ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM
The TEST SITE artist residency program at Bountiful Davis Art Center is designed to foster experimentation and innovation, culminating in a solo exhibition in our Annex Gallery. Artists selected for the BDAC residency receive 24-hour access to a private studio, fully equipped with materials and tools, allowing them to create and explore their work freely. The body of work developed during the residency will be showcased in a solo exhibition in the Annex Gallery during the following calendar year, with BDAC providing comprehensive marketing and publicity support across social media, newsletters, and press releases.
In addition to studio and exhibition opportunities, resident artists are expected to contribute to the BDAC community by giving an artist talk, workshop, or leading a critique session with local artists. This engagement enriches the resident's experience while also strengthening connections within the broader BDAC community, fostering relationships, and expanding the artist’s network.
The program offers two residencies: one running from fall to spring and a summer residency. The Test Site Summer Residency provides a graduating high school student and a teacher from the Davis School District with 24-hour studio access, offering a unique opportunity to develop their skills in a professional environment.
CURRENT ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
Ashley Bautista
Ashley M Bautista (b. 2001) is a Mexican-American conceptual artist who primarily works with the medium of photography. Her practice incorporates analog processes such as Platinum/Palladium, Liquid Gelatin Silver, and Cyanotype printed on wood, glass, paper, and cotton textiles. Bautista began her artistic career while studying photography at the University of Utah, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Fall of 2024.
Her work centers around the exploration of the Mexican-American identity in relation to lived experiences as a child of immigrants, the surrounding political landscape, and the evolution of her personal identity. Along with the mentioned topics, she simultaneously questions and challenges the traditional roles, ideals, and expectations placed on contemporary women considering the evolving negative impacts.
Bautista’s first solo show Bedroom Poetry was exhibited at Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts Spring of 2024. Her cyanotype installation Que Sueñes Con Los Angelitos, created for the show, was part of the Statewide Annual Exhibition 2024 at Ogden Contemporary Arts where she was awarded Best in Show. Most recently, her work was featured in a group exhibition titled I Must Be Dreaming hosted at FICE Gallery March of 2026 and a live art show Salt Lake’s Casita in collaboration with Casita and The BLOCKS SLC September of 2026.
Bautista currently resides and works in West Valley City, Utah.
Kaneez Zehra Hassan
Kaneez Zehra Hassan is a Pakistani American ceramic artist based in northern Utah whose work explores memory, migration, cultural inheritance, and belonging through hand-built ceramic sculptures. Drawing from archaeology, vernacular architecture, textiles, and devotional traditions, she creates vessels and sculptural forms that examine how material surfaces can preserve histories of place, identity, and lived experience.
Hassan holds a Master's degree in Archaeology from the University of Kent, UK, where she specialized in Cultural Heritage Preservation, and a Master's degree in Communication from Johns Hopkins University. Her interdisciplinary background informs a research-driven studio practice that approaches clay as both material and archive. Through layered surfaces, visible seams, stitching, embedded text, and intentionally retained imperfections, her work investigates the ways memory accumulates through making, repair, and time.
Working primarily in stoneware, Hassan has developed a visual language influenced by South Asian material culture, Sufi philosophy, wabi-sabi aesthetic, and everyday acts of care and labor. Her sculptures hold the tension between what is revealed and what remains embedded beneath the surface, between legibility and concealment, presence and trace.
Her work has been exhibited nationally, including the NCECA Annual Exhibition, the Sears Invitational Art Show, the Utah Arts & Museums Statewide Annual, and Merge(d), presented by The Color Network. One of her works received Honorable Mention for Artistic Merit at the Bountiful Davis Art Center Emerging Artist Annual Exhibition.
Hassan approaches clay not simply as a medium for making objects, but as a repository of memory—one capable of holding cultural knowledge, preserving material histories, and bearing witness to the traces people leave behind.
