Our Artists
Since its inception, Jentel has made awards to over 1,500 creatives.
Many alumni have produced work during residency that subsequently received national recognition. Below are a selection of featured Jentel Alumni and their recent activities.
FEATURED ARTISTAusten Camille
Artist StatementAusten Camille is a Canadian-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, builder and gardener. Camille primarily makes site-responsive public work that aims to both build relationships with the local environment, as well as call attention to the relationships that already exist within that environment.
Camille is currently working on her first full-length manuscript: creative nonfiction about soil, land stewardship and rural culture on the upper Eastern Shore of Maryland. The poems, essays and artworks are based on conversations held with a range of land stewards over the course of a year. Alongside this project, Camille is organizing panels, exhibitions, walks, workshops and a farm dinner in order to facilitate community around the shared issue of reliance on healthy soils.
Camille’s work has been commissioned and exhibited in a diverse range of landscapes, from the northern Wyoming rivers to the high desert of eastern Oregon, from the rolling farmland in southern Wisconsin to the tidal estuary marshes along the Hudson River. In 2025, Camille was a keynote poet at the Future Harvest Farming into the Future conference in Silver Spring MD; and presented work at both the More-Than-Human-Rights conference in NY and the Epicenter Rural Summit in Green River, UT. Camille received their MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Temple University) in 2020.
FEATURED ARTISTMaryLouise Patterson
Artist StatementI am the first African American to graduate from a medical school in Moscow, USSR. The year was 1968. The school, Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. I entered it in1960 when it was inaugurated by the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Its mission was to train professionals from colonized and industrially underdeveloped countries. We were 500 students from all over the global South.
My experience there still raises eyebrows, still generates questions and a curiosity in who I am.
“On the Menu Now” is the working title of my memoir. Its purpose is to capture the extraordinary eight years I was there as an emerging adult in a society that espoused and was trying to establish itself around an entirely new and different set of principles and values than those that dominated life everywhere else.
I have lived the last half of the 20th Century and the first quarter of the 21st. The perspective I have gleaned from my parents to my time in Lumumba University’s international world plus all the other places it opened doors to, all the people I met and historic moments and battles I have engaged in, might be helpful in brainstorming new ideas, answers and solutions to the ominous and existential challenges confronting us today. It is my hope that that perspective will add to a better understanding of ourselves, bring us closer to a peaceful and just world and healthy planet for ALL the children and grandchildren to come.
Letters from Langston:
From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond
(2016)
by Langston Hughes (Author), Evelyn Louise Crawford (Editor), MaryLouise Patterson (Editor), Robin D.G. Kelley
JENTEL ALUMNI
We want to feature you!
Jentel enjoys seeing your exhibition announcements, new publishings, awards, and much more. We also enjoy sharing our alumni’s work on our website and social media.
For more information please reach out to alumni@jentelarts.org.
Jentel Artist Residency + YouTube
Find Jentel Artist Residency on YouTube and subscribe to our channel to watch recordings of all Jentel Presents monthly presentations, view studio tours from resident artists, and more.
