The Maine Arts Commission’s Maine Artist Fellowship recognizes artistic excellence across the overall career of a Maine artist. These are merit based awards, not grants for specific projects, and are evaluated on the creativity, vision, and quality demonstrated in each applicant’s work samples and support materials. Fellowships are awarded solely on artistic excellence, with one artist selected in each discipline to form a cohort of six Maine Artist Fellows. To support an independent review process and avoid conflicts of interest, jurors for this program are selected from outside Maine. The Maine Artist Fellowship disciplines are Fine Craft, Literary Arts, Media Arts, Performing Arts, Traditional Arts, and Visual Arts.
Jim Macdonald’s marquetry compositions and wood art capture visual representations of ideas, memories, moments, personal truths, and revelations. With a reverence for trompe l'oeil, his work explores and expresses notions of elegance, balance, fairness of curve, visual weight, negative space, heft, intersections and connections. There is a long history in the embellishment of musical instruments, and Macdonald, who is also a musician, gives the world the most authentic form of self expression that he can muster when crafting his marquetry art guitars.
Mira Ptacin is a first-generation proud daughter of a Polish immigrant, a lineage that shapes her work as a narrative journalist, essayist, and memoirist. Her projects move through the sublime and the transformational, driven by a devotion to telling deeply human stories that challenge prevailing ideas about equity, inclusion, compassion, responsibility, and the systems that govern our lives in Maine and beyond. With an unwavering commitment to activism, she uncovers the complexities behind headlines and amplifies voices often overlooked by mainstream narratives, always in pursuit of justice and transcendence. Mira reportage ranges from the lives of incarcerated women to rural Maine feminist mystics to neo-Nazis and the townsfolk who rid their community of them. With the support of the Maine Arts Commission, she continues to research, report, and tell the in-depth true stories of real Mainers, the salt of the earth. Ptacin serves on the board of Reentry Sisters, Maine-based nonprofit that supports women transitioning from incarceration back into society, offering community, resources, education, and radical amounts of practical care.
Bethany Engstrom’s creative practice is embedded in a curiosity and a questioning of the spaces we encounter every day, both physical and temporal and the states of being and experiences they evoke; often resulting in anxieties produced by current social and environmental concerns. Mining sources including philosophy, sociology, psychology, pop culture, among others, she aims to connect through these investigations. Currently, her work has focused on time, place, labor, care, and motherhood, merging digital and traditional media. Examining the overlapping work of motherhood and art-making, her practice uses durational tasks with materials equal in weight to her young daughter as metaphors for care and responsibility. The settings of the videos look to both the natural and constructed landscapes as a means to interact with and reflect on both, culminating in new considerations of how video is viewed and expanding on methods of presentation.
Kate believes the creative impulse belongs to everyone and that storytelling is at the heart of who we are. She is inspired by theatre as a collaborative craft to celebrate community, deepen belonging, and rediscover place. Kate creates vivid, intimate worlds for our shared experience of the transformative and profound– a poetic realm for the collective reckoning of who we are and who we could be.
Her work leans into the mythic, epic, and bold with a deft simplicity and unabashed theatricality. She is drawn to stories and characters historically kept in the shadows; illuminating their depths in spare, embodied, and lyrical ways. Kate meets every project as a creative collaborator in the spirit of both rigor and play, driven by a boundless curiosity for the human condition and our connection to the natural world.
Born in Phnom Penh in 1979, Sokhoeun Sok’s love of dance began at an earlyage. As a child in Cambodia, she studied at one of the country’s leading dance schools, the Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh, where her aunt was an instructor. With over 36 years of experience in Cambodian dance, Sokhoeun has devoted her life to preserving and sharing this beautiful tradition.
Lihua grew up in a small, rural village in Taiwan where her parents were farmers and two of her grandparents were herbalist healers and one a midwife. As a child she witnessed the respect her parents had for their land and the noble dedication, reverence and care her grandparents shared with her village. Those ideals are manifest in her global perspective as well as in her installations, performances and sculptures. Working with natural, organic, biodegradable and recyclable materials Lihua creates sculpture, and site-specific installations that are often combined with performance. She has recently moved to Midcoast Maine, after living in Solon, Maine for over 20 years and is inspired daily by the natural beauty, the dynamic seasonal changes and the ingenuity, integrity and warmth of people in Maine. Her art acknowledges and engages the surroundings, whether it is a grove of Red Pine or a museum gallery, the space is the focal point. Lihua’s goal in all of her works is to create an open space for reflection and participation, and to remind us of the better angels that we all have in common.