This Spring, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America is proud to welcome a new cohort of seven Artistic Practitioner Fellows. United by a shared focus on race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, fellows critically engage with lost and buried stories, experiences of race and migration, Black feminisms, and public art through film, printmaking, sonics, and the written word.

Supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this skilled group of media makers will convene for weekly workshops that aim to make space to develop their projects in community with one another. 

Learn more about them below.

Providence-based visual artist Becci Davis draws inspiration from their upbringing on a military installation in Georgia named after a Confederate General. Their work explores archives, commemmoration practices, memory, landscapes, and connections to place. Becci’s award-winning work has been shown nationally and locally. 

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (SAMMUS) is a black-feminist-rapper-producer. After receiving her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell, she joined Brown’s faculty as the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music, where she teaches classes on songwriting and feminist sound studies. Since 2010, SAMMUS has written, produced, and recorded an award-winning body of music characterized by explosive energy, stream-of-consciousness style confessions, and an audience as diverse as its lyrical matter.

Writer Victor Yang comes to CSREA from Boston, by way of roots in Southern China and the American South. His experiences as an organizer for immigrant justice, including as a lead educator for a labor union of over 18,000 workers, shape his work. Yang’s writing has been published widely and received support from Macondo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied movements for racial equity.

Founder and Director of Aubin Pictures, Catherine Gund BA’88 is an Emmy-nominated producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on social transformation of all kinds–racial justice, reproductive justice, and environmental justice. Her films have screened around the world, telling the stories of activists, artists, and pathbreakers.

Studio Artist Toby Sisson’s drawing, painting, and printmaking practice incorporates community-based service learning, collaborative public art, and curatorial projects through the lens of history and race in America. She has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. She is Associate Professor and Director of the Studio Art Program at Clark University.

Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock Nations) explores the worlds of Indigenous Fantasy through performance, film, and fiction. She is the Artistic Director of Safe Harbor Indigenous Collective, where she works to deconstruct the pedagogy of the arts within Native communities in the NYC education system.

Christian Campbell is an acclaimed Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist, and cultural critic. Campbell’s poems combine linguistic influences from across a wide spectrum, from modernist poetry to soul music. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, he has received grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Arvon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center and the University of Birmingham.