Six artists selected for residencies at the Bergamot Station Arts Center
July 17, 2026 5:05 PM
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (July 17, 2026) — Six Los Angeles County-based artists have been chosen as the 2026-2027 cohort for the city of Santa Monica Artist Residency Program, formerly known as the Camera Obscura Artist in Residency Program.
They are: Sasha Mazhara, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Bella Ortiz, Seda Saar, Avila Santo and Nicolette Spear. Learn more about each artist below.
These six artists will continue to develop their work during 14-week residencies in a studio space located in the City Gallery at the renowned Bergamot Station Arts Center. The artists were selected by a panel of arts professionals.
As part of the Artist Residency Program, these talented individuals will bring their artistic expertise and expression to the community by leading free workshops open to the public.
Artists each receive an honorarium of $2,500 and a $500 materials budget for public workshops.
Resident Artist Avila Santo will lead an embodied rhythm workshop during COAST 2026, an open streets festival celebrating the World Cup final on Sunday, July 19, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Santo’s workshop will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Palisades Park.
Previous Artist Resident Anahid Boghosian, part of the 2025-2026 program, will also be part of COAST, leading a live painting demonstration and displaying new work created during her residency.
Bella Ortiz will lead a blind contour drawing workshop as part of the annual State of the City event, a celebration of the Santa Monica community and its achievements on Thursday, July 23, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Main Street.
Seda Saar is part of the current “Water is a Currency” exhibition at the Annenberg Community Beach House gallery. The show features seven artists whose work explores the cultural, spiritual, and historical relationships between water, movement, and collective memory. This exhibit is on view from April 4 through Sept. 27 at the Annenberg Community Beach House.
Future artist workshops will be posted on the city events calendar at santamonica.gov/events.
In previous years, the Artist Residency Program was held at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Palisades Park. The 2026-2027 cycle marks the program’s official transition to Bergamot Station Arts Center as its host site.
The Santa Monica Artist Residency Program is part of a network of artist opportunities offered by the city’s Cultural Affairs Division that has served thousands of local artists across a variety of disciplines.
To learn more about city of Santa Monica artist opportunities, click here.
Artist bios:
Sasha Mazhara is a Los Angeles-based photographic artist whose documentary photography focuses on storytelling, capturing people in their natural environments and highlighting traditional practices and everyday rituals. She is originally from Ukraine where she worked as a producer and stylist within the art and fashion scene. Since moving to the U.S., her practice has centered around using the camera to process displacement and exploring reconnecting with oneself in unfamiliar places.
Chinaedu Nwadibia is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles whose work draws from the orality of her Nigerian and African American heritage to explore conduits, channels, modes of communication and how they contribute to culture and identity. She prefers to tell stories on multiple platforms; employing sculpture, performance and writing in her lifelong engagement with photography. By illuminating spaces just out of view, she seeks to prompt a further investigation into how one perceives their surroundings and place in time.
Bella Ortiz, also known by their artist name EDTHEGOATKILLER, is a self-taught Chilean-American visual artist based in Los Angeles. With no formal training and a refusal to conform, they create art for the misfits - for those who never felt like they belonged. After beginning their artistic journey in 2022, they quickly developed a raw, expressive style that spans canvas, apparel and interior murals. Through vivid color and bold composition, their pieces challenge, confront and embrace the complexity of humanity with themes of identity, rebellion and self-acceptance.
Seda Saar is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, architecture and perception. With a background in interior architecture and experiential design, she creates immersive installations, sculptures and paintings that explore the dynamic relationship between light, color and space. Influenced by the Light and Space movement and inspired by natural phenomena, her work transforms environments into meditative experiences. Saar’s public art installations and exhibitions have been featured in both private and institutional collections, including a recent installation, “Pacific Passage,” at San Diego International Airport.
Avila Santo is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses rhythm as the foundation and guiding philosophy for his music compositions, writing, image making and performance work. Specializing in music and sound, his work explores the ways that drumming deepens our relationship to the natural world, diasporic movement and non-linear time. He is a drummer and professor of Capoeira through Capoeira Batuque in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil and in Los Angeles, and has had his music commissioned for a variety of projects.
Nicolette Spear is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose large-scale oil paintings capture the paradoxical nature of technology and its ability to both connect and isolate us, while also encouraging viewers to reflect on their own relationship with the digital world. Her incorporation of app icons, arranged throughout the figures in paintings such as those from her “Dopamine” series, symbolizes the familiar layout of a device's home screen, highlighting the pervasive nature of digital addiction. By juxtaposing technology and the human form, her art explores how technology has become an integral part of our existence.
Media Contact
Lauren Howland
Communications and public information manager
lauren.howland@santamonica.gov