Stephanie J. Williams

ARtist-in-residence / JULY 5 - SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work primarily navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand social coding. Her current projects include, Hospes, a short film, created using hand-built puppets and stop-motion animation, about the body as a political object supported by Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund and a DC Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and The Expectation of the Observed, an experimental short film that considers the unrecognized labor in having and being a body–-a meditation on how much our bodies do not actually seem to belong to us, for Stone Quarry Art Park in Cazenovia, NY. She currently teaches stop motion at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Stephanie's recent projects have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival (Jury Citation, 2022), and the Atlanta Film Festival (2023) with support from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University and multiple DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships. Stephanie received her MFA in Sculpture from RISD, has shown in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show exhibitions, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Lawrence University, the Delaware Contemporary, and the Walters Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, amongst others, with residencies at Sculpture Space, Williams College, the Corporation of Yaddo, VCCA, and ACRE. She currently lives in Washington, DC, and maintains a studio in Baltimore, MD where she teaches stop motion for Maryland Institute College of Art.

Learn more about Stephanie’s work at www.stephaniejwilliams.com

The Pleasure of Wasted time

“Animating stop-motion puppets is perhaps the most inefficient way to make my work. It demands my slowness,” says Stephanie Williams. The Pleasure of Wasted Time reflects on this slowness and the importance of the care that comes with creating stop-motion films. On view at The Nicholson Project from September 24 through November 4, 2023, this exhibition features a series of Williams’ stop motion short films along with an installation of the hand-built puppets, sculptures, and set pieces used in the creation of these films.

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