Writing Fellows
* Indicates Second-Year Fellow
Nico Amador *
Nico Amador is a writer, educator, and community organizer from San Diego, currently based in Vermont. Amador’s writing has recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Poetry Journal, Bear Review, Foglifter, LA Review of Books, fourteen poems, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and has been recognized with the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, Blue Mesa Review Poetry Prize, the Breakout Poetry Prize, Outpost Vermont Fellowship, and the 2026 Gregory Djanikian Scholars in Poetry Prize.
Celeste Amidon
Celeste Amidon was born in London but has lived in America most of her life. Her writing has recently been published in Gulf Coast, Polyester, Rose Books, Sobremesa, and Broad Sound Journal, and is forthcoming in Exacting Clam. In 2025, her short story “Turtles” was selected by E.M. Tran as the winner of the New Ohio Review Ellis Prize for Fiction. Also in 2025, her short story “The Absinthe Drinker” was selected as the winner of the Gemini Magazine Short Story Prize. She won the Jerboa Lit Flash Fiction Contest, and came second in the inaugural Glossy Planet challenge. She was selected as a semi-finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, a finalist for the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, long listed for the Hope Prize, and shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. Celeste received her MFA in Fiction at Boston University, where she was a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow. She was selected by faculty as the recipient of the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction award.
Kenny Carroll
Kenny Carroll is a writer and poet born and raised in DC. In 2017 he was selected as the 2017 DC Youth Poet Laureate. In 2019 received the Thomas Lux Scholarship from Sarah Lawrence. His work has been featured in Georgia Review, Poetry.Onl, Lampblack, and Poetry London among others. He has been awarded fellowships from The DC Commission of the Arts, The Watering Hole, Breadloaf, Rosemary’s House and Obsidian. In 2023 he was selected by Roger Reeves as a Cave Canem Starshine and Clay fellow.
Kai Conradi *
Kai Conradi is a poet and fiction writer from Cumberland, B.C., whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere. Kai is the author of a chapbook, Notes From the Ranch. Their debut novel, Old Pal, will be published by both Hogarth and McClelland & Stewart in May 2027, and will be translated into French and German. After a FAWC Fellowship in 2024/25, Kai moved to Western Mass, where they currently write and work with sheep and goats as a solar grazing shepherd.
Elisabetta Croce
Elisabetta Croce is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned her MFA at the University of Idaho where she was marketing editor of Fugue and taught composition and creative writing. Libby’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Libby loves most things (except for bugs).
Ira Goga
Ira Goga is a trans poet from Reno, Nevada. They have received fellowships and support from the Ucross Foundation, Frontier Magazine, and the Academy of American Poets. They are a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project, where they were named a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature.
Mark Labowskie
Mark Labowskie is a San Francisco-based writer. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, American Short Fiction, Southern Indiana Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, Millay Arts, and Stanford University, where he has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer.
Eva Rosenfeld
Eva Rosenfeld is a writer and painter from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Lux Magazine, Dissent, Jacobin, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. She helped found Redbud Books in Bloomington, Indiana, and earned an MFA as a Goldwater Fellow in fiction from NYU, where she also served as the 2025-2026 Axinn Writer-in-Residence. In Provincetown she plans to work on a novel about interwar artists and a novella about plastic surgeons.
Max Seifert
Max Seifert lives by the Chicago River. He received an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and the Dorianne Laux Prize from NC State University in 2024. His poems can be found in publications including Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly. He edits the Schlub Cinema newsletter.
Yeldana Talgatkyzy
Yeldana Talgatkyzy is a Kazakh fiction writer and poet. Her work has been supported by Macdowell, McMormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), Brooklyn Poets, Under the Volcano Residency, and the Hubbard Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship. She has been awarded the Bullock Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Benjamin B. Wainwright Prize in fiction and selected as the finalist of the 2025 Ninth Story Regeneration Contest.
