The same flexibility that SoMad seeks to embody in its structure and programming applies to its residency, and as such, none of our residents' individual experiences with the program would be identical to another's. We offer dynamic workspaces; access to resources, gallery space, and equipment; and personalized support for photography, sculpture, and multimedia art. 

Meet the 2025 Residents

Rachel Rampleman creates bodies of work that explore gender, artifice, and spectacle. Utilizing directorial, curatorial, and anthropological processes, she showcases exuberantly irrepressible personalities who revel in challenging clichés and taboos to rethink and reimagine the gender construct. A sampling of subjects include Girls Girls Girls - the world's first and only all-woman Mötley Crüe tribute band, and Tazzie Colomb - the world's longest competing professional female bodybuilder and powerlifter. Since 2019, she has been working exclusively on Life is Drag- the largest living digital archive of drag in the United States.

SoMad is proud to present Life is Drag, a solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist, archivist, and cultural anthropologist Rachel Rampleman. On view from September 18 to December 18, 2025, this presentation marks a defining chapter in Rampleman’s six-year project using high definition video to document over 370 performances of more than 200 drag artists. Featuring 24 never-before-seen video portraits of 12 visionary drag performers who embody the height of neo-burlesque and experimental drag, the exhibition serves as the culmination of Rampleman’s residency at SoMad and reflects the creative apex of the project—which serves as the largest digital archive of drag performance in the United States.

Across media including performance, sculpture, painting, and film, Keith Lafuente explores the connections between desire, embodiment, and material histories both visible and hidden. In narrative runway shows, queer reimaginings of Filipino beauty pageants, and still lifes of cosplay armor, Lafuente contends with the mediated relationship to belonging and self inherent to diasporic life. Colonial legacies embedded in garments, male exhibitionists in uncanny situations—identity in his work is at once burden and fantasy, inherited and fabricated, commodified and immaterial. Lafuente's work has been included in exhibitions at, among others, SoMad, New York; Pracownia Portretu, Poland; PULLPROOF, Pittsburgh; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; and New Release, New York. His designs and drag have been featured in publications including The Cut, Cultured, Harper’s Bazaar Hong Kong, and Gayletter.

Yi Hsuan Lai is a Taiwanese-born lens-based artist based in New York. Her practice merges handmade sculpture, found objects, castoffs, and her body into staged photographs—visceral still lifes and self-portraits that blur the line between two and three dimensions. Through construction and deconstruction, Lai explores objecthood, bodily projection, and interior states. Her work centers on themes of adaptation, assimilation, and femininity, bridging material and corporeal to reflect the interplay of physical and psychological landscapes. The visual proliferation in her compositions echoes her emigration experience—marked by uncertainty, dislocation, and a search for belonging. Lai also experiments with photography’s elasticity through altered printing materials and sculptural presentation, creating a dialogue between tangible sensibility and tactile ambiguity.

She has received residency fellowships from Light Work (2024) and Vermont Studio Center (2023), and participated in the NYFA immigration program in 2023. Her solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation (2024), Gallery 456 (2024), and Spring Break Art Show (2020), with group exhibitions at Photo London (2023), Floor_Gallery (2023), Wassaic Project (2022), and Well Well Project (2022). Lai's work was recognized among LensCulture's Critics' Top 10 Choices in 2022.

SoMad has invited Tiffany—a shimmering algae-femme and host of the animated series Life Touching Life—to teletransport her underwater apartment straight into their white-walled Midtown gallery for Mad World 2025.

Created from recycled set paper, collaged imagery, and remixed open-source video, this fantastical living space offers glitchy glimpses of sea life: gender-swapping fish, self-cloning sponges, and a coral reef throwing a full moon bacchanal.

The apartment’s ambient soundtrack, composed by Matthewdavid, weaves together underwater sonics sourced from open-license shrimp recordings. Occasionally, Tiffany herself appears in full algae regalia to host conversations with special guests in her aquatic salon.

Research materials on queer ecology and magical practices—books, artifacts, and talismans—rest inside an aquarium bookshelf. Live plants, including the Moon Cactus and Bird of Paradise, each with its own peculiar history of mutated cultivation, nest in sculpted sconces, offering a surreal take on how terrestrial flora might be stylized in aquatic homes.

Visitors are invited to sink into custom furniture, cruise the bookshelf, and observe a coral city that floats just beyond reason—unnamed, yet unmistakably subaqueous.

As Mad World’s artist-in-residence, Zulu Padilla presents a multimedia installation that traces the migratory patterns of neotropical birds as observed from cruising spots in Prospect Park. In these secluded pockets of urban wilderness, birds and queer communities converge—unbound by borders, rules, or fixed identities. Padilla’s large-scale photographic collages evoke the layered, transient, and embodied nature of both flight and desire. By intertwining the avian and the human, the work reveals a shared multiplicity: each body, feathered or flesh, carries countless perspectives and ways of being.