Join us for a First Friday Open Studio with Artist-in-Residence Awar Monytwic Biong on April 3 from 5-7:30PM. Meet Awar, see the funeral milaya she embroidered in honor of her grandfather and his garden, and learn more about her Research Residency at this free, public event. Wine, seltzer, and snacks will be served throughout the evening.
Since beginning her Research Residency this fall, Awar has committed herself to the experience and practice of grief to amplify and communicate the emotional process of displacement either from death or nationhood, a process that refugees often experience in isolation from those they exist in community with. She is interested in exploring the curious and incurious natures of little grief and big grief. Why is it that people slow down when driving past a car accident, but scroll past a news clip about Gaza? Awar has relied on oral history to assist her essay writing and poetry exploring her own little, or personal, and big griefs–that of the death of her grandfather and the desolation of her ancestral land.
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Awar Monytwic Biong (she/her) is an essayist, poet, and fiction writer whose writing draws from her experiences as a refugee from Sudan, a naturalized American, and a daughter of the newest nation, South Sudan. She explores the isolation, interiority, and resilience of immigrant life within new country folkways. As is with her global health scholarship, Awar’s creative work relies on a supranational approach to make sense of health, society, and variation. She received a BA in Biology from the University of Virginia in 2019 and an MSc in Global Health Delivery from the University of Global Health Equity in 2024.
Awar is the Fall 2025 New City Artist-in-Residency. Her residency culminates in March 2025 with opportunities to see and engage with her work (see Residency Events).
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Whenever someone in my large, refugee community died, my parents instructed us to pray, but banished us from “paan bikka” Dinka and Arabic for “the house of mourning.” Using an IKEA sheet, “because it’s good and sturdy,” and 100% Egyptian cotton thread, because “that’s what we use,” according to Mama, I hand embroidered a funeral milaya, my first, to honor her father’s garden. I do this to acknowledge that below ground, where he now rests, productive work is happening, and we are not the only ones who have been transformed by distance, time, and immense loss.
Through interviews with family members, I interrogated memories, and found that reconstructing the past creates unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths. I experimented with form, and highlighted the difference in our perspectives, altering my rearview, culminating in a collection of poems and essays.
During this residency, I sought to construct a house out of every feeling I learned to reject in order to get by, and welcomed my ghosts and desires. In that house, through language and the repetitive practice of embroidery, I untangle the threads at the back of the hoop of my life.
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First Friday Open Studio with Awar
Friday, April 3 from 5-7:30PM. Refreshments served throughout the evening at this free, public event. All ages are welcome.Sudan, Remember Us: Film Screening with Awar & Filmmaker Hind Meddeb
Details to come -
The New City Artist-in-Residence program provides a local artist with a 6 month studio space grant and a $1,000 stipend. Each residency concludes with the artist sharing their work with the public through a culminating event or series of events.
The New City Arts Research Residency aims to support artists and creatives of all disciplines with practices based in research (i.e., writers, curators, art historians, designers, filmmakers, etc.). The residency is meant to be a celebration of all the ways research informs artistic practices – the questioning, experimenting, reflecting, archiving, and observing that leads artists to new discoveries and ways of knowing. Learn more here.
