CREATIVES IN RESIDENCE

Duration

The program lasts between five and ten days.

Selection Process

We select Creatives-in-Residence based on the alignment of their given craft with our multi-faceted cultural space, together with the values guiding their work. Applicants can contact us via email at requests@jnanetamsna.com.

What We Offer

Creatives-in-Residence are provided accommodation, meals, creative space, travel into the city, and resources to connect with the greater community. We offer artists easy access to cultural and artistic events that may coincide with their stay. During their stay, residents will also have the opportunity to connect with local artists and creatives, share their work, and of course, to rest, something we believe to be just as important as the fact of creating. Please get in touch for information on pricing.

What We Expect

Above all, we wish residents to be energized by their stay here at Jnane Tamsna. We ask that Creatives-in-Residence interact with other guests in our cultural space, through impromptu conversations and shared meals. We also ask that they do not limit their stay to our grounds and connect with Marrakech's creative community. When a residency overlaps an event or retreat, Creatives-in-Residence can perform, provide a workshop, or participate in other ways.

Publicity Contributions

Creatives-in-Residence are invited to play a role in raising public awareness of Jnane Tamsna and its transformative convenings through:

• Online media (blogs, posts, stories, reels)
• Press interviews
• Presentations at home institutions and membership clubs
• Promotional videos/interviews
• Podcasts

Creative Spaces

We are adapting a traditional earth-architecture house to become a residency space with a darkroom, sound studio, writing rooms, and outdoor areas for artistic creation (ceramics, dance, and painting). In the meantime, the full breadth of our property is available to residents. Our rooftop terrace offers a tranquil space for concentration, the symphony of birdsong from our surrounding gardens sure to inspire creation. Our salon and adjoining seating area beside the garden is a gorgeous venue for creative work.

Meet Our Creatives-in-Residence

Dapper Lou is a creative artist and seasoned traveler. He worked on a joint visual art and poetry project with fellow Joekenneth Museau during his residency. He also took on a portrait project of his own, capturing several people at Jnane, including owner Meryanne Loum-Martin.

Joekenneth Museau is an artist and storyteller. He has published poetry and prose and incorporated different mediums like photography into his creative works. During his time with us, he could be found spending time on our rooftop terrace, looking over the palm tree oasis as he filled a notebook with his thoughts.

Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer. For her residency, she is immersing herself in the local community through initiatives providing cultural access and activities to youth and mothers from various neighborhoods. She is also giving workshops and talks as she takes on a personal writing project that makes sense of identity and nature.

Slavomir Latko is a Chinese medicine practitioner joining us for residency in February. He is offering his revolutionary treatments to Jnane's guests. He is also leading a retreat for students of Chinese medicine.

Yagazie Emezi is a Nigeria-based photojournalist and creative. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Vogue, and Time Magazine. She is participating in Marrakech's 1-54 art festival. This event will take place in the second week of February and see a curation of works by established and emerging visual artists.

Bran Rideaux (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary writer and theatre producer from Chicago, Illinois, based in London. In 2020, Bran received a bachelor's in African American Studies with a concentration in Performance Studies from Yale University. They recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, where they studied under amazing writers such as Brandon Taylor, Raven Lelliani, and Zadie Smith. They are currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Elijah Ndoumbe (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, dream-weaver, and collaborator. They engage lens-based work as a practice of care that is capable of producing a radical-care-politic in community, in collaboration, in collective production and intentionality. Feelings of breath, body, space, desire, music and movement are key elements to their process of image-making. They are the inaugural digital resident of Photoworks UK (November 2023), and are currently in development on a project with artists between France, Senegal, and the US. They exhibited at Galerie Sans Titre in Paris (December 2023) and have an upcoming exhibition at Praz Delavallade in February 2024 (Paris, FR).

Amanny Ahmad is a Palestinian artist, cook, land worker, and folk herbalist. In her research-based practice, she studies things small & large: whole systems design, food as language, land as life, historical & contemporary relationships between humans & non-humans, botany, mycology, indigenous culinary traditions & plant use; and how those things can teach us about preservation, survival, and world-making. Her research culminates in a variety of forms: writing, photographs, objects, garden design, fermentation, herbal preparations, and most publicly, large scale meals, often cooked over live fire, incorporating local wild ingredients.

