OSSABAW ISLAND RESIDENCY

ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Carmela Aliffi is a visual artist living in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. She has received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from University of Georgia and  Master of Visual Arts in Drawing and Painting from Georgia State University. She has been an Artist in Residence in Cortona, Italy, Ossabaw Island, Georgia, and several cities throughout Argentina.  She was a 2009 recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship in Hungary and the Czech Republic. She has been a part of the adjunct faculty of Armstrong Atlantic State University and was Art Department Chair of St. Vincent’s Academy 1990- 2020. In addition to serving on the Advisory Committee, Carmela is also a member of the ARTS Southeast Board of Directors.

Judith Barber is a visual artist based in Atlanta, GA. She is the Founding Director of Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences Residence program, the Founding Director of the Center for Craft (Asheville NC), the Founding Director of the Serenbe Institute, and the Executive Director at the Madison Morgan Cultural Center. She has been awarded residences at the Ossabaw Island Project and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Roosevelt Brownlee is a Savannah born and raised chef who served as a combat infantry cook in Vietnam before heading to Sweden, Switzerland, and touring European countries, catering to jazz greats at jazz festivals and outdoor events with Josephine Baker’s manager, serving "The Best of Harlem Soul Food.'' Back in Savannah, Roosevelt vended at Gullah Geechee cultural and seafood festivals on Daufuskie Island, Beaufort, St. Helena, Sapelo, Jacksonville and St. Augustine. He cooked at Elizabeth’s on 37th, Long Cove Club in Hilton Head Island, Soho South, Bed and Breakfast Inn in Savannah, and Driftaway Cafe in Sand Fly before retiring. He still vends on occasion, and consults on various food projects. Chef Brownlee has been featured in the Southern Foodways Alliance and Southern Fork.  He is a current Trustee of the Ossabaw Island Foundation and an Ossabaw Island descendant.

Betsy Cain has maintained a roving independent studio for over 40 years in Savannah, Georgia, and her discipline includes paintings, cut-outs, mixed media works on paper and photography. In her work, she explores the dissolving line between abstraction and the figurative...internal and external landscapes with imagery infused from the visually powerful and textural “low country,” and the language of the body.

Earning her MFA (and BFA) from The University of Alabama, with associated studies at Auburn University and Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Cain has been engaged in the Savannah arts community for decades, co-founding and participating in several collaborative and performative artist groups, curating exhibitions, and sponsoring art forums and lecture series. Among her many awards are The Macon Museum’s Bowen Award 2018 for Artistic Excellence; Georgia Women in the Visual Arts, Governor’s Award; and Southern Expressions Regional Purchase Award, High Museum of Art.

Betsy’s most recent exhibitions include both solo and group shows at Laney Contemporary and at the Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA, and her work is included in the corporate collections of Google, Coca-Cola USA, King and Spaulding, Alston Bird, Price Waterhouse and Cooper, and Chemical Bank, NYC as well as the Macon Museum of Arts & Sciences, Telfair Museum, High Museum of Art, and Roswell Museum & Art Center, just to name a few.

Learn more about Betsy’s work: www.betsycain.com

Beryl Gilothwest is a curator, writer, and art historian based in New York. He is the grandson of Sandy West, the former co-owner of Ossabaw Island, where he spent his childhood vacations. He is co-curator of the exhibition Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now, which is on view at Telfair Museums' Jepson Center in Savannah through September 6, 2026. He is Deputy Director of Research and Exhibitions at the Calder Foundation, which is dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and interpreting the art and archives of Alexander Calder. He has collaborated with institutions around the world on exhibitions of Calder's work, including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. As a writer, he has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications, including Apartamento, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, The Bitter Southerner, and Degree Critical.

Learn more about Beryl’s work: www.berylgilothwest.com

Helen Hamada is a photographer, videographer and retired investment professional living in Stanfordville, NY. She was first introduced to Ossabaw Island through the interdisciplinary residency program called Genesis in 1974 and later worked and lived on the island as co-director of the program from 1976-1980. Helen has been involved with Ossabaw Island for over 50 years and is currently the Vice Chair of The Ossabaw Island Foundation Board of Trustees.

Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis) first moved westward with her parents to San Francisco, after which the family continued north to Yukon Territory. She came of age in the remote natural environment of pre-statehood Alaska, later returning to the Bay Area to study painting and theater at San Francisco State University, and dance at the Pacific Ballet. She settled in Echo Park in 1967, where she worked as an artist and teacher, and attended Charles White’s drawing class at Otis Art Institute. Jackson engaged a community of artist peers —including David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Alonzo Davis, Dan Concholar, Senga Nengudi, George Evans, Gloria Bohanon, Betye Saar, and Emory Douglas—through Gallery 32, which she ran from her studio in the Granada Buildings near McArthur Park from 1968 to 1970. In a career spanning more than five decades, Jackson has worked experimentally across genres including drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, poetry, dance, theater and costume design. Built up through layers of pure acrylic, Jackson’s recent “environmental abstractions” are partially structured with netting, rods, and paper fragments, and strewn with cast- off color and other prosaic elements: peanut shells, bamboo, bells, loquat seeds, leather string. The artist’s handmade gestural impressions—pinching, crimping, and pleating—occur within a material transparency that lends each composition a uniquely lyrical and luminous dimensionality.

Jackson works in Savannah, Georgia, where she has lived since 1996. She received an MFA in theatre design from Yale University 1990, and is a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2024), Jacob Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), an Anonymous Was A Woman grant (2021), NYFA Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2020) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). Recent solo and survey exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Somethings in the World, Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan (2023); To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting, Gagosian, London (2023); Arts Club of Chicago (2022); Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Joan Didion: What She Means, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, Knoxville Museum of Art (2023); Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, Jepson Center/Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019); Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); West by Midwest, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018–19); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Brooklyn Museum, New York and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2018–20); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011–13); Gallery 32 & Its Circle, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2009). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She is represented by Ortuzar Projects, New York.

