Visiting Artists 2026–27

Stanford’s visiting artist programs encourage experimentation, exploration, and education in interdisciplinary arts research and practice. During the 2026–27 academic year, Stanford welcomes the following acclaimed artists for deep campus engagements:

Jussi Ängeslevä is a designer, artist, and educator working with digital materiality and interaction design. Hosted by the Stanford Robotics Center, Ängeslevä will continue 20 years of work choreographing machines with emotional intent, asking how a robot carries meaning rather than just performing a function.

Saif Azzuz is a Libyan and Yurok artist who looks to the land in a moment marked by fleeting ecologies and environmental catastrophe. Hosted by the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma), O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm, and the Center for Just Environmental Futures, with support from the Doerr School of Sustainability’s Art and Sustainability Program and Stanford Arts, Azzuz will attend to material history and cultural and ecological inheritance, revealing the interconnectedness of all living systems and the care needed to sustain them.

Abigail Browde is a theater artist, performer, writer, and director. Hosted by ITALIC: Immersion in the Arts and Theater and Performance Studies with funding from the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning, Browde will devise and conduct audience-engaged performances about shifting baseline syndrome based on Stanford archival material.

Alia Farid is an interdisciplinary artist who Stanford commissioned for a recent flagship public art installation, Amulets. She will return to campus for a residency hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, through which she will continue exploring the relationship of industrial practices and hand-made objects as a method of critical inquiry in the midst of global precarity.

Robin Coste Lewis is a National Book Award winner and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Los Angeles. Hosted by the Creative Writing Program as part of the Mohr Visiting Poet program, Lewis will teach The Practice of Poetic Erasure, a course exploring how erasing most of the words (or images from a book, film, or space) can create, or reveal, a wholly new story, while examining students’ own linguistic indoctrination and unconscious historical intentions.

Ryan Anthony Martinez is a classically trained artist, live painter, and muralist. Hosted by Medical Humanities and the Arts, Chemical and Systems Biology, Department of Pediatrics, and the Department of Biochemistry at the Stanford School of Medicine, Martinez will create visual artwork that communicates the emergent research taking place in the host departments. Much of his work reflects the belief in art’s capacity to foster inclusion and well-being.

Douglas McMaster is the chef and founder of Silo, the world’s first zero-waste restaurant. Hosted by the Hill-Maini Lab and made possible by generous support and collaboration from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises, Stanford Department of Bioengineering, Stanford Arts, and San-J, McMaster will help solve complex food sustainability challenges by advancing scientific research and culinary creativity through collaboration between science and gastronomy.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is the nationally bestselling author of the Superfan novel, and her book Four Treasures of the Sky was named an Idaho Book of the Year. Hosted by the Creative Writing Program as part of the Stein Visiting Writer program, Zhang will teach Reading for Writers: Obsession as Muse, a course that identifies and nurtures obsessions to deepen creative practices.

Contact: T +1 (650) 736 4087 / stanfordarts [​at​] stanford.edu.

*Image above: Clockwise from top left: Abigail Browde photo by Laura Bianchi; Robin Coste Lewis photo by Dunya Alwan; Jussi Ängeslevä courtesy of the artist; Jenny Tinghui Zhang photo by ​​Mary Inhea Kang; Alia Farid photo courtesy of Myriam Boulos; Saif Azzuz photo by Chris Grunder, courtesy of the artist and Anthony Meier; Ryan Anthony Martinez courtesy of the artist; Douglas McMaster courtesy of the artist.