The Visual Arts Center and the Department of Art and Art History welcome artist Francesca Lally as the 2025–26 St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellow. A committee of VAC staff and Art and Art History faculty selected Lally’s exceptional application from a pool of over 100 competitive submissions by recent MFA graduates from across the country.
The St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellowship offers a one-year fellowship to a recent graduate of an MFA studio art program outside the University of Texas system, who specializes in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, or multimedia. The residency includes a $37,140 stipend, a one-year faculty position in the Department of Art and Art History, housing with a private studio, access to UT’s academic and art lab resources, and a fully funded exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, scheduled to take place in the spring of 2026. Applications were open to all students graduating from a US-based MFA Studio Art program by May 2025.
Administered by the Visual Arts Center in collaboration with staff from the Department of Art and Art History, the St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellowship is designed to catalyze an artist’s career by providing teaching experience and exposure through a curated exhibition and to bring diverse perspectives and practices to Austin for the benefit of UT students and Austin arts communities.
Francesca Lally graduated with her MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Temple Rome in 2025, and earned her BFA in Fine Art from the California Institute of the Arts in 2019. Moving between photography, performance, fiber, and cinema, her visual art practice centers time as a material and collaborator. Informed by her work as a media archivist, teacher, and researcher, Lally explores the poetic webs of weaving, data storage technologies, volcanoes, and language in translation.
Lally’s recent work considers how sites and landscapes are built by collective memory; how history is made up of creative retellings along vast geologic time scales and intimate personal ones. In her most recent project, for example, Babycamera Dream Boat (2025), she utilized an image of a decommissioned, decaying boat as a lens through which to examine relationships between immigration and placemaking, global trade and technology, and ideology and the environment.
"I'm interested in the ways that stories or truths are shaped by time, how history is always a game of telephone, and what is true is always subject to change," Lally says. "In Austin, I want to continue working with late 19th-century image-making technologies because I'm interested in how that period reflects and informs contemporary understandings of time and labor."
Recent solo exhibitions include Babycamera Dream Boat (Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA, 2025) and Just like a Book we can read also a Rock (TUR Gallery of Art, Rome, Italy, 2025). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Philadelphia at venues including Icebox Project Space, the William Way LGBT Center, PhillyCAM, Cherry Street Pier, and Vox Populi, among many others. She has participated in international residency programs, including at the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio Makerspace (Philadelphia, 2024), and the Performing Arts Forum (St-Erme, FR), among others.
As the eighth St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellow, Lally joins a network of artists who have been platformed by the University and who continue to shape contemporary art discourse and arts education following their time at the University of Texas. Past Fellows include Pablo Tut (2024–25), Zalika Azim (2023–24), Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (2022–23), Armando Cortés (2021–22), Dawn Kim (2020–21), Merideth Hillbrand (2019–20), and Katy McCarthy (2018–19). This year marks the second iteration hosted and organized by the Visual Arts Center.
Max Fields, director of the Visual Arts Center, says, “Choosing just one graduating MFA student for this year’s St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellowship program was an exceptional challenge. The pool of highly talented artists entering the art world is staggering. Francesca’s outstanding portfolio, teaching statement, and interview impressed the selection committee as representative of the next generation of contemporary artists who combine research, participatory action, and diverse media to create compelling projects that connect with a wide audience. I am excited to see how this incredible artist’s pedagogical and visual practice evolves at UT and in Austin through her residency and exhibition at the Visual Arts Center next spring.”
A free and open-to-the-public artist talk by Lally will take place at the Visual Arts Center on Thursday, October 2, at 3 p.m. The artist’s exhibition will open to the public on Friday, January 23, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.
Support for this program is provided by the St. Elmo Arts Residency and the Department of Art and Art History.