Meet the Artists: Session 2

Alina Orlov, Jacqueline Surdell , and Leilah Babirye

Alina, Jacqueline, and Leilah will be in residence at Fountainhead from February 18 to March18, 2026.

Alina Orlov

Website | Instagram

Sponsored by Artis

Alina Orlov is a filmmaker and multimedia artist working across experimental documentary and installation. Her practice examines power, authority, and subjugation across contested geographies, exploring how personal narratives become entangled with collective histories and how intimacy operates within larger political structures. Her most recent short film, The Cavalry (2024), premiered in the Pardi di Domani section of the 77th Locarno Film Festival and has screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight, Vancouver International Film Festival, Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, the Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival, Cosmic Rays, and Antimatter, among others. The film is included in the Duke University Libraries collection.

Jacqueline Surdell

Website | Instagram

Sponsored by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess

Jacqueline Surdell is a Chicago-based artist working across sculpture, painting, and performance. Using rope, industrial textiles, drawing, and found materials, she creates large-scale fiber constructions that reimagine landscape as a site of memory, grief, and transformation. Through labor-intensive processes of knotting and weaving, her work explores tensions between softness and structure, abstraction and allegory, and the body’s relationship to place, drawing on personal and collective histories, myth, and iconography. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Occidental College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo presentations at Secrist | BEACH, Devening Projects, Apparatus Projects, Gallery COMMON, and The Armory Show, among others. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship recipient and has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ragdale, Millay Arts, and Fountainhead. She is represented by Secrist | BEACH.

Leilah Babirye

Website | Instagram

Sponsored by HRF

Leilah Babirye is a multidisciplinary artist whose sculptural practice transforms discarded and everyday materials into works addressing identity, sexuality, and human rights. Using debris gathered from the streets of New York, she carves, welds, burns, and assembles sculptures and masks that reclaim narratives around LGBTQI identity, drawing on African mask traditions and the visual language of blacksmithing. Her use of cast-off materials references the Luganda slur abasiyazi (“sugarcane husk”) and repositions what is rejected as resilient and sacred. Born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda, Babirye studied at Makerere University and later relocated to New York after being publicly outed, receiving U.S. asylum in 2018. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions with Gordon Robichaux, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and was featured in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). Her first U.S. solo museum exhibition opened at the de Young Museum in 2024.