Meet the 2024 USA Fellows

“I’m uninterested in the traditional hierarchical structures of filmmaking and am much more informed by experiences with collective creation and improvisation in theater, which is a practice based on mutual trust and care.”

“Vodou culture has always been my source of inspiration as it introduces abstract compositions that encapsulate new ways of thinking and creating. Each rhythm produces its own unique set of resonances, and all of these sounds have at some point influenced one another, merging into a vibrational ocean of Haitian ancestral legacy.”

“Emotionality, spirit, presence, and transformation are the foundation of my composition and performance style; the kind that triggers a cathartic experience — this is where I dwell as an artist.”

“In classical composition, I use the wonderfully flexible and colorful orchestral tools to express my experience as a Chickasaw person.”

“Stories are at the heart of my work; they are where Indigenous knowledge lives.”

“To tell the Asian-American story, it must be the whole story of this country. One must investigate not just one’s own community but its intersectionality with other marginalized communities.”

“I aim to create inclusive, joyous, and inspiring collaborations where the art we create is a reflection of the society we live in and building toward a future society we want to inhabit.”

“I need rooms of compassion and I need my Art to be able to be the container of my pain, my tears, and the joy that I deserve. The joy that you deserve too. We are a tired nation. A tired world.”

“I enjoy researching history and creating something out of nothing with my own hands but my real fuel is the impact my work has on the next generation; it feeds our youth’s sense of self and identity as well as their cultural awareness.”

“I am on a constant quest to learn all that I can about my culture and the Haida art form.”

“I use traditional teachings from the past to create weavings that share my voice as an artist and activist living in today’s world, looking ahead for sustainable solutions to ensure the continuation of traditional teachings and sustainable practices for future generations.”

“[Sweetgrass Basket Weaving] is one of the rare arts of our country that is found nowhere else in America. Gullah Sweetgrass Baskets are a national treasure.”

“It’s no surprise that when I came into my own, the music I would compose and perform would be informed by the world that came before. Balancing the aesthetics of today and yesterday has been a challenge and a guide for me.”

“My work is aimed at directly impacting the prison industrial complex, by creating art that explores the daily realities of structural violence, incarceration, detention, and policing in communities across the United States.”

“I want to express the Filipino condition of adapting to a changing and overwhelming environment, increasingly overpopulated with colonizers, technology, waste products, and climate change.”

“In my work as an artist, I have witnessed firsthand how a handful of dedicated visionaries are able to band together, source materials, create something new, and then offer it up into the world.”

“As the sociopolitical climate of the US-Mexico border remains controversial, we continue the conversation of permeability and interrogate how the perception of the actual line of the border can be reimagined as a site of thriving, beauty, abundance, and creativity.”

“We aim to collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices in order to create sites of acknowledgment that promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth.”

“I work beyond borders and linguistic boundaries, emphasizing the importance of considering historical contexts through a multitude of artistic languages, resulting in an approach that allows for a more holistic understanding of these complex narratives.”

“My work is the lens through which I try to understand humanity as a whole and my place within it. Art cannot be substituted for direct action, but I do think it can lead a person there.”

“I write the stories I wanted to read as a young Black girl in white spaces that offered me very little reflection of my own image — stories of outsiders who eschew easy categorization, stories of the absurdities of everyday life and the absurdities of Blackness in everyday life.”

“The entanglement that drives my work is political because it orients us away from ideas of an integrated, singular subjecthood and toward a sense of being that is mutually created and cared for.”

“What others have hidden I seek to reveal. When boxes constrain, when legacies oppress, I seek to liberate.”

“By integrating design thinking to the production of visual poetry, I’m able to question the conventions of reading, model new publishing futures, and reimagine what poetry readings can be.”

“I’m interested in the gap between what happened and how we talk about it — how that gap operates in the space of an individual life, in the space of a family, and in the space of a country.”

“Catharsis holds a mighty sway over what I choose to make because I believe we often respond to the story that mirrors our humanity. It’s important to me that art helps its witnesses to feel.”

