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Fellow-Category: Creative Arts
Heather Courtney
Heather Courtney won an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award, and a SXSW Jury Award for her film Where Soldiers Come From. The film received great reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was broadcast nationally on the PBS program POV in November 2011. It made several Top 10 films of 2011
Anna Conway
Anna Conway lives and works in New York City, having received her B.F.A. from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Conway’s work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally at galleries and museums; for example, in New York at MOMA PS1; University Art Museum, Albany;
Claire Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California, in 1984 and raised in the Mojave Desert. She is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno, and the M.F.A. program at the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her short-story collection, Battleborn (Riverhead Books, 2012), won the Story Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize,
Pier Consagra
Pier Luigi Consagra was born in Rome, Italy, where he lived until attending Rhode Island School of Design, and then Brown University. Following graduation from Brown, Pier showed with the Jamie Wolff Gallery on the Lower East Side of New York City. He received an NEA and two NYFA awards—the first for painting, the second
Lu Wang
Composer and pianist Wang Lu was born in Xi’an, the ancient capital of China. Brought up in a musical family with strong Chinese opera and folk music traditions, she composes works that reflect a very natural identification with those influences, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities. Wang Lu’s works for
Steve Coleman
I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, a city that has always had a very distinctive character. The particular part of the city that I grew up in (the South Side) also had quite an esoteric and mystical tendency, but I was not aware of this when I was younger, only seeing this in
Gene Coleman
Gene Coleman is a composer, musician and director. He is the recipient of the 2013 Berlin Prize in Music Composition from The American Academy in Berlin. Since 2001 his work has focused on global culture and music’s relationship with architecture, video and dance. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with
Rachel Cohen
Rachel Cohen is an essayist and cultural critic, who writes about history, literature, and the arts. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Times, Threepenny Review, Believer, and McSweeney’s, and have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Essays. Cohen’s first book, A
Stephen Taylor
Stephen Andrew Taylor composes music that explores boundaries between art and science. His first orchestra commission, Unapproachable Light, inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Testament, was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 1996 in Carnegie Hall. Other works include the chamber quartet Quark Shadows,
Xavier Cha
Xavier Cha’s performance-based work revolves around modes of accessibility, exchange, and hierarchies of space and perception. Collaboration is often at play in her performances: Xavier has invited actors, dancers, musicians, programmers, cults, and clowns, among many other non-artist performers, to not only participate in her projects, but also to become protagonists in the work. Through
Mary Szybist
Born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 1970, Mary Szybist is the author of two books of poems, most recently Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013), winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. Incarnadine was also named a best book of the year by Slate, NPR.org, Amazon.com, and Publishers Weekly, and it received the 2014 Oregon Book
Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies
Christopher Castellani
Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels, each published by Algonquin: All This Talk of Love (2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award; The Saint of Lost Things (2005); and A Kiss From Maddalena (2003), which won the Massachusetts Book Award. His fiction and non-fiction have
Kathy Butterly
Kathy Butterly is an artist based in New York City. She considers her works to be both sculpture and painting. Standing on average four to eight inches tall, Butterly’s ceramic works have large personalities which command attention. Her approach to work is unique in that she fires each piece fifteen to forty times. This allows
Victoria Sweet
Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in medical history. She practiced medicine for twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing. In God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the
Rachel Sussman
Rachel Sussman is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. For nearly a decade she has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled all over the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older. This work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and
Stacey Steers
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. Through an intricate investigation of the nature of longing, she explores the ways desire provokes and mediates experience to create meaning.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith, lauded by critics as “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” is the author of six acclaimed poetry volumes. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah was winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, awarded to the best poetry book published in the United States the