The Sandbox Announces Its Inaugural Cohort of Artist Residents in Joshua Tree

Four artists — a playwright-poet, a painter, a playwright-journalist, and a photographer-director — will gather in the High Desert this summer for the first residency session of The Sandbox, a new artist residency founded by playwright Al Sierra.

JOSHUA TREE, Calif., May 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ --The Sandbox, a new artist residency in the high Mojave Desert, today announced the four artists who will form its inaugural cohort. Karina Billini, Charles Chaisson, Gloria Oladipo, and Ambe J. Williams will live and work together at the Sandbox from July 30 through August 9, 2026 — an eleven-day summer session at the foot of Joshua Tree National Park.

Selected from a competitive first-year pool, the cohort spans the disciplines the residency was built to hold together: theater, literature, painting, photography, and film. All four will be in residence simultaneously — sharing meals, studios, and the vast desert quiet.

"I wanted to build the place I needed when I was starting out — a room of one's own, with four co-conspirators, at the edge of something vast. This cohort is a dream made manifest." — Al Sierra, Founder

The Cohort — Summer 2026

Karina Billini

Playwright & Poet Brooklyn, NY

Karina Billini is a Dominican-American playwright, poet, and educator from Brooklyn. A recent graduate of Juilliard's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, she is a proud alum of The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group, the New Harmony Project Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, Pipeline PlayLab, and Gingold Theatrical Group's Speakers' Corner. Her plays have been workshopped and produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Alliance Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Teatro Vivo. Her play Apple Bottom received the EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from The New School and a BA from Marymount Manhattan College. Through poetic language and NYC imagery, Billini captures the limitless hope, fierce perseverance, and quiet loneliness of first-generation, working-class, POC communities.

Charles Chaisson

Painter & Abstract Visual Artist Arnaudville, LA

Charles Chaisson is an artist and New Orleans native residing in Arnaudville, Louisiana. His abstract paintings delve into the world of psychosoma, language, and perception. He studied at NOCCA|Riverfront, St. Augustine High School, The Ringling College of Art & Design, and SVA in New York. Over sixteen years of freelance illustration work, he became an adjunct professor at RISD before returning home to Louisiana to be near family. He now serves on the board of Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on coastal regeneration and community aid, and is the founder of Levity, a nonprofit focused on designing systems to meet human needs in ecologically harmonious ways.

Gloria Oladipo

Playwright & Journalist New York (from Chicago)

Gloria Oladipo is a playwright based in New York, proudly from Chicago. She writes Black comedies about Black families who are generationally unhappy, who do not know how to love each other, but do the very best they can. She is a Public Theater Emerging Writers Group Fellow, a Velvetpark Writers Fellow, and the 2024 recipient of the Dramatists Guild Foundation Thom Thomas Award. Her work has been developed at New York Stage and Film, the Lucille Lortel Theatre, and Boston Court Pasadena. Oladipo is also a cultural critic and journalist — formerly a race and equity reporter at the Guardian US, and the 2023 recipient of the ATCA Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian. BA, Cornell; MFA in Playwriting, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

Ambe J. Williams

Photographer & Director Brooklyn, NY

Ambe J. Williams is a self-taught portrait and commercial photographer based in Brooklyn. She holds a BFA in Theatre Arts from the University of the Arts, and everything she learned in her decade-long experience as an actor directly influences her approach to photography — how she directs performances through the lens, capturing moments of humor and humanity. Recently signed to Great Friends Agency for commercial representation, her directorial debut Circle of Shame premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival and won the Audience Favorite award for Best US Short. Select clients include UMG Verve, Audible, Lincoln Center, ViiV Healthcare, Novo Nordisk, and Banana Republic. Whether creating work for campaigns, key art, or editorial publications, her images carry a motif that evokes softness, depth, and joy.

About the Founder — Al Sierra

Al Sierra is a New York City-born and based playwright, writer, and actor, and the founder of The Sandbox. He received a BSc. from Cornell University and worked for years in advertising as a copywriter and creative director before embarking on his journey as a storyteller. His plays include clean, The Peak, and …when the sea comes home, and his work has received developmental support from The National Black Theatre and The National Queer Theater. He is a 2022 Learning to Love Fellow of The Gatekeepers Collective and a member of The Public Theater's 2023–2025 Emerging Writers Group.

In 2017, after years of writing and creating in the city, Sierra drove west on a road trip that would change his creative life — somewhere between the chaos of New York and the vast openness of the California desert, he found Joshua Tree. What began as a search for clarity became a long love affair with the landscape: the eccentricities of the high desert, creative community, the endless sky, the silence that speaks volumes. He returned again and again, drawn by something he couldn't quite name but deeply understood. The Sandbox was born from that return — a place where other artists could experience the same transformation, where creativity could flourish in the embrace of the desert's timeless beauty, and where a small cohort could find, for a short time, the room to play, create, and imagine.

His guiding principle for the residency is the one he wished he'd had as a young writer: the essential is the space to experiment, play, imagine, make mistakes, build, knock down, and build again — just like a sandbox.

About the Property

The Sandbox sits on a 10-acre parcel on the western edge of Joshua Tree, California, purchased in the fall of 2023 and located just five minutes from the West Entrance of Joshua Tree National Park — an 800,000-acre expanse of Mojave high desert. The main campus was designed by Seth Brayton and May Lee Birks of the acclaimed architectural firm Brayton + Birks — both graduates of the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning — in close collaboration with founder Al Sierra, a fellow Cornellian. Their approach integrates the structures seamlessly into the landscape, blurring the boundaries between interior sanctuary and desert wilderness.

Each resident has a private studio and bedroom. Shared spaces — a communal kitchen, a long dining table, a porch open to the sky — are the places where the cohort gathers for meals, critiques, and the long evenings for which the property was built. Accommodation, studio access, and meals are provided for the full length of each session; residents arrive to begin working on day one.

The Sandbox is designed for focused work in small company. Its first summer session hosts four artists by intention, not by constraint.

Press Contact
Barbara Saint Aime
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About The Sandbox

The Sandbox is an artist residency in Joshua Tree, California, committed to fostering an environment of mutual respect, creative generosity, and care. Established in 2023 and launching its first residency session in summer 2026 under the founding direction of Al Sierra, it offers multidisciplinary residencies for writers, musicians, visual artists, composers, photographers, directors, culture makers, thought leaders, and scientists. Each session is designed around a small cohort, shared meals, private studios, and the silence of the desert. The Sandbox is currently raising development funds to support future cohorts and expand access; for more on the program and upcoming sessions, visit thesandboxcalifornia.com.

SOURCE The Sandbox