Centrum Residencies

Home
United States
Port Townsend, WA
Centrum Residencies

Residencies for creative professionals from all disciplines and backgrounds.

Artists can take advantage of charming cabins, studio spaces, and a rich array of resources including Corvidae Press and Rainshadow recording studio.

06/02/2026

It was such a pleasure to welcome writer and director Brenda Chapman to Centrum earlier this spring! Learn more about Brenda below.

Brenda Chapman started her career as a story artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1987, contributing to her favorite fairytales: The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. She also worked on a few non-fairytales which included The Rescuers Down Under, Fantasia 2000 and was the story supervisor on the original The Lion King - for which she won ASIFA’s Annie Award. Chapman then helped launch DreamWorks Animation Studios, where she co-directed The Prince of Egypt. In 2003, Chapman joined Pixar Animation Studios where she created, wrote and directed Brave, winning an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe. Come Away, Chapman’s live-action debut, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Currently, Chapman is writing and developing several projects across many different media platforms. Chapman is represented by Tanya Cohen at Range Media and Candace Carlo at Kleinberg, Lange, Cuddy & Carlo LLP.

05/28/2026

We were delighted to welcome writer Eva-Maria Maggi to Centrum earlier this spring! Learn more about Eva-Maria below.

Eva-Maria Maggi is a nonfiction writer drawn to the quiet forces that shape lives and history—resistance, conscience, and the moral choices of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
She is completing her first biography and narrative nonfiction book, The Artisan, which tells the story of Georg Elser, the German working-class craftsman who, in 1939, came closer than anyone to assassinating Adolf Hi**er. The book blends meticulous archival research with immersive storytelling, exploring Elser’s extraordinary courage, the craft that enabled his resistance, and the ways individual acts can ripple through history.
Maggi’s work is grounded in long-form research and shaped by a transatlantic perspective. She has lived and worked in Germany, Italy, and the United States, bringing a nuanced understanding of political, social, and cultural landscapes to her writing. Her previous book, Hush of the Land (Bison Books, 2024), co-authored with Smoke Elser, examines how memory, landscape, and political forces intersect in shaping human experience. She also writes the newsletter Notes from Between the Lines, offering story-driven reflections on history, politics, and identity.
Alongside her writing, Maggi designs and leads immersive, field-based university courses that bring questions of wilderness, policy, and moral responsibility into lived practice. Since 2021, she has taken University of Montana students on multi-day horse and mule pack trips into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, where issues of access, restraint, stewardship, and care are encountered on the ground rather than in abstraction.
Across her work, Maggi seeks to illuminate the intersections of personal experience and historical forces, showing how the ordinary and the everyday can hold profound moral significance.

05/20/2026

It was such a pleasure to welcome local artist Jenny Grout to Centrum! Learn more about Jenny below.

I was raised in Vermont, and after college I moved to the Pacific Northwest, where I started an organic flower farm. In the summertime, I created beautiful bouquets, and during the long, rainy winters I learned to make prints. Now I’m a full-time artist, creating designs, carving blocks, and printing pretty things to send out into the world. My work is inspired by the flowers I grow, my kitchen garden, and the wildlife surrounding my home in Washington State.

05/15/2026

Just catching up on our feed…it’s been a busy spring!

We were so delighted to welcome the Art Scouts Collective to Centrum in February! Learn more about the Art Scouts below. And if you’re ever invited to tea or picnic with them, don’t pass it up! ♥️

Art Scouts Collective is based in the greater Portland area. The Art Scouts are very serious about not being serious. Primarily working with socially engaged art, the Art Scouts cultivate spaces that
foster community building. Drawing inspiration from the Fluxus movement of the 1960’s, the Art Scouts have created their own projects such as the Cookie Exchange, Fluxus Dinner series, and
30 Day Picnic. Many Art Scouts projects center around food, as a comforting and accessible base to bring artists together and host meaningful experiences and conversations. The collective’s
current members are Jessica Joner , Bryce Frimming , Ansley Gwin .gwin, and Laura Swingen. While each artist maintains an individual practice, they unite through a shared love collaborative artwork,
using it as a means to nourish both creativity and community, and to bring together diverse range of artists.

04/29/2026

Next week, we are thrilled to welcome back 2024 artist in residence, director and screenwriter Olivia Newman ! Olivia came to Centrum in February of 2024 to work on the adaptation of the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, written by Shelby Van Pelt . She got to meet the giant pacific octopus, Kakantu, at the aquarium at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center and spent a week wandering the woods and beaches at Fort Worden and Port Townsend.

