Fireline Fellows | 2024
The Spring Creek Project is pleased to announce that nine artists, writers, and musicians were awarded Fireline Fellowships in spring 2024. They join an interdisciplinary community exploring issues connected with wildfire and regeneration in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. In 2026, the public will be invited to engage with new works inspired by their experiences. Learn more about the program here.
Learn More About the Fellows
Madison Bacon lives life with one foot in the conservation world and one foot in the art world. To them, it feels like two legs moving the same body. They’ve worked for conservation corps, the Forest Service and the National Park Service on a variety of projects including invasive species removal, biological monitoring, trail building and wildland firefighting. These roles have both connected them with purpose and led to new knowledge about gender and the body’s capabilities. Influenced by their work as a conservationist, Bacon’s art practice moves fluidly between painting, writing, animation, and, most passionately, comic-making. Their graphic narratives do not merely document nature, but also draw connections between nature and gender, the environment and public health, and climate change and what humans deem valuable.
Bacon holds a BFA in Fine Art from University of Delaware, and after years traveling the country for work, is now primarily based in Oregon. They have received support from numerous residencies, including Olympic National Park’s Terminus Project, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and PLAYA’s Wildfire + Water: Artists and Scientists Collaborating for Change.
Robin Lee Carlson is an author and natural science illustrator, building careful observation of the natural world into deeper commentary on ecology and climate change. Her work centers on field sketching ecoreportage, living documentation of the ever-accelerating transformation of ecosystems by human activity. Her first book, The Cold Canyon Fire Journals, was published in 2022 by Heyday and her work has also appeared in The Common, the literary journal of Amherst College, and in Arnoldia, the magazine of the Harvard University Arboretum. She teaches workshops that combine drawing, painting, and natural science up and down the Pacific Coast as well as online.
Michael Fischer is Senior Program Manager of the University of Chicago's Program in Creative Writing. He also conducts writing and storytelling workshops for various organizations, including AIDS Foundation Chicago and the Odyssey Project. Michael is a fellow of the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Right of Return USA, and Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice. His nonfiction—which has won the National Systems-Impacted Writers' Contest, been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and been cited as notable in Best American Essays, among other honors—appears in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
A Moth StorySLAM winner, Michael tells stories on Moth Mainstages across the US and abroad, and has been featured on programs like Modern Love: The Podcast, Ear Hustle, the Outside Magazine Podcast, and The Moth Radio Hour. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a Grauman Fellowship.
Perri Lynch Howard is a socially engaged artist working in painting, drawing, installation, and sound. Her work evokes a world in flux due to the profound impacts of climate change. Her creative practice is rooted in "place-based listening," a deep attentiveness to the passage of sound, light, and signal through vulnerable landscapes—a phenomenology of place. The resulting visual artworks and sound installations are testaments to nature's resilience. They are chronicles of both extinction's grief and the tenacious spirit of adaptation.
From her studio in the tiny hamlet of Twisp, WA, Howard’s art has a global reach through sound installations and visual art exhibitions in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, and as a Fulbright Scholar in South India. She has received support from numerous granting agencies and residencies including the Montello Foundation, PLAYA, McMillen Foundation, Puffin Foundation, 4Culture, Artist Trust, MadArt, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Willapa Bay AiR, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Arctic Circle Residency Program. Her work is represented by Smith & Vallee Gallery and the Seattle Art Museum Gallery.
Emily Loughlin is a sculptor and land artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Working with ceramics, textile, and plant matter, her work uses the language of maps and abstraction to investigate the intersection of biology and geology and their symbiotic relationships across deep time. Emily is represented by Amos Eno Gallery and Armature Projects, and has completed residencies with Keepsake Gallery and with Friends of Pando, where she collaborated with scientists and researchers to build a body of work inspired by the world's largest tree.
Catie Michel is an artist, scientific illustrator, and muralist guided by collaborative visual storytelling and our connection to the natural world. Her background in field research and science communication grounds her creative work in attention, observation, and inquiry. As a devoted naturalist, Catie’s creative process begins the moment she catches a rare glimpse into a vernal pool or hears the competing calls of owls at night. Catie examines themes of connection (human/more-than-human), access, advocacy, and the intersection of science and art. She finds great community in shared curiosity. Cultivating safe spaces through creative placemaking, storytelling, and public art is her passion. Catie explores what, in nature, is capturing our attention and what, in us, is looking back.
Scott Ordway is an American composer and multimedia artist whose works have been called “exquisite” (New York Times), “hypnotic” (BBC), and “a marvel” (Philadelphia Inquirer). His music and multimedia projects are presented on major concert stages around the world including the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Beijing Modern, and Aspen Music Festivals. In 2023, he presented his first solo photography exhibition at the Kunstverein Familie Montez in Frankfurt am Main, with an upcoming solo show in 2025 at Boston’s Laconia Gallery.
Drawing on a deep interest in literature, languages, and the humanities, Ordway often fuses his music with text, video, and photography to explore an array of contemporary themes including ecology, religion and philosophy, and landscapes and cultures of the American West. His works have been supported by awards, residencies, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Music Center, American Composers Forum, American Opera Projects, and the Copland House, among others. Ordway is Associate Professor, Head of Music Composition, and Director of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University, where he teaches courses on music, landscape, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) is a poet, wood-firing potter and land steward who recently made her way back to Virginia where her grandmother raised her. She is based in Charlottesville, where she writes about shade. She is the 2024 New City Arts Guest Curator, The Fralin Museum of Art Writer’s Eye Fellow, and serves as Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. MaKshya was a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow and New City Arts’ 2022-23 Research Residency Artist-in-Residence, which culminated in her first solo poetry installation, Shade is a place. She has received support as a Fulbright Scholar as well as from Community of Writers, Tin House, and Roots.Wounds.Words, Inc.
Tolbert’s work has been featured in Emergence Magazine, Artpapers, Gastronomica, Cake Zine, Odd Apples, and Queer Poem-a-Day and new work is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Nightboat Books, and Campfire Stories: Volume III. MaKshya holds degrees from the University of Virginia (‘24), University of Gastronomic Sciences (‘21), and Stanford University (‘15). She spent the last decade providing funding, facilitation, technical assistance, and capacity-building toward livable, community-controlled food systems. In her free time, she is elsewhere, where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'
Riley Yuan is a Chinese-American writer and photographer, and currently one of six inaugural Murrow Fellows placed in local newsrooms around Washington state. He covers an environmental beat for The Chinook Observer throughout Pacific County, with a focus on enterprise storytelling.
Yuan turns to journalism after spending two seasons on hotshot crews with the U.S. Forest Service. Previously he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Timor, Indonesia, and as a high school English teacher in Hawaii and Vermont. A New England native, Yuan holds a BS in Biology from Cornell University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Oregon State University.