Our 2024 program is rooted in 25 years of experimental pedagogies, emphasizing collaborative learning, interdisciplinary exchange, and sustainable living practices. The 2024 sessions create space for exploring new modes of teaching / learning / researching / making / being together. We hope you will join us this year!

Why the crow, you ask? Crows and ravens, both members of the Corvus family, carry auspicious mythological histories across cultures, accompanying periods of rebirth and transformation. We are shape-shifters, beginning again as a nonprofit for art, ecology, and education, becoming a center for collaborative and intra-disciplinary creative practice.

SESSION | JUNE 10–15

LAND STEWARDSHIP SKILL-SHARE 

A week of workshops at Mildred’s Lane to share land stewardship skills and cultivate regenerative practices. 

This session will create an environment for knowledge exchange with daily workshops at Mildred’s Lane covering topics including composting, sustainable medicine harvesting, habitat management, deep listening, soap-making, and more. The emergent dialogue will resist extractive and instrumentalizing logics prevalent in some contemporary notions of wildcrafting, placing emphasis instead upon regenerative and non-invasive traditions.  

Workshops and lectures by day will be interspersed with meals that extend skill-sharing into the Kitchen Laboratory, recognizing that food production and consumption are also forms of land stewardship. The session will coincide with a re-design of the kitchen composting system and the installation of a composting toilet at Mildred’s Lane, projects which aim to embody the intersection of artistic and ecological practice—a systems aesthetics for the 21st century.

Workshop details to be announced in May!

Duration: one week (Monday–Saturday, arrivals & departures permitted Sunday)

Enrollment costs: $1,300 per fellow

Options for Drop-in Enrollment by the day will be announced in May

Enrollment costs cover all lodging expenses and materials related to the session, supporting honoraria for our workshop leaders and allowing community members to join the program at a reduced cost.

SESSION | JUNE 17–23

BIBLIOPHANTICS IV: MARX FOR CATS, AND OTHER INTERSPECIES DIALOGUES

A residency session for readers and writers coinciding with the Deep Water Literary Festival (June 21–22), Narrowsburg’s most prestigious cultural gathering!

This week-long retreat for readers and writers at Mildred’s Lane will develop literary tools for decentering the human and deepening relations with the more-than-human world. Through writing workshops and reading discussions spanning political philosophy, speculative fiction, and mythology, we will invite interspecies awareness, eco-political agency, and even metamorphosis. As with past “Bibliophantics” sessions at Mildred’s Lane, there will be ample quiet-time for reading and creative experimentation in dialogue with the landscape-site and library, and for attending the exciting Literary Festival Program — partial admission will be covered by enrollment costs.

Anchoring themes of the session is Marx For Cats: A Radical Bestiary by Leigh Claire La Berge (Duke University Press, 2023), which traces class struggle as a historical dialogue between humans and felines. For this session, La Berge will present a workshop on writing animal histories. 

Additional workshops and guests to be announced in May!

Duration: one week (Monday, June 17th – Sunday, June 23)

Enrollment costs: $1,300 per fellow

Weekend-only options may be available, pending availability

Costs cover all lodging expenses and materials related to the session, supporting honoraria for our collaborators and allowing community members to join the program at a reduced cost.

SESSION | JULY 1–19

IN THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE UFO PHENOMENON

An immersive residency for art practitioners, theorists, researchers and students interested in exploring the broad spectra of discourses emerging from the global UFO phenomenon, culminating in an interdisciplinary symposium.

This residency session takes a transhistorical and interdisciplinary approach to the UFO phenomenon, forming an intensive context in which to consider the subject through divergent research methods and artistic practices. Organized into 3 week-long modules, culminating in a hybrid in-person/online symposium, the curriculum encompasses readings, screenings, discussions, and field trips that divide the expansive topic of the UFO into thematic territories of interest.

Session participants will devise methods for research-based art practice, culminating in a hybrid/online symposium on the UFO phenomenon that centers art, visual culture, and cinema as key vehicles for the encryption and transmission of liminal phenomena (July 17–18). How can art guide an interrogative worldview, and communicate knowledge across deep scales of time? Join us for this unique project to discover together. 

Fellows may join for one, two, or three weeks of the session, or for the symposium only.

For more information on the session & symposium, see mildredslane.org/UFO

Enrollment Costs

One week enrollment      $1,300

Two week enrollment     $2,400

Three week enrollment   $3,600

Symposium attendance, in-person (two nights).   $  600

SESSION | JULY 29–AUGUST 4

QUEER ECOLOGIES RESEARCH COLLECTIVE II: CREATION/BECOMING/CHAOS

A space for embodied and performative research in pursuit of creative entanglement and co-evolution

Ecological collapse is a theater of the absurd—how do we play upon its stage? The Queer Ecologies Research Collective (QuERC), as embodied by participants of this residency session, will embrace CREATION / BECOMING / CHAOS as a guiding logic for emergent experiments in theater and expanded cinema, as well as readings and discussions. Over the course of the session, participants will generate new terms for the collective publication “A Glossary for Queer Ecologies” (2023–ongoing).

Dada and drag will provide frames of reference as playful and subversive art movements that speak to the power of the absurd, the disorienting, and the fantastical. The QuERC will assert these affective tools as necessary to the pursuit of a regenerative spirit, and to our ability to intra-relate with concepts such as extinction and apocalypse. Within the practice of queer ecologies, adaptation and metamorphosis become dynamic forces of entanglement, which on a human scale become processes of social as well as biological change.

SESSION | AUGUST 19–25

DISENTANGLEMENT / RE-EMBODIMENT

Artists, writers, and activists gather to unravel structures of oppression, fostering collective dialogue and action

Entanglement is key to understanding how systems of domination and inequality—political, economic, social, and spiritual—are deeply engrained into culture. Racism, transphobia, environmental exploitation, attacks on reproductive freedom, and genocide are all interconnected manifestations of oppression, which must all be disentangled in order to re-embody a new society. But how? How does one perform disentanglement, and how do artistic practices intersect with socio-political aims? This residency session fosters collective exploration, dialogue, and action at the intersection of art and activism.

Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is a multi-year project of extrication from bonds of gender-based oppression, undertaken by Jill Goldman and collaborators through film and performance works. The project strives for personal and collective re-embodiment based on values of equality, community, and reciprocity. Goldman’s research areas include Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Utopian Societies, Matriarchal Studies, the Gift Economy, and post-Capitalist economies, topics which will inform the curriculum of the session, encouraging research and praxis for all participants.