“I want to create channels of access for indigenous populations to engage and embed their worldviews within architectural design and actively reintegrating suppressed identities and indigenous knowledge as valid within the context of the architecture field.”

“My work encourages everyday people to dream about liberatory futures in their built environments.”

“Through design praxis I explore tangible responses to systemic injustice in space and the environment, taking action where and when people, living beings, and the planet are unfairly constrained from opportunity or access to quality of life.”

“Our work is committed to unlearning the conventions of architecture with hopes of developing a spatial practice that is open and generous.”

“With verbal meaning so imprecise and mutable, visual language became my way of expressing the world. Clay, whose malleability allows me to create objects that appear soft and playful, has allowed for endless possibilities.”

“I am defiantly a weaver. Through this position, I reconsider tapestry as a modality in which image, matter, technology, and embodiment provide productive conflicts for constructing form.”

“Each of my jewelry pieces marks a time, a place, or a memory. They are linked together with a similar visual language where I utilize black and white enamel marks on the surface of copper to indicate my hand and tick marks to represent time passing.”

“My work materializes the relationship between words and things; it manifests my ambition to understand loss and absence and how we ask words to hold meaning in the same way glass holds light.”

“In my studio practice, weaving and the loom act as a code-switching device between anachronistic technologies, elusive identities, speculative histories, and illusory desires.”

“My artwork contemplates narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, longing, and faith. By weaving together familial and historical narratives, mapping data, and magical thinking, my installations evoke ritual moments of physical, metaphysical, and spiritual escape.”

“My focus centers around dissecting notions of femininity in myth, metaphor, and the performance of Bharatanatyam — all of which reflects the aesthetics of both the culture in which it is rooted as well as the broader tapestry of global cultures.”

“I love my transgender body, and I love choreographing dances from the graceful, informed, and powerful location of my transgender body.”

“My work as a transdisciplinary designer, artist, and urbanist has been rooted in dynamic diasporic understandings of the Black experience, and I have used my craft to advocate for, design, plan with, and visually showcase the stories of communities of color.”

“In my methodologies of working with the body I look for authenticity: an exploratory dance composition that is combative, romantic, sublime, sexual, absurd, and indecipherable. For me, this achieves changes in the behavior of human thought.”

“My art poses and processes my questions, such as: What might freedom — a reality that elevates culture, life, wisdom, the intangible and mysterious — look like? Can we achieve it?”

“My dance work lives at a place where social environments, contemporary performance forms, and dancing collide. With an aesthetic orientation that sits on a pop-fringe borderline, my work is born from house parties, mosh pits, spectacle, music videos, nightlife, and dance teams.”

“Whether the content is real or fictional, I want audiences positioned in front of my characters, not above or below, with no chance to look away. It’s not a Dickensian gaze. It’s laser focused on the dirt, so you can see the flowers grow.”

“As a filmmaker living in the empire, I have the unique position to use my privileges to create films that contribute to efforts to decolonize US imperial legacies.”

“My films are personal, psychedelic, and spiritual — aiming to challenge genre norms and authentically represent Indigenous stories, often in the Navajo language.”

“Through portraiture and historical reimagination, I have experimented with both old and contemporary archives as a means for better understanding my own country, its history, and the possibilities that might exist for all tenses of time.”

“My intention is to make poetic an idea-driven, propositional, and self-implicating art situated within social anxieties by reimagining sites of contest, controversy, and consequence into those of generative public pedagogy, curiosity, and discourse.”

“I aim to trouble the assumptions baked into the beliefs and technologies that mediate our existences. I aim to make sense of the world, so that we can remake it differently.”

“With my community, I dream and steward spaces for radical pleasure, asking ourselves, How can we be together? Building physical, digital, virtual, ancestral pathways to each other again and again.”

“In many works, the repetition of seemingly banal material reveals unusual depth and variety within sounds and the spaces in which they are heard, provoking the audience to notice and ask questions about the peculiar world we inhabit.”