This Book Is For You If:
You’ve dreamed about starting an artist residency
You want to build a creative community in your town
You are an artist exploring new ways to support other creatives
You want to create spaces where creativity can flourish
You are curious about how artist residencies actually work
Released April 21st! Pre order now!
Nurturing Creativity
A Guide to Building Your Artist Residency and Cultivating Creative Community
Shannon Amidon
Are you an artist, creative, or community-builder dreaming of starting your own artist residency or creative program? Nurturing Creativity is a practical and inspiring guidebook that helps you turn that dream into a sustainable reality.
Drawing from her real-world experience founding The Verdancy Project, a multidisciplinary, nature-based artist residency in the Pacific Northwest, artist and creative entrepreneur Shannon Amidon offers step-by-step guidance, heartfelt insights, and stories from the field.
This book covers everything you need to know about:
How to start an artist residency program
Different residency models and structures
The business basics of running a residency
Marketing and attracting artists
Lessons learned from running The Verdancy Project
Real stories from residency directors and artists
Maintaining your own creative practice while leading others
Nurturing Creativity goes beyond logistics, it’s a book about connection, generosity, and the courage to create something bigger than yourself.
Shannon Amidon is an artist, writer, and community builder who lives and works in Troutdale, Oregon, where the forests, fields, and creek edges of the Pacific Northwest find their way into everything she makes. She is a wonder seeker, a beekeeper, a lover of insects, old books, and the kind of beauty that most people walk past without noticing.
For more than twenty years, Shannon has created mixed-media and encaustic artwork using beeswax, natural earth pigments, vintage paper ephemera, pressed botanicals, and found objects. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide, collected by institutions including Google, Kaiser Permanente, and Genentech, and recognized with grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, International Encaustic Artists, Silicon Valley Creates, and others. She has been an artist in residence in Canada, Iceland, Costa Rica, and Oregon, among other places.
Shannon is the founder and director of The Verdancy Project, a multidisciplinary nature-based artist residency and creative community on a 4.5-acre property in Troutdale, Oregon.
Her writing explores creativity, ecology, and the art of building a life that means something. Her essays on art and creative practice have appeared in notable publications, and she is the author of Nurturing Creativity: A Guide to Building Your Artist Residency and Cultivating Creative Community and the anthology Cycles of Creation: Five Years of The Verdancy Project.