Volland will host fifteen residents in 2026.
Since 2022, the Volland Foundation has offered its spaces and accommodations to creative practitioners for residencies of two or four weeks in length. Volland Residents come to Wabaunsee County from all over the United States and beyond our borders, working on projects of various mediums.
Most residents express a genuine interest in rural culture and venture out to meet locals, finding inspiration from this place’s life ways as they reflect on their work and create. They are drawn to the idea of an endangered ecosystem and wish to experience and engage with it.
While Volland does not require residents to host open studios, the artists often enjoy sharing their work. Be on the lookout for open studios or other residency-related programs. Meet the artists and tap into the energy and creativity they will bring to Wabaunsee County and the Flint Hills.
Join us in welcoming Volland’s 2026 residents to this extraordinary place in Kansas.
SPRING 2026
JONATHAN CONRAD
Sterling, KS
April 7 – 21 |
Rebecca’s plays explore the effect of heredity and environment on character. She is particularly interested in how both can determine one’s social and economic status. Rebecca will be working on a new play that centers on a group of women who choose to drop out of the mainstream and forge a new community for themselves in a rural setting.
LAURA KILLINGBECK
Charlestown, RI
April 7 – 21 | Laura Killingbeck is an adventurer and award-winning storyteller. Her journeys are a part of a lifelong quest to engage deeply with a beautiful, absurd, and complex world. As a writer and speaker, her stories explore themes of connection, growth, and transformation. Over the last two decades Laura has biked over 20,000 miles on global routes, backpacked through swamps, forests, and deserts, and spent two years hitchhiking across Latin America by car, truck, train, and boat. In between expeditions, she worked for thirteen years in experimental communities dedicated to ending climate change. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook @laurakillingbeck. Laura also writes a popular, free adventure newsletter at LauraKillingbeck.com/newsletter.
MAURIAH DONEGAN KRAKER
Appleton, WI
April 28 – May 12 | Trey Moody is from San Antonio, Texas. The author of two poetry collections, Autoblivion (Conduit Books, 2023) and Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), he teaches at Creighton University and lives in Omaha, Nebraska. At Volland, Trey plans to write about water and art.
DANIELLE FAUTH & RK FAUTH
New Orleans, LA
April 28 – May 12 | Although wholly based in contemporary expression, Beth Watts Nelson’s artistic output evokes a simpler time and invites others to slow down, look around and experience the beauty of being alive together on earth. Her time at Volland will be spent doing exactly that.
STEVE GURYSH
Lawrence, KS
May 19 – June 17 | Kendall Grady emboldens the couplet as a social relation of difference, or how love and poetry imagine worlds otherwise. Tracing Bruce Springsteen’s queer appeal, Grady will write unfaithful, ekphrastic translations of Born in the U.S.A to activate love as a generative apparatus and necessary reckoning with the “American Dream.” Grady holds a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and teaches at Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint – Tʼiistsʼóóz Ńdeeshgizh, New Mexico.
JUSTIN KORVER
Kansas City, MO
May 19 – June 2 | Justin Korver is an artist and educator who lives and works in Kansas City. He is originally from a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, and the plains of home taught him to understand minimalism. He moved to Holland, Michigan, to complete his undergraduate work at Hope College. While in Michigan, he was influenced by mid-century design and discovered a passion for hardware stores. After Michigan, he moved to Texas to pursue his MFA at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where his thesis focused on the critique of the social construction of masculinity. After grad school, he began working as a Senior Lecturer of Art at Texas A&M San Antonio, where he facilitated various courses in the theory and practice of art.
He then moved to Kansas City in 2024 to accept an Assistant Professor of Foundation position at the Kansas City Art Institute. At KCAI, he mentors students as they navigate the first year of their college experience. He also maintains an active research practice. He exhibits his artwork extensively with recent exhibitions at the Contemporary at Blue Star, grayDUCK Gallery, Artpace, and McNay Museum Art Museum. He has participated in artist residencies at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Casa LÜ in Mexico City, Rockland Woods outside Seattle, and Volland Foundation in the Flint Hills of Kansas.
DORA AGBAS
Prairie Village, KS
June 3 – 17 | Rob Scheps has recorded on over 35 albums across the instruments of tenor / soprano saxophone and flute. He tours actively worldwide, and leads bands in New York, Seattle, Portland, Kansas City & Honolulu. During his time at Volland, Rob hopes to finish his upcoming Jazz Portraits suite.
SUMMER 2026
URSULA EMERY McCLURE
Manhattan, KS
July 14 – August 11 | Ursula Emery McClure’s architectural work as a partner in emerymcclure architecture investigates the intersection of materiality, history, and environmental context. She is particularly interested in how these elements shape spatial experience, the built environment, and cultural identity. Ursula will use her residency to investigate the Flint Hills ecosystem and traditional building techniques to address contemporary challenges of prairie sustainability and resilience.
KEVIN PYLE
Montclair, NJ
July 14 – August 11 | Edie Winograde makes photographs that explore the intersections of history, myth, and landscape, often focusing on how the past is remembered and represented. With dedicated time for creative focus and immersion in a new landscape, the residency will provide an opportunity to further develop new work exploring icons and remnants of the Great Plains.
FALL 2026
JOANNA STRATTON ROZE
Mercer Island, WA
September 15 – October 13 | Janet Eo is an artist who formulates a visual language that encodes blurred identity, historical displacement, and the sense of belonging through mapping and layering. In her paintings, Janet reassembles family photos, wallpapers, and Google Maps to document memories of transformed places. As a Korean immigrant now settled in Lubbock, Northern Texas, she interweaves her experiences of migration with her grandfather’s refugee story from the Korean War.
G.C. WALDREP
Mercersburg, PA
September 15 – October 13 | G.C. Waldrep is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024). At Volland he will be returning to an abandoned project from the 1990s on ecological settlement and unsettlement.
TANNER BINGAMAN
Fairfield, PA
October 20 – November 18 | Alexandra Light’s choreographic work is deeply connected to place, history, and the unseen forces that shape movement—both human and ecological. At Volland, she will develop Prairie Run, a dance work that draws from the prairie’s shifting rhythms and the site’s layered histories, using immersive research and sustainable materials to create a piece that moves between past and present, stillness and motion.
PHILLIPS SAYLOR WISOR
Brunswick, MD
October 20 – November 3 | Stripmall Ballads is the haunted, dust-blown project of Phillips Saylor Wisor, a songwriter wandering the backroads between myth and memory. Drawing comparisons to Neil Young, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Maybelle Carter, his work lives in the tension between Appalachian tradition and modern disillusionment—aching with spectral beauty, dry wit, and a bone-deep sense of longing. From early lo-fi masterworks like Since Jimmy Died to the sparse, cinematic ache of Distant, his songs are slow-burning dispatches from the heart of a fractured America—where ghosts speak in minor chords and resistance sounds like a hymn. Stripmall Ballads doesn’t just sing about forgotten places—Phillips sings from them.
TODD ROBINSON
Omaha, NE
November 4 – 18 |
Todd Robinson is the author of two poetry collections,
Mass for Shut-Ins (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and
Note at Heart Rock (Main Street Rag Press, 2012). He teaches in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and serves as caregiver to his partner, a disabled physician. A lifelong resident of the Great Plains, Todd will explore local folkways and ecologies at Volland.
