Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors Creator & Curator Susannah Mills
THE DOOR WAS RIGHT HERE, 2025
Performance by Jasmine Albequerque Croissant. Developed at the Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors Residency (LAWS) at BKN, this work was instigated by a personal video of the initial discovery of her destroyed family home from the Woolsey Fire of 2018. As a survivor of this kind of loss, Albuquerque Croissant experienced the earth swallowing everything she owned. She speaks of wanting to be swallowed as well, and a catharsis evolves from the symbolic action of this on stage. Combining themes of motherhood, birth, death, and rebirth, this work explores the power of nature to absorb and transmute loss.
Video and performance in collaboration with Rick Gradone, with Wren Petrichor Ossman and additional footage by Jane Szabo
Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors (LAWS)
Creator & Curator Susannah Mills
Susannah Mills’ art and curatorial practice are directly connected to her work as an End of Life Guide, relating to the deep psychology of death and rebirth of life and spirit, and how human relationships make life come into existence. The residencies she creates are deeply connected to transmutation, nature and morph with new environments.
In January 7, 2025, Mills experienced the total loss of her home, art studio and community in the Eaton Canyon Fire. The result of this trauma gave her the gift of nothing to lose. Through an art grant she attended residency at BKN in Björkö, Sweden. Her work went from mostly painting into full expansion with new mediums and utilising large-scale installation. Susannah also became devoted to giving this experience to other fire survivors.
Following her stay she created the Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors artist residency in May, 2025. She partnered with Stockholm-based artist and curator Anna Viola-Hallberg and New York-based artist Rick Gradone, bringing thirteen artists severely affected by the fires back to BKN in September, 2025. For two months, they collectively healed, formed a new artist community, and created work scalable for exhibitions.
LAWS hopes to bring more fire survivors back to Sweden, furthering the alliance created between the two countries and giving other artists the opportunity to expand, create, and recover.
@losangeleswildfiresurvivors
@susannarama
Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant
Dance & Choreography
Jasmine Albuquerque is a choreographer, dancer, educator and physical
storyteller. She is a co-founder of the projection mapping dance trio WIFE and has performed with companies such as Hysterica, Blue13 Bollywood, Collage Dance Theater, and Ryan Heffington’s Fingered.
She has done movement direction for Beyonce, Rihanna, St Vincent and Jennifer Lopez while creating and collaborating in performances such as Soft Sex, Istanbul Light Festival, TEDx SoCal, KTCHN, We Are The World, Frequency Festival, Jane’s Addiction and Hecuba. Most recently, she choreographed for NIN and Trent Reznor at Coachella in 2026.
Various venues include the Hammer Museum, Zebulon, The El Rey, The Wiltern, MOCA, The Ford, Orpheum Theater, and LACMA. Jasmine has choreographed for Katy, Perry, Ivy Park, Puma x Balmain, St. Vincent, Devendra Banhart and danced in videos for Beck, Laura Marling, The Weekend, Miguel, Verve Records and many more.
She has a degree in History from UCLA and trained in contemporary and psycho dance at the Edge Performing Arts Center and in Budapest, Hungary. She has been teaching dance for the past twenty one years in and around Los Angeles, Europe and Mexico and frequently collaborates with her Earthworks/Light&Space Land Artist mother Lita Albuquerque.
@jasminealbuquerquecroissant
www.jasminealbuquerquecroissant
Rick Gradone
Rick Gradone holds a B.A. in Art History from Fairfield University in which he studied painting independently with Peter Michael Gish. Functioning at the intersection of geology and religion, his work imagines a new inclusive religion with the earth as its central figure. Structured as studies for shrines and monuments, his rock paintings and sculptures imagine spaces of worship and contemplation for all beings and suggest that revelation about this relationship has the power to create a new human responsibility to each other and to the planet.
He has done residencies at Creekside Arts in Humboldt, CA, Belgrade Art
Studio in Serbia, and La Wayaka in the Atacama Desert in Chile, Artesumapaz in Colombia, and BKN in Björko, Sweden. He is a co-curator for the Los Angeles
Wildfire Survivor Artist Residency and his work has been featured in Marie Claire Maison, Residence Magazine, Architectural Digest, and Medium. He lives and works in Delhi, NY.
@rickgradoneprojects
Wren Petrichor Ossman
Wren Petrichor Ossman is a Research and Lens-Based Visual Artist born and raised in Altadena. They received First Class Honours in Fine Art Photography at The University of the Arts London. Ossman has exhibited domestically and in the United Kingdom, Italy, Stockholm, and South Korea. Their previous experience includes a virtual residency in collaboration with Ecofutures+Videotage and UAL, BKN, as well as a Risograph Printing Program at Fort London.
Ecological grief and queer hauntology have always been prevalent in their work, which magnified after experiencing the Eaton Fire. Ossman lost digital work nearly finished for an upcoming exhibition, as well as part of their archive, due to soot and ash contamination.
Wren’s work serves as a mirror, the visual opposition of the fire-scarred environment of Altadena, creating a conversation between dry sage-brush and the forests of Björko, a journey from a drought-ridden landscape to the damp, moss-covered earth by the Baltic Sea.
@wren_ossman