Visual Arts Fellows
Mitsuko 三津子 Brooks is a mail artist & archivist of mixed settler Japanese and European descent currently living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from Cooper Union, MFA in Painting and Drawing from UCLA, and MLIS & Certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, MoMA PS1, The Hammer Museum, Printed Matter and The Japanese American National Museum of San Jose, among others. She has participated in residencies at LMCC Arts Center, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Wassaic Project, and was awarded grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Edward & Sally Van Lier Fellowship. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Los Angeles Times, Boston Art Review, The Art Newspaper and other publications. Brooks’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Jeane Cohen
Jeane Cohen is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Her painting practice prioritizes material discovery, visual diversity, and deep engagement with the experience of thinking. Cohen’s paintings are invitations to see, presenting an endless arrangement of organizational strategies across works. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times by Seph Rodney and written about by critics Barry Schwabsky and Michelle Grabner. Solo presentations include at Francois Ghebaly NY, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The Maine Jewish Museum, Miami University OH, AIR Space Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania PA, Slag Gallery NY and Flying Object MA. Group exhibitions include at 56 Henry NY, Make Room Gallery CA, the Institute of Contemporary Art ME, Julius Caesar Gallery IL, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects NY, Jupiter Gallery NY, The Roger Brown Study Collection IL, Vox Populai PA, the University of Helsinki FI, Suffolk County Community College NY, and Edgewood College WI. Cohen is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, a John Anson Kittridge Foundation Grant, a Visiting Artist & Scholar in Teaching Residency at the Schneider Museum and Oregon Center for the Arts, and was awarded First Place in the Miami Yeck Young Painters Competition. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Art and Psychoanalysis from Hampshire College. She currently teaches painting at Brown University.
Abigail Dudley *
Abigail Dudley is a painter who is interested in liminal spaces between quotidian life and the surreal. Her work explores the malleable nature of perception, memory, and the poetics of space. Dudley received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Delaware. Dudley has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States and internationally, and is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield Grant in 2020, 2022, and 2025. In 2026, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Aaron Feltman
Aaron Feltman is a painter and woodcarver based in Kingston, New York. Feltman received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024 and a BFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2020. He is also an alumnus of the Yale Norfolk School of Art (2019). Other residencies include The Vermont Studio Center (2026), The Vermont Carving Studio (2026), Palazzo Monti (2025), Wassaic Project (2025), and the Macedonia Institute (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Between States, Chilli Art Projects, London, UK (2026); Log In, Fertile, Brescia, IT (2026); School’s Out, The Macedonia Institute, Ghent, NY (2025); What Lovers Do: RISD MFA Painting Thesis Exhibition, FLAG Art Foundation, NY (2024), Biomes, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, NY (2024); and A Room with a View, Vardan Gallery, CA (2023).
Katya Grokhovsky
Katya Grokhovsky is a Ukrainian-born, New York City–based artist and Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. She works across installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and performance. Grokhovsky has participated in numerous residencies and fellowships, including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Columbus State University Visiting AIR, Padnos Distinguished AIR at Grand Valley State University, Windgate AIR at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith, California Studio: Manetti Shrem Visiting AIR at UC Davis, Ekard AIR at Bucknell University, Sculpture Space, MAD Museum Studio Residency, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, SVA MFA AIR, Pratt Fine Arts AIR, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYC STAR Residency, Muhlenberg College AIR, BRIC Workspace, Residency Unlimited, Ox-Bow School of Art Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts AIR, Wassaic Project Residency, Saltonstall Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS Residency, Santa Fe Art Institute AIR and Watermill Center among others. She is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, the New American Fellowship, FST StudioProjects Fund, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant Prize and the Australia Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant to name a few. Grokhovsky’s work has been widely exhibited at institutions and galleries such as the Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, PS122 Gallery, AIR Gallery Biennial, NADA East Broadway, Romanian Cultural Institute, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Ceysson & Bénétière, Smack Mellon, BRIC Biennial, Hudson Valley MOCA, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Flux Factory, and many more. Grokhovsky holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, and a BA in Fashion Honors from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.
