Squeaky Wheel announces Spring 2026 Workspace Residents
Ajunie Virk, Arielle Knight, and Jason Rhee will receive support for media arts projects and lead public events and workshops as part of the Workspace Residency
Media Contact: Ekrem Serdar, ekrem@squeaky.org, 716-884-7172
BUFFALO, NY — Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce the awardees of the spring 2026 Workspace Residency. From Friday, April 10 through Saturday, April 25, 2026, the residency will provide Ajunie Virk (Chicago, IL), Arielle Knight (New York, NY) and Jason Rhee (Chicago, IL) with tailored access to equipment, technical and curatorial consultations towards their work on new and ongoing projects at Squeaky Wheel, including an artist talk and workshops.
Ajunie Virk will be working on A Foot Off the Windowsill, a feature length experimental film which follows a recovering addict whose fragile first relationship and year of sobriety collide as she scours her house to destroy a shadow she judges to be a cockroach. The roach—an insect often seen as toxic, despite its essential role in ecosystems to break down remnants and waste—enters the character’s pristine home, disrupting their curated world and forcing a reckoning with societal expectation, relinquishment, and authenticity. The film blends the use of 3D animation, green screen performance, and motion capture to highlight the inconsistencies in the personas we build to dodge the shame inherent in pursuing perfection.
Arielle Knight will be working on an installation version of And Counting… a hybrid documentary and fiction film that conveys the fractured experience of “carceral time”. The film follows a mother and her formerly incarcerated son’s journey home, confronting their wounds and their hopes to rebuild their bond. Knight’s approach draws on the power of hybridity not as artifice, but as a means of approaching reality more truthfully. During the residency, the filmmaker will repurpose and recontextualize materials that did not make it into the short film—outtakes, archival footage, and experimental sound pieces—integrating them into an immersive multi-channel environment.
Filmmaker Jason Lee will be working on The Untitled EJ Lee Documentary, an intimate feature-length film that goes beyond basketball to unveil the untold story of Eun Jung “EJ” Lee, a diminutive but powerful figure in the world of women’s basketball. The film tells a basketball story that’s never been told before: a female Asian immigrant in the southern U.S. who reached enormous heights on the biggest stages as a player and attempts to do the same as a coach. Following sports narratives such as Last Chance U, The Heart of The Game, and Hoop Dreams, the film showcases intimate verité footage of EJ and the players on and off the court, the societal issues that they faced, and the historical journey of EJ becoming one of the best basketball players in the world. In a society that tends to worship male sports icons, The Untitled EJ Lee Documentary seeks to inspire young women, girls, members of the AAPI community, older adults, and sports enthusiasts at large, ushering a resilient and awe-inspiring woman into the pantheon of American sports heroes.
Along with providing support for artists’ intensive project work, the Workspace Residency gives the public an opportunity to attend events and workshops led by the residents on four occasions. Event details will be shared in the coming weeks. Panelists for this session of the residency were Alicia Hawkins, Donte McFadden, and Joan Nobile. Biographies of the residents and panelists can be found below.
Tuesday, April 14, 6:30 pm
Workshop | Sound in the Margins: Drawing audio on 16mm with Ajunie Virk
Thursday, April 16, 6:30 pm
Workshop | Autotheory and the Poetics of the Self: Storying the Personal with Arielle Knight
Friday, April 17, 7 pm
Artist talk | Meet the Residents: Ajunie Virk, Arielle Knight, and Jason Rhee
Tuesday, April 21, 6:30 pm
Workshop | Building Trust On and Off Camera: Ethical Practices with Film Participants with Jason Rhee
Funding for this session of Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is provided by the Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thank you to our friends at Rust Belt Books, Buffalo’s largest used bookstore, for sponsoring this session of the residency.
About Workspace Residency
Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency supports artists and researchers working on media arts projects. The program attracts practitioners who make challenging and critical inquiries to media art: its possibilities, histories, and the communities it can hold and form. Since its inception in 2016, the program has supported projects by over 50 artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators. Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is supported by Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and additional support by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of Governor and the New York State Legislature. Special thank you to Rustbelt Books for being a sponsor of this session of the residency.
Biographies of the artists
Ajunie Virk is an Indian-American writer-director and animator whose work investigates the relationship between surveillance, identity, and paranoia in a diasporic middle-America, conjuring up narratives that force viewers to face uncomfortable truths only apparent after objects of nostalgia are stripped of their familiar contexts. An alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University, Virk was an artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects, Brew House Arts, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. A recipient of the Anne Dowden and Samuel Rosenberg awards, she has recently screened works at the Coaxial Art Foundation, Roski Mateo Gallery, and Light Matters Festival, among others.
Director and producer Arielle Knight is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of GoodKnight Films Inc., acclaimed for her innovative storytelling that illuminates untold narratives across the Black diaspora. Working at the intersection of documentary and hybrid forms, her films and collaborations examine how communities navigate social, economic, and embodied precarity. She draws on surreal interpretations of political, social, and domestic realities, blurring boundaries between nonfiction and fantasy to create cinematic spaces of escape and freedom. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Southern Documentary Fund, Catapult Film Fund, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Through intimate, personal narratives, Knight continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary cinema with a vision rooted in Black futurity, imagination, and experimentation.
Jason Rhee (Director/Producer/Cinematographer) is a Korean American filmmaker with a passion for telling stories centered around his childhood and the AAPI community. Jason spent a decade in comedy prior to working on his feature film at institutions like The Onion and Conan. With a background in screenwriting and comedy, he helped produce three one- woman shows with comedian Kellye Howard, including directing a sold-out run at the Steppenwolf Theater as part of its 2022 LookOut series. Jason recently served as a cinematographer for PBS WTTW’s Firsthand webseries on migrants, unhoused Chicagoans, and peacekeepers.
Biographies of the panelists
Alicia Hawkins is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and educator originally from Buffalo’s West Side. She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she teaches Ethnic Studies with a focus on critical race, gender, and queer theory in film and media. Her research and creative work explore questions of identity, historical erasure, representation, and the politics of storytelling, often through the lens of magical realism. Currently in post production on Don’t Go Back to Sleep, a short documentary developed during her residency at Squeaky Wheel, Alicia continues to blend art and scholarship in ways that foreground underrepresented voices within the ever-evolving and transforming landscape of contemporary media.
Donte McFadden, PhD, serves as Vice President on the Board of Squeaky Wheel. Dr. McFadden is a Visiting Associate Professor of Communication and the Unit Diversity Officer in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo. Prior to joining UB as the director of the Distinguished Visiting Scholars in the Fall of 2022, he served as the Senior Associate Director for Undergraduate Research and High Impact Practices for the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette University. In this role, he served as the Director of the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. He has held other leadership roles with the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette, including serving as its Interim Director and Associate Director of Administration, Curriculum and Evaluation. Donte received his PhD in English with an emphasis in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He earned a master’s degree in English and a BFA/BA in Film/Film Studies also from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Donte is co-founder and past programmer of Black Lens, a showcase for African American filmmakers as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival.
Joan Nobile (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar from Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA in Media Production from Buffalo State College and an MFA in Media Arts Production from the University at Buffalo. Her research and work broadly focus on media theory and critique, gaming, cyberfeminism, and glitch aesthetics/feminism. Her practice involves work in film, video, zines, and video games. When she’s not working or creating, Joan enjoys visiting farmer’s markets, reading & watching non-fiction, and spending too much time playing video games. She currently lives in Buffalo, NY with her partner.