Since working on the screenplay, Olivia directed the feature length film adaptation of the novel for Netflix, staring Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, and Alfred Molina as the voice of the octopus. On May 8th, the day the film comes out on Netflix, Olivia will be here at Centrum for a screening of the movie at the Wheeler Theater! We will have a brief Q&A after the screening. The event is free and open to the public (film is rated PG-13), and there are just a few tickets left. Link in bio for more details, we hope to see you there!

📸:
1 - Olivia Newman at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center aquarium at Fort Worden
2 - Kakantu, ’s giant pacific octopus in 2024, that has since been released back into the Salish sea
3 - Remarkably Bright Creatures novel, with new Netflix cover featuring Sally Field
4 - Film still from Remarkably Bright Creatures feature film

04/23/2026

We’re super duper excited to announce the completion of the renovations on our 5 artist cabins! Check out this little video tour of cabin 261! Also, our residency application for the 2027 season is now open, deadline is June 30th. Apply now to join us next year!

This project has been years in the making, and we want to extend a huge thanks to the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and the Sage Foundation for supporting these renovations. We worked with Side x Side Architects and Clark Construction , as well as local subcontractors for plumbing, electrical and painting work.

We’d also like to thank some of our incredible supporters of the residency program, including Sally Warren & Jeff Jackson, Cathy Sarkowsky , Cat Clifford .k.see , and the Chin Family Foundation.

Thank you all, and we hope to see you here at Fort Worden soon!

03/31/2026

It was such a pleasure to welcome visual artist Andrea Kantrowitz .kantrow to Centrum last month! Learn more about Andrea below.

Andrea Kantrowitz is an artist whose practice centers on large-scale sumi ink drawings and oil paintings exploring perception, ecological systems, and immersive encounters with the natural world. She investigates forms shaped by growth, decay, and emergence: forests, coral, fungi, and other complex structures formed through natural processes. Her work invites viewers to slow down and look closely.

Kantrowitz has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at The Painting Center in New York City and Kenise Barnes Fine Art. Her work is held in numerous private collections. She has participated in residencies including Mountain Lake Biological Station and continues to develop site-responsive work informed by walking and sustained observation.

She is Associate Professor and Director of Art Education at SUNY New Paltz and author of Drawing Thought (MIT Press, 2022), which explores drawing as a tool for embodied thinking that helps us understand what is and imagine what could be.

03/24/2026

We were delighted to welcome painter Hannah Buchanan to Centrum last month! Learn more about Hannah below.

Hannah Buchanan is an artist from Rockville, Indiana working in acrylic, oil, and gouache. She focuses her paintings on the preservation of memories, traditions, and world-building, often centering the rural landscape and her family’s bait shop. At Centrum, she had the opportunity to further develop a plein air practice alongside studio time. She valued the hours spent outside painting the PNW’s mountains, trees, and Salish Sea.
Buchanan is a 2022 graduate of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and earned an MFA in Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2025. She has studied at Anderson Ranch in Colorado and with Vice Versa artist collective in Kansas City, and has published a children’s book.

03/20/2026

It was such a pleasure to welcome writer Benjamin Bartu .moog to Centrum last month! Learn more about Ben below.

Benjamin Bartu is a poet and researcher. He is the author of the chapbook Myriad Reflector (Poetry.Onl Press). His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared in The Offing, The Journal, The Boiler, Sonora Review, HAD, & elsewhere. He has received support from Tin House Summer and Winter Workshops, The Hambidge Center, and Centrum Residencies. He lives in Oakland, California. His website is benjaminbartu.com

03/18/2026

We were delighted to welcome visual artist Saya Moriyasu to Centrum in February! Learn more about Saya below.

Saya Moriyasu has exhibited at venues including the Deitch Art Parade (New York), Aqua Art Miami (Florida), Montserrat College of Art (Massachusetts), Henry Art Gallery Gift Shop Project, Bellevue Arts Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Wing Luke Museum for the Asian American Experience (Washington state unless noted). After graduating with a BFA from the University of Washington, Moriyasu was awarded residencies at Skowhegan and at Pilchuck Glass School. An alumnus of SOIL Artist-Run Gallery and represented by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Inspirations include Americana, consumerism, humor, the decorative arts, class, history, Buddhism, and a love of beauty. Her work often consisted of many small pieces that make up a larger piece, in clay, wood, prints, and other materials.

Address

223 Battery Way
Port Townsend, WA
98368

Telephone

+13603853102

Website

https://centrum.org/artists-in-place/on-a-i-r/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Centrum Residencies posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Want your organization to be the top-listed Non Profit Organization in Port Townsend?