Out of 400 applicants, the South Mountain Community College Storytelling Institute was one of five artists selected for the 2026 Grand Canyon Conservancy’s Artist in Residence Program. Each year, the program invites artists to live onsite at Grand Canyon National Park to provide unique opportunities for visitors to engage with through contemporary art.
The SMCC Storytelling Institute, who received the honor of being the inaugural Local Artist in Residence, will bring something rare and entirely new to the program, a project titled “Living Voices: Stories at the Rim”. The residency will take place November 4 through December 15 on a Wednesday to Tuesday schedule.
During the six-week residency, Liz Warren, Director of the SMCC Storytelling Institute, along with 10 tellers from the Institute, will each spend a week engaging people at the South Rim while providing workshops for long-term residents and employees, visiting the local school and hosting at least one concert per week.
“For six weeks, ten remarkable storytellers and I will be trading tales with visitors from all over, right there at the rim, in a place that has held human voices for thousands of years,” said Warren. “Stories are how we come to belong to a place, and there is no place on earth like this one.”
The storytellers participating alongside Liz Warren include Coral Evans, Melissa Soza Fees, Doug Bland, Christopher Hooper, Joi Fletcher, Nereyda Martinez, Carly Davis, Summer Cherland, Kathy Eastman and Kyle Mitchell.
“The ten tellers joining me are some of the finest working today, each bringing their own traditions, voices and ways of holding an audience,” said Warren. “Visitors at the rim are in for something they won't find anywhere else.”
The group is composed of current and former SMCC students, adjunct faculty, full-time faculty and community storytellers, all representing the college through their personal expertise in the art of storytelling.
“I'm so proud to carry the Storytelling Institute and South Mountain Community College with me to the canyon — for over 30 years, we've been teaching that storytelling isn't just an art form, it's how communities know themselves,” said Warren.
