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Artists-in-
Residence
Since 2023, a professional artist has joined our community, guiding girls to connect with themselves, each other, and this special place through the power of art. These artists are connected through their own Onaway experiences and the return to camp is powerful for the alumna and the campers alike.
Ellen Langford
Previous artists
Ellen Langford, 2024
A painter rooted in the landscapes and rhythms of the American South, her canvases capture the tender relationships between people, animals, and the land they share. Her years working as a paramedic deeply shaped her eye for quiet, human moments, and that warmth and attentiveness lives in every composition. Through layered, textured brushwork she builds whole worlds, ones we don't just see but feel.
Nancy Winship Milliken, 2025
Nancy is a place-based environmental artist located in New England but working throughout the world. Rooted in a deep reverence for the natural world, her work spans a wide range of mediums united by a single purpose: finding ways to deepen our connection to the earth. Her practice is as much about the journey as the final piece, honoring process at every stage. Through gathering wild materials, weaving, molding, and burning, she invites both hands and senses into an intimate conversation with the land.
Ann Joslin Williams, 2026
A celebrated novelist and short story writer, Ann has earned recognition from some of the most prestigious literary institutions in the country, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her fiction, which has appeared in renowned publications across the country, is shaped by a deep connection to place and the natural world. She brings that same spirit to Onaway as an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and a storyteller with much to share.
A sampling of art & nature experiences
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Ellen Langford, 2024
Ann Joslin Williams, 2026
It was an honor to be the Artist-in-Residence this summer at Onaway. What a pleasure to work with different groups of campers, encouraging them to write about the trips they’d recently returned from. I asked them to recall details and images to make their experiences as vivid as possible. It was a lot of fun to hear stories about hiking, sailing, camping, rain, and snakes!
After the girls wrote about their actual experiences, I asked them to use their imaginations to venture into fiction. What if the boat had capsized? What if there was a door in a tree and you walked through? What if you came upon a little kid lost in the forest? How exciting it was to hear what they came up with--underwater fairies, a talking bear, and whole worlds of magic. The girls were eager to share what they’d written out loud.
I told them a little bit about my own writing and how some of my memories of being at Onaway, especially hiking and canoeing trips, appeared decades later in my short stories and novels.
Nancy Winship Milliken, 2025
In the summer of 2024, I brought a publicly generated, site-specific environmental project to the camp. The project's premise is to introduce the idea that if we could interpret or speak “Nature,” what would we hear her say? Whether it is the earth or wind, the animals, the lake or insects, if we listen closely enough, the sounds around us might be translated into words. What are those words?
The soundscape of Onaway is rich; from the wind in the pines, the lapping of the waves on the shore, the morning birds, to the startled and scolding chipmunks. We can hear a different “voice of Nature” than when we are home in a busy life, in the car, at school, on the playing field, or in band practice. Here, it is uniquely Onaway.
We asked each girl to listen to the other-than-human sounds at Onaway and imagine what the sounds of Nature are saying. What might it feel like to be an animal or a lake during these times? It asks us to empathize with another species. It offers a voice for those not able to speak.
The concept of Earth Press Project: Listen is inspired by the former Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord who mused in his poem Dispatch from Gaia, if he could translate the sounds of Nature. Mother’s singing to us now in a loud soft voice, “Put your ear to the air and ground and sea.” Mother’s speaking in so many languages that are nonetheless one. Mother’s quacking and chirping and barking and purring and growling and braying and snorting and yodeling and keening and grunting and laughing and hissing and screaming and whispering. Mother’s speaking silently in every language: listen."
Ellen Langford, 2024
From her website about her Appalachian Trail Project:
At age 13, I attended Camp Onaway in New Hampshire. This flatlander made the cut for the intermediate hiking club, and I still vividly recall rising above treeline on the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains. I could see forever! This southern girl, trained from birth to be demure and undemanding, felt powerful and free, and when I learned that this same trail went all the way from Georgia to Maine, I decided then that I would one day hike every step of that trail.