Summer Institute – Beverly Residency

June 22 – June 28, 2025

Give yourself the time you’ve been craving to be creative with the camaraderie of fellow art educators. Montserrat’s Art Educator Summer Institute offers a week-long session to reconnect with your artist self. Participants will be immersed in our studio spaces, building on their art practice while learning new skills to bring back to the classroom.

“It was a great way to kickstart the summer and get into a good art-making groove.”
–2024 Summer Institute participant

LOCATION: Montserrat College of Art is woven into the vibrant Arts District of downtown Beverly, MA. Our campus is just three blocks from the beach and five train stops from Boston. Summer in Beverly is bursting with inspiration. Explore nearby Dane Street beach, attend a community summer concert at Beverly Commons, or take a free yoga class at beautiful Lynch Park.

ACCOMMODATIONS: Apartment-style accommodations create an authentic artist-in-residence experience with shared common space, kitchen, bathroom, and double or single bedrooms.

COST: The cost is $700 for shared accommodations (double bedroom) or $850 for a single bedroom and includes:

  • Participation in two studio art workshops (4 days of instruction)
    • Morning session: 9am–12pm 
    • Afternoon session: 1pm–4pm
  • Individual and group studio space
  • An optional field trip (Wednesday) to the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester and picturesque Rockport, MA, full with galleries, shops, and ocean vistas. 
  • Daily continental breakfasts
  • A welcome reception on Sunday and a closing reception on Friday where participants share the work they’ve created during the week.
  • 30 Professional Development Points (PDPs)

“I would definitely recommend it as an opportunity to get back into a creative flow, learn some new skills, and spend time in community.” –2024 Summer Institute participant

Applications are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis until the program is full.
If you have any questions regarding the application process, please contact [email protected].

“The impact of the whole program really got me motivated and re-inspired. It gave me many tools to take home.” –2024 Summer Institute participant


Workshops will be announced in 2025.
Past workshops have included:

The Poetic Landscape with Loren Doucette

Join artist Loren Doucette to learn how to record the ENERGY & RHYTHM of the day through gestural mark making while directly working on a beautiful location. During this class, you will be introduced to a way to rhythmically “search” the landscape for relationships vertically and horizontally while recording the natural directional forces. The class will focus on the importance of “differences” while creating a play of sizes, shapes and colors. You will be encouraged to explore expressive mark making to capture the feeling of the landscape rather than drawing it realistically using the local color or departing from it entirely with non-naturalistic color. You will be supported in seeking the rhythm, flow and movement of the day with your own poetic sensibility. Bring the medium you are most confident using and Loren will help you develop your confidence in expanding the idea of the landscape. 

Illustration: From Sketch to Finish with Greg Orfanos

In this course, students will be making an evocative image to create a more intriguing illustration. We will begin with learning how to craft an illustration from the early idea stage, to the client-ready sketch, and then on to a full-color finish. To aid in the development of a concept, students will learn problem-solving techniques through the use of thumbnails and word association. Visual communication skills will be strengthened while learning how to use composition and reference for more effective storytelling in their work. Color studies will then be explored as we move into the finished illustration. Class critiques will occur at certain stages during the process in order to help each student make improvements for stronger illustrations.

Creating Puppets with Blyth Hazen

In this course, we will work from a simple pattern to create a muppet-style fleece moving mouth puppet with arm rods. Each puppet can be customized depending on the creator’s whim. During the second half of the week, participants can build an additional puppet and/or create prototypes of mechanisms to move eyes, eyebrows, fingers or other puppet body parts. As puppets take form, we will explore rudimentary performance exercises to help these wee ones find their individual puppet voices and tell their own stories! Machine and hand sewing experience is helpful but not essential — bring your reading glasses to help thread those needles!

Paper Cutting with Catie Nasser

Papercutting is a rich art form filled with historical and cultural traditions. In the class, students will learn various paper-cutting techniques and styles using both a X-Acto knife and scissors. Learn how to transform an image or an illustration into your own original work of art.

Alternative Photographic Processes with Patricia Scalio

Experience the art, science, and magic of handmade photography. Looking into the history of the camera obscura, we will construct viewing cameras and pinhole cameras producing paper negatives and design a photogram collage using found objects. Demonstrations on hand-coloring techniques and instructions on how to transform a room into a working darkroom lab using minimal equipment will follow. All of the techniques are geared to 3rd grade through high school students.

Deepening Your Relationship With Painting and Drawing with Loren Doucette

Exploring the nature of the creative process and our own unique creativity is the focus of this class. Learning by submerging yourself in the materials that speak to you most, you will find what lifts your practice and what may set you back. Through seeing and deep listening, you will gain clarity on ways that work best for you. You will be encouraged to work in any medium that calls to you and to try mixing dry and wet media. This is a time to try the things that you have been putting off. As a group, we will seek that freedom of expression that allows for true discovery. You will be supported by instructor Loren Doucette who will speak to the group each morning with inspiring notes from her workshops with Tim Hawksworth and La La Zeitlyn. Loren will work individually with each artist throughout their process.

Acrylic Glazing Techniques with Greg Orfanos

In this class, students will be taught a glazing technique with acrylic paints. You will learn how to slowly build up color by applying acrylic paint in thin layers over an existing full value drawing. We will begin by sketching out several rough value sketches, followed by some color studies. Then the most successful sketch will be transferred to a final surface. Using various pencils, we will bring the sketch to a complete value drawing. Then we will solidify our warms and cools by adding thin washes of color. Finally we slowly build the color until the piece is finished.

Assemblage and Collage with Ruth Bauer

This studio workshop will delve into the playful art of collage and assemblage, with participants constructing images and low relief panels with paper, fabric, found images and objects, wood, paint, ephemera, and anything else that adds color and texture to their pieces. Exploration of a wide range of historical and contemporary manifestations of collage and assemblage, such as the work of Dada artist Hanna Höch and contemporary artist Mark Bradford, will provide food for thought and inspiration.

Nearly Non-Toxic Intaglio with Haig Demarjian

Intaglio printmaking is infamous for being fraught with hazardous chemicals. Acid used for etching is the most notorious of all, producing toxic fumes and destroying human flesh; not to mention the disposal issues, as well as dangerous and costly shipping and storage.

Also, inks and grounds demanding petroleum-based solvents for clean up are not only exposure hazards but also require prohibitively expensive ventilation for the safety of those using them. What a headache.

The “Nearly non-toxic Intaglio” workshop will show you how to replace acid with a miraculous etchant that produces no fumes, requires no ventilation, and is not a danger to human flesh – AND it etches zinc like a son-of-a-gun! The solution is very easy to make yourself, more convenient to purchase, transport, store, and is much less expensive than nitric acid. Not only that, but the whole process “from soup-to-nuts” is practically non-toxic! In this workshop you’ll produce an intaglio print– utilizing hard ground, etchant, ink, and clean-up — with the entire process being no more toxic than cleaning your bathroom.

The expressive potential of direct mark making (non-etchant based) intaglio methods will also be demonstrated, including engraving, drypoint and electric tools.

Tunnel Books with Catie Nasser

Tunnel Books, also called Telescope Books, are three dimensional books that one can look through to reveal creative worlds and artistic views. In this class, students will learn to develop a story concept and turn that into layers of unique imagery illustrating stories, memories, poems, and more. The tunnel book is a very adaptable structure. Students will be encouraged to play around with size, materials, and production methods to discover what else is possible!