SPACES  |  April 17, 2026

SPACES Announces Eight Artists for Inaugural Echo Artist Residency Program in 2027

(Cleveland, OH) — April 17, 2026 —SPACES is honored to announce the inaugural artists-in-residence of the 2027 Echo Residency program. After a competitive selection process completed by celebrated artists and curators Anna Arnold, Leila Khoury, Thea Spittle, and Antwoine Washington, the committee awarded 8 artists with the residency. The 4 regional Echo artists are: Hannah Bates, CHIMI, Charles H. Lee III, and Ebrahim Poustinchi. The 4 non-regional Echo artists are: Andrew Ina, Jason Lord, Jacoub Reyes and moira williams. Each quarter, one regional and one non-regional Echo artist will complete a residency and exhibition at SPACES, forming a peer cohort that encourages the exchange of ideas, techniques, and networks.

The selection committee was especially impressed with the exceptional quality of work by the awarded artists, and with their regionally and site-specific proposals for projects that respond to societal tensions, erased histories, and ecological research. Additionally, the selected artists demonstrate a commitment to expanding their artistic practice through access to SPACES’ available technology, facilities and community partnerships. These artists authentically embrace SPACES’ mission to create radical new work that challenges and deepens our understanding of the world.

About the regional Echo Artists-in-Residence

Hannah Bates (she/her) is an artist based in Cleveland, OH. She received her MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA in Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art & Design. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Summit Art Space (Akron), Underscore (Milwaukee), Sculpture Space (Cleveland), and Waterloo Arts Gallery (Cleveland), and in group exhibitions at AUTOMAT (Philadelphia), Heaven Gallery (Chicago), and Dream Clinic (Columbus). Bates has participated in residencies at Sculpture Space, ChaNorth, and ACRE, and is the recipient of a Satellite Fund Grant from SPACES. She is a founding member of Vessel City, an artist-run studio and exhibition space in Cleveland.

CHIMI (she/her) is a Nigerian interdisciplinary artist working within the realms of sound, performance, installation, and visual art. She inspects the spiritual and psychological legacies of tribes, communities, rest, inheritance, and transcendence on the internal and the external body. She imagines her work as a living act of remembrance. Being a Nigerian born artist living in Northeast Ohio for the past 18 years, she draws from nostalgia and ancestral knowledge of patterns, rhythm, communal ritual, and learned traditions to breathe life into diverse subject matters. Her installations and performances have been exhibited and presented at Spaces Gallery, Waterloo Arts, Grace Exhibition Space, Harlan Levey Projects, New York Live Arts, and Gallery Papilon. CHIMI has been a trusted collaborator with the Bessie award winning choreographer, Symara Saraiover, most recently for the world premiere of Sarai's full length dance theater piece, “Angelic Architectures” (April 17-25) at Abrons Art Center (NY, NY).

Charles H. Lee III (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates how Black families document, preserve, and transmit history through the objects and images they choose to keep. Working across photography, installation, assemblage, collage, and video, his work engages questions of land, labor, migration, and what freedom has meant across generations of Black American life, treating the archive as a living collaborator rather than a static record. Lee has presented solo exhibitions at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and SF Camerawork, and group exhibitions at Berggruen Gallery, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Transformer Station, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Casemore Gallery among others. He is a 2026 SF MoMA SECA Award Finalist. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He has curated exhibitions at Casemore Gallery and Saint Joseph's Art Society in San Francisco.

Ebrahim Poustinchi (he/him), an award-winning artist/designer, and curator, is a tenured Associate Professor of digital design/architecture and the founder/director of the Robotically Augmented Design (RAD) Lab at Kent State University, and the founding principal of Studio EP, an experimental art/design practice. Poustinchi's work focuses on the intersection of design/art, worldbuilding, architecture/space, media, technology, AI, and robotics, with an emphasis on an alternative/speculative reading of Animism and human/non-human dialogue through cyber-physical public-art installations and video art, UI/UX design, Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), and spatial/accessible interfaces for the public audience. Ebrahim has widely lectured, taught workshops, and exhibited his work nationally and internationally across museums, galleries, and public venues, including the Museum of Moscow and Meyerhold Theatre Center in Russia; Akron Art Museum in Ohio; the Arab-American National Museum in Michigan; the Architecture and Design (A+D) Museum in Los Angeles; and galleries such as Spazio Giustiniani in Italy and Jan-Koniarek Gallery in Slovakia

About the non-regional Echo Artists-in-Residence

Andrew Ina (he/him) explores ethnocentrism, familial histories, and the loss of cultural memory through photography, moving images, and installations. His work has been exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions at TSA Philadelphia (PA), RBC Media Gallery in Vancouver (BC), and CO-OPt Research and Projects (TX). In the summer of 2026, he will participate as a Fellow in the MDOCS Storytellers Institute at Skidmore College. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at the True/False Film Festival (MO). His work has screened widely, including the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (CA), the St. Louis International Film Festival (MO), the Portland Film Festival (OR), the Glasgow Film Theatre (UK), and the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH). Andrew holds an MA in Animation from the Glasgow School of Art (UK) and an MFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver (BC).

Jason Lord (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator based in the American South. His inquiry-based practice is prolific and sustained, often pushing at the boundaries between craft, art, and design while engaging the questions, “What does it mean to be human?” and “What can art do?” His work explores perceptual systems and the relationship between parts and wholes through modular structures, long-duration rituals, and material accumulation. Jason holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work has been supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, CERF+, the McColl Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Peter Bullough Foundation, Penland School of Craft, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, through the Snapdragon Fund administered by Visual Art Exchange.

Jacoub Reyes (he/him) is an artist based in Florida who centers his Caribbean and Pakistani background as a relational point to expand on themes of colonialism, social response, and ecosystems exemplified in his work with IEA, Ma’s House, The Latinx Project, and CENTRO. Collaborating with Brown University, Alfred University, Kean University, Hunter College, UCSF, and other prestigious institutions, the intersections found in his work has allowed him to travel globally, engaging in lectures, workshops, and community events. Notable accolades include the Center for Craft’s Teaching Artist Cohort, the SFCC Grant, The Puffin Foundation, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation finalist, among others.

moira williams (they/them) is an interdisciplinary disabled Indigenous artist, curator, cultural activist, access magician and dreamer of Lenape, Kickapoo, Wyandot, and Sämi descent. Their ongoing co-creativity with land, water and people unsettles ableist and ecological boundaries between bodies by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an expansion of Mia Mingus’s “access intimacy.” Their often co-creative civic engagements, access as art, performances, gatherings, haptic sculptures, films, and installations enfold tactile/sensorial memories across scales of time and IndigiTech. For moira, these enfoldings express the multiple and mutable interwoven relationships shaping the land, moira’s ancestral cosmologies and knowledges with their lived experiences as an Indigenous disabled person. They are interested in how tactile and embodied memories often move with tensions between knowing and naming. They are the Founder and Director of the Disability Arts + Dreaming Utopian Fellowship at Culture Push, NYC.

About SPACES

SPACES is a nonprofit alternative art organization in Cleveland, OH, dedicated to supporting artists who explore and experiment. Since 1978, SPACES has commissioned and presented ambitious projects by artists-in-residence working across all media. The organization provides vital resources to cultural producers and offers an inclusive, welcoming space for audiences to engage with bold, experimental ideas.