people & happenings
MEET OUR 2025 – 2026 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
By Julie-Anne Whitney, Public Events Manager
Emily Duggan is a poet, performer, and storyteller. Inspired by her Playback Theater practice, she founded StoryTailor Poems, for which she writes customized poems on the spot. She has appeared onstage with the Boston Poetry Slam, Uptown Poetry Slam( Chicago), ArtsEmerson, the Roslindale Square Theater, and Deana’ s Educational Theater, among others. Her poems can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Writers Without Margins, and Academic Psychiatry.
“ Mount Auburn Cemetery: Memory Poems”
“ Mount Auburn Cemetery: Memory Poems” invites visitors to explore and preserve their memories of Mount Auburn through poetry written for them on the spot. Throughout the year, Emily will be stationed in different locations at the Cemetery, where visitors will be invited to share their memories of and connections to Mount Auburn. Emily will then write customized / improvised poems based on these stories, and visitors will be given a copy of the original piece. The poems will later be compiled into a self-guided audio walking tour by which future visitors may listen to recordings of the poems as they move through the Cemetery. Emily will conclude her residency with a roaming poetry reading in the landscape.
Juls Gabs is a digital painter and media artist who redefines traditional painting by merging classical influences with contemporary digital methods. Her work has received notable awards and grants including the European Research of New Creative Spaces in new media and the Revelation Artist Prize Mayte Spinola, among others. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions across the world including the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, the U. K., Sweden, Spain, and France. She has had solo exhibitions in Boston, Rome, London, and Madrid. www. julsgabs. com
“ Prophecies of the Land”
Inspired by late 18th / early 19th-century landscape painter J. M. W. Turner’ s bold vision of capturing a world in flux, Juls seeks to paint the Mount Auburn landscape of the future— where nature, time, and humanity intertwine in new and unexpected ways. Her exhibition will be created using new technologies where digitalized nature grows from the ceiling forming an ethereal forest. Through this project, she hopes to create a space where nature, memory, and technology converge— inviting reflection on the landscapes we inherit and the ones we have yet to create.
A Decade of Inspiration, All in One Place:
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION EVENT
n 2014, Mount Auburn became the first cemetery in the United States to establish an
I artist residency program. The AiR program offers grants to local artists who are encouraged to create site-specific work that is unique and authentic to Mount Auburn.
In the past ten years, we have worked with nearly 30 artists across different disciplines including film, music, theater, dance, sculpture, photography, painting, poetry, and more.
On April 5 and 6, 2025 more than 20 former Artists-in-Residence came together for the 10th Anniversary AiR Celebration event at Story Chapel. The event highlighted storytelling, dance, music, and visual art with live performances and an art gallery.
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