Nasim Hantehzadeh
Nasim Hantehzadeh is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. They received a BA in Art and Architecture from Tehran Center University in 2007, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Hantehzadeh’s main focus is developing large scale paintings and drawings using oil-based materials. They have created a visual language with elements such as forms, gestures, and colors which suggests an in-between space that is inspired by liminal states of being, where biomorphic forms co-exist. Their work draws on both personal and collective memory while challenging patriarchal concepts that have shaped our understanding of identity, personhood, gender, and sexuality. They have participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, and MacDowell. Their work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries and museums such as Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK, Nina Johnson, Miami, FL, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Paramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico, and is in the permanent collection of Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, CA. Hantehzadeh’s work has been published in House and Garden Magazine, Cultured Mag, Galerie Magazine, Something Curated, Art Maze Mag, and New American Paintings.
Miranda Holmes
Miranda Holmes is an artist currently living in Columbus, OH, whose paintings and drawings explore emotional landscapes, bodily sensations, and intimacy. She received her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University in 2022. Holmes has had solo shows in Berlin, Germany at Vorfluter Projektraum and Raum für Sichtbarkeit, as well as in the U.S. at No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH, and DePauw University, Greencastle, IN. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and I Like Your Work Podcast’s catalogue. She has participated in multiple group shows, including at Olympia, New York, NY, Urban Arts Space, Columbus, OH, and Curiouser KC, Kansas City, KS. Holmes has received various awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship, a DAAD Fellowship, the Ellen Battel Stoeckel award to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, and multiple Greater Columbus Arts Council Grants. Holmes has attended residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, Chautauqua Visual Arts in New York, and GlogauAIR in Berlin. In 2025, she was the Visiting Artist for Skidmore College’s Work + Space Residency, where she presented a solo show of her work at Schick Gallery. She co-organizes Dream Clinic Project Space, an artist-run space in Columbus, OH.
Paloma Izquierdo
Paloma Izquierdo investigates what emerges when built systems are repurposed beyond their intended use. Influenced by the improvised infrastructures found throughout Cuba, where adaptation becomes a means of resistance, she adopts strategies of improvisation, rerouting, and misuse to create sculptures that explore the poetic and political possibilities embedded in infrastructural systems. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Hesse Flatow, Murmurs, and Helena Anrather amongst others. Her work has been supported by the NYFA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and YoungArts.
Alina Perez *
Alina Perez creates monumental works on paper using charcoal and pastel, blending personal recollection and imagination to rethink familial history, personal trauma, and notions of identity that are rooted in both the individual and in geography. Her lexicon of symbols and environments pull heavily from her lived experiences as a Cuban-American raised in Miami, FL, examining the relationship between the dense and vulnerable life of the region’s tropical wetlands and the depth of human experience. Perez’s work has been exhibited at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; Atlanta Contemporary, GA; Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishers, London, UK; Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY; Deli Gallery, New York, NY; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; Company Gallery, New York, NY; and M+B, Los Angeles, CA. Work by Perez was included in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, the second edition of El Museo del Barrio’s triennial surveying Latinx contemporary art. In 2017, Perez was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME, and has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA; the Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI; and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Perez received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. The artist lives and works in Miami, Florida.
LJ Roberts
LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans narratives, people, and places. The artist creates conceptual and geographical maps of queer life of the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices. Roberts has exhibited work at the National Portrait Gallery and Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian, Stedelijk Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Barbican Centre, Pioneer Works, Victoria and Albert Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, FLAG Art Foundation, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Anchorage Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, National Academy of Design, Fragment Gallery, The 8th Floor, and New York Historical. Roberts received The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI+ artists in 2015, the Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art and Activism in 2019, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize in 2022. They were the 2023 Prensky Artist-in-Residence at Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis, and the 2023-2024 halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence at Bowdoin College. Most recently, Roberts was a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Roberts’ work is included in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum of Art, The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, and the National Portrait Gallery, Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art all at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Roberts lives between Providence, RI and Brooklyn, NY. They are represented by Hales Gallery.
