Today, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the recipients of the 2025 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, an initiative that supports artists exploring innovative approaches to technology and new media. Administered by United States Artists, the Fellowship awards five artists annually with unrestricted grants of $50,000.

Launched in 2021, the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship recognizes artists who are expanding the boundaries of creative practice through emerging technologies — including artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, immersive installations, video game design, digital fabrication, and software-based work. Fellows use these tools in thoughtful, radical, or poetic ways, pushing the field forward and critically engaging its possibilities.

In addition to the unrestricted $50,000 award, recipients gain access to financial planning support and are featured in Shift Space, the fellowship’s annual online publication fostering dialogue among artists, writers, and technologists. Coinciding with today’s announcement is the release of Shift Space 5.0, the latest edition of the publication. Featuring essays, poetry, and prose, this year’s issue continues to explore critical ideas and experimental practices shaping the intersection of art and technology.

Artists have always shaped how we understand the world. The Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship celebrates that enduring power while embracing new tools to do it,” said Kristina Newman-Scott, Vice President for Arts at Knight Foundation. “This fellowship is about more than technology. It’s about investing in visionary artists whose practices challenge dominant narratives, expand civic imagination, and invite us to see and feel differently. Through Shift Space and their individual work, these Fellows are not just experimenting with media, they are reshaping cultural discourse, bridging disciplines, and helping us build more connected, expressive communities. We are proud to support them, not just for what they make, but for how they move us forward."

As technological advancement increasingly shapes our collective reality, this year’s Knight Arts + Tech Fellows offer ambitious engagements with these tools — recasting them as pathways to liberation, reimagined pedagogy, and radical self-authorship.

The 2025 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows are:

Akea Brionne (Detroit, MI) is an arts-based researcher working at the intersection of lens and textile media and artificial intelligence. Brionne's practice analyzes the contemporary consequences of Western colonial and imperial histories and their suppression of Black and Indigenous ways of life and being, specifically in the Americas and the Caribbean.

Antonia Wright (Miami, FL) is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Through a multimedia practice of video, coding, performance, photography, sound, light, and sculpture, Wright explores systems of power. The body is a principal element in her work.

Ash Arder (Detroit, MI) is a Detroit-based, interdisciplinary artist whose research-based works expose, deconstruct, or reconfigure physical and conceptual systems, especially those related to ecology and/or industry. Arder manipulates physical and virtual environments to explore materials, mark-making, mechanical portraiture, and sound design as tools for complicating the dynamics of power between humans, machines, and the lands they occupy.

Matthew Angelo Harrison (Detroit, MI) is a Detroit-based sculptor who uses resin to encapsulate objects from his ancestral past and his diasporic present. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; de Young Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; ICA Miami; Denver Art Museum; Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and more.

Michelle Lopez (Philadelphia, PA) is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. She explores feminist and race politics through the lens of a minority body — as a skin, a shell, a mirrored reflection, an object of desire, a protest. Her research and exploitation of industrial materials and technologies, exposes our finite societal systems by inverting cultural tropes through her process of building.

By providing unrestricted funding alongside platforms for critical engagement, the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship strengthens the arts and technology ecosystem through long-term investment in the individuals and artistic practices that fuel innovation. The fellowship’s impact extends far beyond a single grant cycle, fostering a community among artists and cultural workers and laying the foundation for continued growth across the field.

The 2025 Fellows were selected by Knight Foundation, United States Artists, and a national panel of field leaders, including artist Roopa Vasudevan, the Afrofuture Strategies Institute Founder, and Director Ingrid LaFleur, and Co-Director of the School for Poetic Computation Neta Bomani.

To date, the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship program has awarded twenty artists, each cohort spanning various practices, disciplines, and mediums, grounded in storytelling, speculative thinking, and community engagement. This year’s cohort builds on that legacy — foregrounding collaboration, education, and cross-disciplinary experimentation as they shape the evolving landscape of art and technology.

Complementary to this award is Shift Space, an annual digital publication that explores these intersections and highlights the Knight Arts + Tech Fellows. Guest edited by Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride and produced by United States Artists, Shift Space 5.0 features writing on each of this year’s Fellows, along with essays and conversations reflecting on the field. Contributors to this issue include Alexis Pauline Gumbs, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Denise Ryner, Monica Uszerowicz, Rua M. Williams, Tamir Williams, and Tawana Petty.

In addition to the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship announcement, the foundation is now accepting applications for the Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund. This initiative supports individual artists, nonprofit arts organizations, and arts collectives based in Miami, FL; Akron, OH; and Detroit, MI. The fund is designed to help integrate technology into artistic practice and expand audience engagement. Eligible expenses include equipment and software purchases, infrastructure upgrades, staffing or contractor support, website and app development, and digitization or archiving projects. Applications are currently open through June 20, 2025.

For more information on the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship and the 2025 cohort of recipients, please visit kf.org/artstechfellows2025.