Learn more about Suzanne’s work: www.suzannejackson.art www.sfjfoundation.org

Karen Karp is a third generation Savannahian who after four decades of living elsewhere has landed back in her hometown. She currently divides her time between Savannah and New York City.

Karen has held leadership positions in international and multicultural settings, in the nonprofit and private sectors as Director of Marketing for the Metropolitan Opera, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the Asia Society and Senior Vice President for International Marketing at Christie's. Karen has led numerous initiatives to rebrand organizations, build reputational excellence, diversify audiences, grow revenue and expand digital footprints. Earlier in her career, Karen worked at major advertising agencies, in Asian American marketing, in investment banking and as a Princeton in Asia teaching fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong where she taught survey courses in the History of Western Art.

Prior to the pandemic, Karen co-founded a travel company, Kilachand + Karp, that organized chef-driven immersive culinary travel adventures in Asia, starting with India. 

She received an AB/magna cum laude at Princeton University in Art History and European Cultural Studies. Her graduate work was at The Wharton School-Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania where she earned an MBA/MA.

Karen serves as co-chair of the board of directors for the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) and on the executive committee of the Savannah Tree Foundation board. She is also a member of the Collections Committee at Telfair Museums and an emeritus trustee of Princeton in Asia.

Working for over two decades with Southern artists, gallery owner Susan Laney represents the outstanding talents of the area’s dynamic, often underrepresented, contemporary art scene. Prior to opening the gallery in 2017, Laney was the Gallery Director for the eponymous gallery of acclaimed photographer Jack Leigh. A SCAD graduate, Laney has curated group and solo exhibitions in numerous galleries, and museums, as well as the Westobou Festival and several exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art, including Jack Leigh: Full Circle, Low Country Photographs, 1972-2004, which was selected by Hyperallergic.com as one of the top ten exhibitions in the US for 2014. She served on the Alumni Executive Board of SCAD and co-founded the non-profit organization, ARC Savannah. Laney advises private and corporate clients in developing or enhancing art collections.

Learn more about Susan’s work: laneycontemporary.com

Melissa Messina is a nationally recognized arts professional who has developed thought provoking exhibitions, dynamic site-responsive projects, and engaging educational public programming both independently and in leadership positions at museums and non-profit arts organizations. For 20 years, her work with regional, national, and international artists has been presented in the U.S. in Atlanta, Kansas City, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah, and Washington, D.C., as well as in Bermuda, France, and Hong Kong. She has lectured extensively, published widely, and her research has been funded by Creative Time and The Andy Warhol Foundation, as well as by fellowships at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library, Atlanta, GA, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

In addition to serving select public and private clients, she is the Executor of the Mildred Thompson Estate. She has also recently served as guest curator at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and was the co-curator of the 2018 and 2020 Bermuda Biennials. In 2017, she co-created Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition highlighting 21 Black female abstract practitioners that traveled from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Learn more about Melissa’s work: messinacuratorial.com

Parker Stewart (b. 1992) is a photographer based in Savannah, Georgia. A native of North Carolina, Stewart arrived in Savannah in 2011 to study photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Stewart’s work is focused on the notion of Place, and he uses photography as a tool to record the moments and scenes that move him the most. Currently, Stewart is making  photographs of the landscape and culture of the wild Georgia coastline and the rural Savannah River basin, as well as working on long-term bodies of work in Coastal Maine, Western North Carolina, the Oregon Coast, and the Mojave Desert.

Learn more about Parker’s work: www.parkerstewartphotography.com

Lisa Jaye Young is a parent, educator, independent writer and curator, in that order. She earned a PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She contributes to art magazines, exhibition catalogs, and books, often with emphasis on art and feminism, ecocritical reflections, and a visual history of capital. She is faculty at SCAD, is a founding-editor for Decatur Dixon Press and founder of LJY Arts & Letters.

Emily Earl is a photographer and designer, a Savannah native, and one of the original co-founders of Sulfur Studios. She helped the organization transition to ARTS Southeast, a 501c3 nonprofit in 2021 and became the nonprofit’s inaugural Executive Director. She is also the co-founder and Editor of IMPACT Arts + Culture Magazine. She received her BFA in Photography from SCAD in 2007. Her monograph, Late Night Polaroids, a document of Savannah’s nightlife scene from 2012 - 2020, was published in conjunction with her first museum solo exhibition at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center in 2021.

Emily has a lifelong connection to Ossabaw, as her parents met there in 1977 as visiting artists to the Ossabaw Island Project. Her father, John Earl was a close friend of Sandy West, and spent many years helping to advocate for Ossabaw’s protection. Her brother Larry Earl was a member of the first group at Genesis in 1970. Emily is proud to be a Co-Director of the Ossabaw Island Residency Program, and to be part of the continuing legacy of bringing creative thinkers to Ossabaw.

Learn more about Emily’s work: www.emilyearlphotography.com @emilyearlphoto

Jon Witzky is an artist, educator and independent curator from Columbus, Ohio. He received his BFA in Painting from Ohio State University and an MFA in Painting from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Jon is co-founder and Editor of IMPACT Arts + Culture Magazine. He maintains an active artistic practice and can often be found working in his studio at ARTS Southeast.

Jon is a Co-Director of the Ossabaw Island Residency.

Learn more about Jon’s work: www.jcwitzky.com @jon_witzky