New Ma's House Podcast episode! In this conversation, we sit down with Bonny Melendez to talk about the ways photography can hold family history, migration, identity, and cultural memory. Bonny reflects on growing up in Queens in a close Peruvian matriarchal family, discovering later that her father was also a photographer, and how those connections continue to shape her portraits and self-portraits. We also talk about how her background in psychology informs the care, collaboration, and trust she brings to photographing others, especially members of her own family.

Bonny also shares how her practice is expanding beyond photography into fashion, beauty, movement, poetry, video, and performance. During her residency at Ma's House, she created new self-portrait work inspired by Marinera, a traditional Peruvian dance, while thinking through her relationship with her mother, her body, and her own voice. We discuss solitude, collaboration, cultural storytelling, and the importance of making work that feels grounded in lived experience. Bonny describes her time at Ma's House as an affirming moment that helped her more fully embrace herself as an artist and imagine what might come next between New York and New Mexico.

In this Ma's House episode, we speak with artist and engineer Cole Douglas about his multidisciplinary practice spanning abstract painting, photography, poetry, video, and printmaking. Cole reflects on his transition from college football and mechanical engineering into art, which emerged as a necessary outlet for healing, emotional expression, and responding to the social upheaval of 2020. He discusses his guiding principle of "process, not progress," the role of writing and experimentation in developing new bodies of work, and his ongoing exploration of Black identity, nature, memory, and humanity's relationship with the environment.

Cole also reflects on his residency at Ma's House, where he experimented with printmaking, led a poetry workshop inspired by the ocean, and learned more about Shinnecock history and relationships with the surrounding shoreline. He shares how time in nature, conversations with fellow artists, and participation in community workshops expanded his thinking about climate change, migration, and material history. The conversation also touches on mentorship, defining success on one's own terms, finding joy through creativity and dancing, and his developing interest in using oyster-shell tabby to connect his South Carolina roots with family migration stories and the coastal histories of New York.

Host Jeremy Dennis interviews Yooyeon Nam, a Korean-born, New York–based painter (BFA Pratt Institute, 2023) whose oil and acrylic works explore alienation, cultural displacement, and existential unease through dreamlike, bold palettes and invented round-faced, often noseless figures with downcast or pupil-less eyes. Nam describes her maximalist compositions as entertainment with hidden "secrets," explains developing anonymous characters from frequent figure drawing, and discusses influences including Korean Buddhist sculpture, existential philosophy, and Matisse. She connects missing noses and changing eyes to suffocation, shyness, and differences in eye contact between Korea and New York, and explains balancing pain, violence, and cuteness to make difficult themes bearable. The conversation covers her process, color improvisation, Ma's House residency work in acrylic, relationship challenges, business-study lessons about audience, future themes of irrecoverable loss in a changing world, and where to find interviews and her work online.