South Fork Community Residency
Dec 3 - 16, 2025
2026 Community Residents: Kirsten Benfield, Scott Bluedorn, Perry Burns, Zoya Cherkassky, Robin Gianis, Bastienne Schmidt
During our annual South Fork Community Residency, we invite six selected artists of the East End to work on campus at The Church to enrich and foster artistic community and dialogue. In 2026, we’re excited to welcome Kirsten Benfield, Scott Bluedorn, Perry Burns, Zoya Cherkassky, Robin Gianis, and Bastienne Schmidt in residence. Read more about each artist below:
Originally from New Zealand, Kirsten Benfield moved to the East End in her mid-20s. Benfield began her arts practice in Plein Air watercolor and has since expanded to techniques of oil painting and printmaking, while continuing to push the boundaries of the watercolor medium. Benfield’s work is held in various private collections and has been exhibited at several venues across the East End, including Guild Hall, The Church Sag Harbor, Springs Improvement Society, and the Victor D’Amico Art Barge, among others. She is also a founding member of water+color+works, a collective of East End Artists who paint together, and have shown annually together since 2016.
Photo by Lindsay Morris
Scott Bluedorn is an artist, illustrator, and designer working in various media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, and found object assemblage. His work reckons with the effects of the Anthropocene era, defined by climate disruption and the alteration of environments by human agency, while incorporating elements of science, anthropology, myth, mysticism, and the supernatural. Scott lives and works on eastern Long Island, and his work is in the collection of the Parrish Art Museum of Watermill, NY, LongHouse Reserve, Edward Albee Foundation, and numerous private collections.
Photo by Lindsay Morris
Perry Burns received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. and Masters degree from Columbia University, New York, N.Y. in 1994. He has lived and worked on the East End of Long Island, New York, for the past 30 years, working as a professional painter, photographer, and teacher. Inspired by travels to many different countries around the world, Burns’ paintings are influenced by Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, African, and Indian sensibilities of color, pattern, and form. He intentionally merges the traditions of organic pattern and abstract expressionism and thereby consciously crosses boundaries of culture, history, religion, race, ideology, and politics. He brings this sensibility to both abstract and representational painting, often alluding to aspects of the East End of Long Island's landscape and seascape.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Zoya Cherkassky was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1976. She and her family left the former Soviet Union immediately after its collapse in 1991 and immigrated to Israel. Cherkassky recently relocated to Long Island, New York where she currently lives and works. She is best known for paintings and drawings that depict her lived and closely observed experiences of immigration, cross-cultural conflict, marginalized labor, and tropes of Jewish identity. Cherkassky’s art often responds to current events in real time.
Photo by Tony Wang
Working across disciplines of sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and mixed media, Robin Gianis explores the familiar fractals and repeating patterns of the natural world. She completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Michigan in Florence, Italy, before receiving a teaching degree in Arts Education from Long Island University. Originally from Massachusetts, Gianis has resided on the East End for over three decades, working as a Visual Arts teacher for Bridgehampton Schools for the last 20+ years.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Bastienne Schmidt is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, painting, and large-scale drawings. She was born in Germany, raised in Greece and Italy, and has lived in New York for the past 30 years. Her artwork is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris among many others. She is the recipient of the Kodak Book Award, the Best German Photo Book Award, and the German Photo Prize. She is also a winner of the World Press Photo Award, and she received a grant from the Soros Foundation for her documentary work.
Photo by Jenny Gorman