial inquiry. Combining fragile materials, repetitive gestures, and site-responsive installation, Xu’s practice traces how visibility, belonging, and survival are negotiated through the built environment and daily experience. Her work has been exhibited at Compound Yellow, by bye Pilsen, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, RUSCHMAN Gallery, 6018|North, The Plan, Chicago Art Department, Terrain Biennial, Mana Contemporary, 062, and Comfort Station. She has also collaborated on public-facing projects with Jess Bass and Selina Trepp.
