Every year, the Museum offers residencies to local artists working in any media. We are pleased to announce our current resident. Heidi K. Brandow, an artist living and working in Santa Fe, NM. Brandow is a painter and printmaker whose work is commonly filled with whimsical characters and monsters that are often combined with words of poetry, stories, and personal reflections. Hailing from a long line of Native Hawaiian singers, musicians and performers on her mother’s side and Diné storytellers and medicine people on her father’s side, she finds that her pursuit of an artistic career came natural. Drawing her inspiration from everyday life, Brandow’s work concerns discovering, defining, and redefining personal identity by questioning authority and deconstructing mainstream assumptions of Native American identity. Brandow’s work engages personal, cultural, and historical experiences while incorporating perspectives of critical theory. In addition to continually evolving her illustrative monsters, Brandow is a 2015 Turkish Cultural Foundation (TCF) Artist Fellow. As a TCF Fellow, she is simultaneously working on the project ” defining: home ” which seeks to collaborate and document the evolving definitions of “home” for Turkish and Syrian artists affected by regional conflicts and political strife. Brandow is represented by Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the mother of two young boys. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, Brandow also studied design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Istanbul Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey This residency will run from October, 2015 through February, 2016.