FALL RESIDENCY SHOWCASE 2026

William Stephen Davis is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, musician and educator from the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina. He earned a Bachelors in Photography with a Film Studies minor and Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he is a faculty member and former Director of the Film Studies Program. He is Founder + Creative Director of multimedia production company Small Creatures, and performs music under the moniker Rasmus Leon.

Through spatial navigations between visible and invisible structures of bodies/home and memory/experiences, his process involves a continual reprocessing of materials, possessions and experiences toward expansive internal mythologizations. His works have been exhibited throughout the US and internationally including Green Hall Gallery (Yale), TS1 Gallery (Beijing) and KIT Museum (Düsseldorf). He is a Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, and his work has been supported by grants including the Knight Foundation and the Arts & Science Council.

For this residency a vast array of collected, inherited and partially-formed materials interact to glimpse actual and imagined experiences they took part in. With a focus on ‘possession’ as refractions of corporeal and internalized experiences, many of the elements including the 35mm film were found buried or discarded, wherein the creative process initiated via ritualistic acts of searching, collecting and combining materials on the brink of extinction. The series of encasements acts as an attempt to recalibrate the role of animation to the experiencer, inversing outward projections into that of the viewer as their movement becomes a singular animated act, drawing lines of individual meaning between physical and psychological spaces. This work represents an effort to get between, behind and in front of image and story, to navigate exteriors and interiors through confrontations of mysteries and receipts. Through material layers and steepened individual experiences, a collective mythology is braided in the unseen between bodies and space.