Soukayna (they/them) is a writer, researcher, visual artist and overall multidisciplinary being with a profound curiosity and an avid passion for learning. Their work is largely motivated by the dichotomies of their identity and navigates between memory and action. With a BFA in Art History and Film Studies and a certificate in Francophone Literature, Soukayna is interested in the relationship between society and history and how it translates into different mediums and the mundane. They are interested in using their practice today as a tool for future archiving through collaboration and self-exploration. They are currently working on practices of the land around food and traditional medicine and creating an archive of their family's recipes. Soukayna published a book of poetry titled WORDS in 2018 and co-founded and co-produced the photo-documentary series Hchouma (2020). They wrote and published with Elle Québec, GQ Middle East, Goodee, Mille World, La Presse, Azeema, and more. Soukayna has given panels and been invited as a lecturer, guest, and artist at Concordia University, Denver Art Museum, MENA Film Festival, Dar Maghreb and Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal, amongst others.

Bunmi Agusto is a world-builder and storyteller concerned with unseen worlds and their metaphysical architectures. Moving across dreams, folktales, imagined realms, lost civilisations, cosmologies, and theories of the afterlife, she constructs rational systems for what might otherwise appear irrational and maps the hidden mechanics that underlie reality. She reimagines personal, cultural, and philosophical concerns through the vibrant lens of her identity as a Nigerian woman of Yoruba, Edo, and Afro-Brazilian descent. As a writer and art historian, Agusto thinks critically about fantasy and magical storytelling, often weaving together scientific theories, global mythologies, and contemporary narratives. Her writing practice is primarily self-published on her Substack, "In Search of Magic," where she explores fantasy and magical storytelling, both ancient and contemporary. She explores comparative mythology, often cross-referencing myth and folktales with scientific theories. She has contributed essays to DADA Magazine as well as the 2025 Nigerian Pavilion for the London Design Biennale, for which she was brought on as a Cultural Collaborator. Following her research and writing on The Remediation of Egúngún Masquerades in Contemporary Nigerian Art, she curated the exhibition "Masking the Unseen" at MILIKI, Lagos in 2022 highlighting contemporary remediations of mask traditions as a mode of capturing intangible essences. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, an MA in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University, and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Her artworks have been exhibited in Nigeria, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and China. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Financial Times, Condé Nast Traveller and Boy.Brother.Friend. In 2023, Agusto was selected as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She was also awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize in 2023, the Clarendon Scholarship in 2022 and the Cass Art Prize twice in 2019 and 2020.

Pauline Loctin is a multidisciplinary artist and creative director whose contemporary sculptural practice transforms paper and fabric through intricate folding techniques into immersive, sensory installations. Drawing on principles of repetition, geometry and material tension, Loctin manipulates surfaces into rhythmic, three-dimensional forms that shift with light, movement and perspective. Rooted in narrative and precision, her work balances technical craft with poetic expression, creating moments of quiet wonder that invite audiences to pause, gather and engage through form, visual language and spatial experience. She has designed custom, wearable paper costumes and scenography for world-class performing groups, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Couturissime exhibition with Thierry Mugler), and The New York Times Magazine dance films. She has created immersive displays, window designs, and custom activations for brands like BVLGARI and LVMH Métiers d'Art, Veuve Clicquot, Nespresso, Four Seasons Hotels, and COS.

Charlotte Edwardes is a writer and multi-award-winning journalist. She writes profiles and features for the Guardian Saturday magazine. She previously wrote for The Times magazine and was the Evening Standard’s chief interviewer and features editor. Early in her career, she was a news reporter on the Telegraph, where she covered the war in Iraq and won awards for investigative journalism. Edwardes is a three-times British Press Award winner, including Interviewer of the Year in 2017 and 2018. She was highly commended in that category in 2021 and 2025 and is shortlisted for 2026. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and is completing a doctoral thesis in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA. Her debut novel, Trouble Was, is out July 2026 (Bloomsbury).

