Image: Laura Stayton (MFA ’26 LowRes)
JANUARY COLLOQUIUM
Every winter, students in MassArt’s MFA: Fine Arts Low Residency program gather virtually for five days to engage in a colloquium and review. Each of these intensive winter experiences is organized around a theme and features guest speakers and visiting artists. Topics are grounded in contemporary studio practice, art history, art theory, and expanded fields of study (audience, landscape, empathy, identity), and provide a lens for discussion. The January colloquium also includes reviews of student work by program faculty, guest critics, and select mentors. Students present their work, guide discussions, and provide feedback for their peers.
Image details(F-B): (B)Laura Stayton (MFA-BLR ’26), (F)Among Us, multiplayer game, InnerSloth LLC, 2018
2025 MFA JANUARY COLLOQUIUM:
Impostors Only: Fake It Till You Break It
“I do not belong here.” Impostors Only invites you to investigate your responses to such a statement, often unspoken, but deeply felt. Together, we will unpack this internal feeling of fraudulence not just as personal anxiety, but as a socio-political construction shaped by external power relations. We will then ask: What becomes possible when we embrace impostorship in our creative practices? How do we turn fraudulence into a radical, generative tool for art? How do we shift our understandings of amateurism, belonging, and kinship? And how, after all, do we fake it till we break it?
2025 COLLOQUIUM VISITORS
LEAD FACULTY / PANEL MODERATOR
Falaks Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic.
Falaks’ lived practice currently takes the roles of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by Sybil Press and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, RI, with her wife, cat, and ball python.