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Smithsonian American Art Museum Announces 2025–26 Fellowship Appointments - British Association for American Studies

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Smithsonian American Art Museum Announces 2025–26 Fellowship Appointments

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The Smithsonian American Art Museum will welcome twenty fellows for the 2025–26 academic year. Among this year’s cohort are four senior scholars, two postdoctoral fellows, twelve predoctoral fellows, and two Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows. Utilizing the Smithsonian’s vast collections, they will research the impact of music on the visual arts, works of craft produced by Black artists and artisans, artist-built environments in landscapes slated for urban development, and more. A directory of appointees that includes their project abstracts is available at https://americanart.si.edu/search/fellows?content_type=fellow&begin_year=2025.

  • Diane Ahn, SAAM-APAC-Terra Predoctoral Fellow in Asian American Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “‘Alien Trends’ in American Art: Issei Artists, Cultural Performance, and National Identity (1885–1942)”
  • Allison Bigelow, George Gurney Senior Fellow, University of Notre Dame, “The George Rogers Clark Statue at the University of Virginia, 1921–2021”
  • Rose Bishop, Big Ten Academic Alliance/Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California, “Idol Makers, Picture Takers: Snapshots of American Popular Music, 1945–2007”
  • Kim Bobier, Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow, Pratt Institute, “Capturing the Body: Embodying Racializing Surveillance in Contemporary Art”
  • Matthew Bowman, Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, University of Iowa, “Contested Lands, Fraught Waters: Images of Taos Pueblo and Its Northern New Mexican Terrain, 1900–1970”
  • Gabrielle Christiansen, Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University, “Salvage Reworlding Along the Renewal Frontier: The Creation and Expropriation of U.S. Artist-Built Environments, 1972–1998”
  • M. Comstock, SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft and Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellow, University of Minnesota, “Allen Fannin: Hand-Spinning and Weaving, ‘Nitty-Gritty Needs,’ and ‘The Black Craftsman Situation’”
  • Jesse Dritz, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Boston University, “What’s Up, Doc: How High School Students Reclaimed Documentary Photography in the 1970s”
  • Tatiana Flores, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Senior Fellow, University of Virginia, “Blackness, Indigeneity, Mixture: Race in Latinx Visual Representation”
  • David R. Harper, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, “Prepared Sky: Interference, Light, Flight, and Magnets”
  • Janina López, Will Barnet Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, University of Pittsburgh, “The Royal Chicano Air Force’s Comuniversidad: Public Art and Education in Northern California Since 1969”
  • Julia Modes, Audrey Flack Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, “Rosalind Constable’s Reports: Invisible Labor in Art Criticism”
  • Andrew Hansung Park, Big Ten Academic Alliance/Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles, “‘A Different Kind of Jazz’: Sam Gilliam and the Work of Improvisation”
  • Taylor Rose Payer, Betsy James Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow in Native American Art, University of Minnesota, “Crafting Kinship: Strategic Abstraction, Gender, and the Making of Modern Native American Art”
  • Casey Reas, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles, “Rewilding—New Performance Scores”
  • Clara Royer, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “One Spectrum, Many Worlds: Slow-Scan TV and the Geopolitical Turn of Media Arts (1977–1991)”
  • Joseph Semkiu, Big Ten Academic Alliance/Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California, “Art of the Airwaves: American Painting, Circulation, and Radio in the 1940s”
  • Hampton Smith, Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Making Against Slavery: A Material History of Abolition in the Early United States”
  • Nicole Woods, William H. Truettner Senior Fellow, Loyola Marymount University, “Acid Visions: Abstract Figurative Painting and the Afrofuturism of Bob Thompson”
  • Allison Young, Patricia and Phillip Frost Senior Fellow, Louisiana State University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, “Paper Trails: On Art and History in Plantationocene Louisiana”

Since 1970, SAAM has provided 809 scholars with financial aid, unparalleled research resources, and a world-class network of colleagues. Former fellows now occupy positions in prominent academic and cultural institutions across North and South America, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Applications for the 2026-27 cycle will open August 1st. Learn more at https://americanart.si.edu/research/fellowships.