Hanan Sharifa is a Moroccan American artist and clothing designer whose work embraces femininity and is rooted in the belief that garments can function as vessels for ritual and inner sanctuary. Working at the intersection of fashion and art, she creates clothing that invites slowness, tenderness, and embodied presence in a world that often demands speed. Originally producing her work by hand in New York, Hanan has now shifted her production to Morocco, reconnecting her practice with her ancestral homeland. This transition reflects a deepening commitment to intentional making, collaboration, and care, as well as a desire to honor traditional craft, human labor, and slower systems of production. Her garments are developed through an intimate process that includes digitally designed fabrics, screen printing, dyeing, and embroidery, often in close dialogue with artisans and small teams. This approach is a conscious refusal of fast fashion in favor of devotion, patience, and love. Ceramics, photography, performance, and video are integral to Hanan’s work, shaping the world in which her clothing exists. Her designs bridge the tangible and the spiritual, serving as conduits to liminality. Through fashion happenings, salon-style dinner parties, and performative presentations, she invites audiences into moments of collective ease, reflection, and care.

Shauna Walker is a choreographer, director, filmmaker, performer, and editor who uses movement as her love language. She crafts immersive micro-films and movement portrait work that explore vulnerability, presence, and the emotional textures of the raw, unfiltered heart of the human experience. Her movement-based films weave fashion, narrative, and intimate cinematography to create work that feels both visceral and luminous. Based in Los Angeles, Shauna collaborates with designers, brands, and fellow artists to create bold visual stories, from ad campaigns and movement portraits to conceptual films. She also brings her expertise in body language to photo shoots and music videos, guiding subjects to move, express, and reveal their authentic self before the lens.

Dee “the della kit” Landsberg is a future-sounding vocalist, songwriter, DJ, and producer drawing on funk, jazz, neo soul, and R&B. Unapologetically honest, her music explores love, spirituality, self-discovery, and social consciousness. Her sound is, in her words, a “quiet uprising”—a gentle yet powerful rebellion that heals, rebuilds, and reclaims. It proves that spiritual and intentional music can thrive at the intersection of soul, hip-hop, meditation, and sound healing. She has an infectiously warm personality, which can be felt by the way she lives through her heart and centers her passion for authenticity in her music. The Della Kit has had the opportunity to collaborate with and be mentored by renowned Grammy Award winner Jerry Wonder (The Fugees), electronic producer Lorin Bassnectar, and multi-instrumentalist Mr. Carmack. Her first release in 2011, "Golden Mixtape," is a mix of remixes and originals focusing around 90s R&B, classic hip hop, and house. She also released her debut album New Skies in 2016 with Berlin's homegrown label Long Lost Relatives.

Chris Sholar is a Grammy Award-winning music producer and composer working in the world of R&B and Hip Hop music. He has worked with the top names in the industry, a diverse range of artists from Stevie Wonder to Snoop Dogg. He's performed everywhere from concerts at Carnegie Hall to arenas at Glastonbury to the NFL Super Bowl Gala. Over the past 20 years, Chris has recorded, performed and toured with countless artists including Beyonce, Whitney Houston, and A Tribe Called Quest. He is a two-time Grammy Award winner from his collaborations with Jay-Z and Esperanza Spalding. Chris’s music has been featured on some of the top TV networks and brands like New York Fashion Week, New Balance, Dodge Dart, ESPN, New York Knicks, BET, VH1, MTV. He also has music in mega films such as “Safe House” starring Denzel Washington and “The Great Gatsby” starring Leonardo DiCaprio. As an educator Chris has had the opportunity to be a guest facilitator/teacher at prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Carnegie Hall and TEDx. Chris is a 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards recipient. In recent years Chris has been exploring the healing power of music and meditation, fusing the intersection of beats, soundscapes, and positive affirmations. His diverse musical experiences and interests result in a fresh, unique take on meditation music which he calls “Frequency Journeys.” Chris now considers himself a soundscape artist who creates musical scores for meditative and spiritual experiences.

