BRENDAN BASHAM NAMED AS FIRST-EVER CULINARY RESIDENT

Ucross Foundation, the acclaimed artist residency program on a 20,000-acre ranch in Wyoming, announced today the inaugural recipient of its new culinary residency: Brendan Basham (Diné), the acclaimed writer, artist, and chef from the Zuni Mountains in western New Mexico.

Launched this year, Ucross’s culinary residency program provides an individual with uninterrupted time and space to focus on their creative practice in and out of the kitchen. The Ucross Fellow receives private living accommodations, access to a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen, and an optional supplemental studio for interdisciplinary work.

“We are excited to be able to offer this new layer to our residency program,” said Caitlin Addlesperger, Ucross President and Executive Director. “We invite chefly artists or artistic chefs to experiment, learn, and collaborate with the Ucross chef, artists, and community.”

After reviewing a slate of qualified candidates, Ucross awarded the inaugural culinary residency to Basham. 

“Brendan Basham was the ideal first recipient,” Addlesperger said. “As an alum, he shares our artist-centric values and is familiar with our program operations. He also brings a strong culinary background — including previously cooking for a group at Ucross.”

Born in Alaska and raised in northern Arizona, Basham earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Bachelor of Arts from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He worked as a chef for 15 years, co-owning two successful restaurants in Puerto Rico before writing his award-winning debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished.

Basham began work on this novel during the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Writers in 2021. In 2022, he returned to Wyoming to cook for the Ucross Native American Art Curatorial Convening, which featured top curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and beyond. 

Basham has received numerous honors, including the Poetry Northwest’s inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Writers, along with several fellowships across the country. He is currently a fiction faculty member at University of Nevada, Reno — Lake Tahoe’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts Program. 

During his six-week culinary residency at Ucross this summer, Basham worked on his second novel about a “former chef who must return home to the Navajo reservation after his mother dies from cancer caused by uranium mines that still haven’t been properly cleaned up after 70 years,” Basham shared. 

When he wasn’t writing, Basham spent time exploring the Ucross Ranch, experimenting in the kitchen, and cooking for fellow artists.

“During the culinary residency, the artmaking is more hands-on, of course, and as a writer I’ve missed that tactile space, playing with food, using local produce and proteins. It is such a joy to feed other creative souls,” Basham said. “It truly was a pleasure cooking good things for good people. It is a reminder of how essential a meal is for human connection: It brings people together, builds social and cultural capital, and offers meaning and beauty for our hungry minds.” 

Since Ucross’s first residencies were awarded in 1983, more than 3,000 artists have received the gift of time and space. Distinguished Fellows include Annie Proulx, Terry Tempest Williams, Elizabeth Gilbert, Ann Patchett, Bill Morrison, Theaster Gates, Anthony Hernandez, and Tayari Jones. National Book Award winners Susan Choi, Sigrid Nunez, and Sarah M. Broom have been residents, as have Academy Award and Tony winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Emmy Award winner Billy Porter, Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, and former three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. 

You can learn more about the new culinary residency program here.

To learn more about Basham and his work, visit his website here.