Laimah Osman is a queer Afghan American visual artist, educator, and graphic designer. She makes multidisciplinary art that celebrates her cultural heritage and experiences. Osman’s family left Afghanistan for the U.S. when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Since then, she connects to her Afghan culture through her family, community, and the media. Particularly after 9/11, Afghan and Muslim people are singularly portrayed in the media in connection to violence and war. Osman wants to present the richness and diversity of her Central Asian culture and hopes to challenge the one-dimensional representation of Afghan and Muslim people that fuels today’s atmosphere of racism and xenophobia.



Osman’s visual work is based in the research, study, and practice of various printmaking and book arts processes. The origins of these different techniques are tied to global histories of communication and offer limitless possibilities for storytelling and socially engaged work. She is drawn to the nuances and possibilities for chance, repetition, multiplicity, improvisation and collaboration in generating work, as well as the materiality as a counter to the digital age.



While at Camargo, Osman plans to explore ideas around migration, safety and security in dialogue with others who are considering and expressing similar global concerns. She will travel to Marseille to see how this large modern “port city” is shaped by its immigrants. She also plans to experiment with different folds and bookbinding methods to make structural decisions and prototypes for the artists’ books.

Ram Devineni is a documentary filmmaker, publisher and founder of Rattapallax films and magazine. He produced The Russian Woodpecker, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. He is the creator of the augmented reality social-activist comic book series, Priya’s Shakti which received the Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund from the Ford Foundation and was supported by the World Bank.  Devineni was honored by UN Women as a “gender equality champion” for creating India’s first female superhero character.



While at Camargo, Devineni will develop an interactive comic book that focuses on migration of women from Syria and other countries into Europe resulting from recent conflicts. The comic book will be based on real-life interviews and stories and use augmented reality to bring the artwork to life.

Photo by Stephen Cherry.

Mike Alberti grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota in 2016. His work has appeared in Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, One Story, and elsewhere. His stories have won the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and the Sweet Corn Prize from Flyway.



Alberti has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the James Merrill House, the Jentel Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the MacDowell Colony. He was awarded a Bread Loaf Fiction Scholarship in 2019. He lives in Minneapolis, where he serves as the Managing Director for Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.



Alberti's work explores the relationship between people and place, with a focus on the environment and specifically on the way that climate change is affecting that relationship. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. While in residence at Camargo, he will finish his first collection of short stories, Some People Let You Down.