Emanuel J Burton is a British-born, Florida-raised multidisciplinary artist of Jamaican heritage working at the intersection of music, sonic ecology, culture, and social impact. As a composer, sound designer, producer, and performer, he tells stories through sound—drawing from global nomadic travels, ancestral wisdom, and collaborations across stage, screen, and radio. His work spans making music for major productions like Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage (Marvel Studios/Sony) and Blitz (Apple TV+), directed by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen, to collaborating alongside artists/creatives such as Little Simz, SAULT, FKJ, Steven Bartlett (Diary of A CEO), Cleo Sol, Ghetts, Tom Misch, Mansur Brown and Yazmin Lacey. Beyond the studio, he is deeply committed to youth empowerment and educational equity. He has led creative workshops in South African townships with The Great Oven (supported by Nigel Slater), taught music to children with learning disabilities in the UK (including at the Royal National Institute for the Blind), and supported education initiatives in Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp. As an ambassador for Black Lives in Music and Music 4 All, he champions accessibility and inclusivity in the arts. His debut solo work as an artist—including acclaimed tracks like “Surf Club” and “Shine”—have received international radio play and amassed hundreds of thousands of streams.

Max Wallis is a poet and artist based in Lancashire. His first book Modern Love was nominated for the Polari Prize, and he has been described as a "poetry wunderkind" by Curious Arts Festival. Widely published in both poetry journals and magazines, Wallis's main motive is to get poetry into places it's not normally seen. In 2017, he had poetry published by Vogue, did a talk at the Royal Opera House about heartbreak, collaborated with Topman twice, producing specially curated art pieces and poetry for their shows, and turned the underground at Regent's Park gay with poetry. In 2024 he left his life in London after a mental health crisis, returning home to his family. Diagnosed with complex-PTSD and adult ADHD he also returned to his first love: poetry. In 2025 he launched The Aftershock Review, a survivor-led, trauma-informed literary magazine backed by major funding from Arts Council England.

Leonard Pongo is a Belgian-Congolese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Congolese identity, landscape, memory, spirituality, and the layered realities of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working across photography, film, textile design, experimental printing techniques, and mixed-media installation, Pongo examines how Congo is perceived and represented through immersive visual strategies that move between documentary observation, abstraction, and material experimentation. Pongo studied Political and Social Sciences at Maastricht University, graduating in 2009, and later earned a BA in Visual Arts: Photography from Bussel’s Art School in 2012. His work often engages landscape, social history, craft, and diasporic belonging, using snapshot, diary-based photography, abstraction, moving image, and installation to consider the complexity, contradiction, and polysemy of Congolese experience beyond reductive frameworks of conflict or spectacle. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale in 2026, and has been shown in exhibitions across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. He was named one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and received a Getty Grant in 2018.

Shourideh Molavi is a scholar in political science and human rights and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. Shourideh has two decades of extensive academic, legal research, and fieldwork experience in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine/Israel, on the topics of human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power. She is Senior Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in NYC. Her publications include Stateless Citizenship: The Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013); Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018); Environmental Warfare in Gaza (Pluto Press, 2024); Constituting the Jewish State: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Exclusion (I.B. Tauris, 2025). She is the dedicated Palestine researcher at Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their mandate is to develop, employ, and disseminate new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence.

Margarida Mendes is a researcher, curator, artist, and educator whose work explores the intersections of critical ecology, experimental film, sound practices, and ecopedagogy. She develops transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions, and experiential projects that open space for alternative modes of education and sensing, aiming to catalyse political imagination and restorative action. Mendes has been part of the curatorial teams of the 11th Liverpool Biennale, the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale. She has also co-directed several educational platforms, including escuelita at CA2M, The World In Which We Occur / Matter in Flux, and The Barber Shop. Mendes holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, is a tutor in the GEO-Design master's programme at Design Academy Eindhoven, and an affiliated researcher at ICNOVA, University of Lisbon.

Qasim Warraich (also known as Qi Yama) is a multidisciplinary force whose career originally formulated in music and quickly escalated beyond it. His 2019 debut album, wilt, introduced him as a songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist with rare range and control. He became a Red Bull Artist and was named one of Canada's Top 20 Rising Artists, going on to release three albums, perform in front of 20,000 people, and generate millions of streams and views across platforms. He collaborated with a wide spectrum of talent—from Marcus Troy and Naskademini to Siphe November, Sudan Archives, Govi, and Monsune—and earned co-signs from powerhouse managers including Lola Plaku (The Weeknd, ASAP Rocky) and Sickamore (Travis Scott). In 2024, at the height of his momentum, he walked away from the industry on his own terms. He pivoted into film composition before founding LEHJA, a press and film agency built to document the stories most of the world overlooks. With a background in journalism, Qasim has worked in more than 20 countries—including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Somalia, Egypt, South Africa, Chile, and New Zealand—collaborating with the United Nations and the World Bank. He has reported from the largest refugee camps in the world, documented the displacement of the Rohingya community of Myanmar, and covered climate crises across Pakistan and the Middle East and Africa. His first short documentary, WHEN THE WORLD LOOKS AWAY, examines Muslim charitable work across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Somalia. He is now developing his second film, The Sound of Rain, a climate documentary investigating humanity's complex, fragile relationship with rain. His photography, filmmaking, and writing now help raise over $2 million annually in Canada alone and generate billions of views across Canada, the United States, the UK, and Australia. He is currently creating his most personal work yet: A Name Is a Crown, a collection of 99 letters written to his daughter during the first year of her life. Rooted in faith, resilience, and memory, the book reflects on his childhood and his father's battle with leukemia and lymphoma when Qasim was nine. At its core is a single question for his daughter: "Where will you look for me after I'm gone?" It is not just a book—it is a legacy document, a spiritual inheritance, and a permanent place for her to find him, long after the noise fades.

Gabriel Annouka (they/them) is an artist and designer based in London. They are currently Art Editor at Wallpaper*. Collaboration is important, if not necessary. They write, direct and create image-based work within an editorial and commercial environment, and personal practice. They curate Care + Intention, a programme initiated in May 2024 in collaboration with Atlas Cinema, discussing and peeking at non-linear forms of filmmaking and image production. Their work was featured in platforms including T3 Tokyo, Dazed, Peckham 24, Photobook London, B.P. Space Gallery, Open205 Gallery, SHOWstudio, Kaltblut, Schön, JordanLuca, and Wallpaper*. Their latest project, عَمِيقَات A’ameeqat, self-published in 2024, is a combination of commissioned written pieces and different film photography formats, which intend to emphasize the importance of documenting, preserving, and recontextualizing neglected queer narratives through image and language. The project was showcased at BPS Gallery, Photobook and Peckham 24 in London; at Megutama in Shibuya (Tokyo); and at Les Insolites in Tangier.

Nat Powers is a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum music producer, songwriter, and industry architect whose work spans 13+ global music markets. With a career built on both artistry and strategic vision, he has contributed to the success of chart-topping artists and international movements. His production and songwriting credits include J Balvin, Greentea Peng, Jennifer Hudson, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Giggs, and Janet Jackson. As a sought-after creative force, he has led production for Pharrell Williams’ new boy band DND, is currently developing a Netflix-targeted series concept with Idris Elba and Ashley Walters, and played a key role in shaping the sound of cutting-edge artists. Beneath the musical exterior, Nat has established himself as a global industry connector, working across nine major international markets, including the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Jamaica. His ability to bridge genres, cultures, and industry barriers makes him an asset to both artists and labels looking to redefine their sound. In Summer 2025, Nat paused his commercial career to begin a long-term feature film project on humanity versus the machine, starting with three months living in the West Bank.

Michael 謙 Stewart is a New York-based visual artist and photographer whose practice operates at the intersection of editorial precision and a painterly sensibility. Informed by his personal history as an adoptee and a mixed-race Japanese individual, Stewart’s work deeply investigates themes of belonging, place, and the intuition of nature. His lens favors intimacy and nuance, prioritizing authentic human presence over overproduced aesthetics. Guided by an unwavering belief in human goodness, he defines beauty through generosity, honesty, courage, empathy, and selflessness. Driven by a desire to serve through his work, he anchors his multidisciplinary practice in direct conversation with others. He is guided by the legacies of Takuma Nakahira, Alonzo King, Eikoh Hosoe, and Isamu Noguchi.

SILK ROAD SLIPPERS

Silk Road Slippers is a literary community led by three veterans of the publishing industry: Alexandra Pringle, Alex von Tunzelmann and Faiza Khan. Their partnership with Jnane Tamsna sees a unique opportunity for writers at any stage of their career to further their craft in the picturesque background of Marrakech, Morocco. Their transformative masterclass, which takes place four times a year, helps unlock your storytelling potential through a combination of hands-on exercises. This includes, but is not limited to immersive workshops, participatory seminars, and one-on-one feedback. The literary process from rough draft to agent query is fully covered. To enquire about joining a Masterclass, please contact the Silk Road Slippers team.