Join us in welcoming our 2022-2023 Fellows & Media Fellows into the Kala community!

Kala’s fellowship programs support artists in their work to advance their craft, take artistic risks, experiment with new forms of art making, and tap into the transformative capacity of art to mobilize conversations about social, political, cultural, and economic issues. We're really excited to work with this talented cohort of artists!

These opportunities are made possible with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Bernard Osher Foundation, Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation. We will be featuring additional Parent Artist Residency Award recipients Demetri Broxton & Rupy Tut, and CCA Hamaguchi Fellows Joseph Blake and Alex Larsen in a separate newsletter coming soon!

Applications for Kala’s 2023-2024 Fellowship program will open later this month. Stay tuned for upcoming details by signing up for our newsletter or following us on Instagram @kalaartinstitute!

2022-2023 Fellows

Lani Asuncion is a Boston based multimedia artist working within public spaces to create socially engaged art by weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance in relation to their identity as a queer multicultural Filipinx.

Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist. In her practice she incorporates textiles, printmaking, and collage to explore identity, home, borders, and nostalgia. Paola’s practice draws from a diverse field of research ranging from magical realism to National Geographic magazines, family photographs and videos to found objects and the War on Drugs.

Rayelle Janell Gardner is a Black queer image-maker from Queens, NY. Rayelle’s bio-mythographic art practice explores themes of interiority, memory, and fantasy. Through experimental portraiture and image making Rayelle sets out to provide a visual entryway into Black literature and storytelling.

Sungjae Lee is a Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist who makes performance, installation, text, and video. Throughout his residing in the States, his practice has centered on the need for visibility and representation of queer Asians in a Western context.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, PhD is a multi-award winning Aniyunwiya interdisciplinary poet and artist. As a native of the occupied land of what is often referred to today as “Oregon” and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, and de-colonization are the driving forces behind her work. She recently completed a Fulbright Senior Scholar post in Bengaluru, India where she curated a poetry anthology in the colonizer’s tongue.

Khadijah Morley is a Tkaronto (Toronto, CAN) based artist. Through the process of etching and relief printing, Khadijah explores the complexities of Black womanhood through an autobiographical lens. She often uses self-portraiture to deconstruct the fallacy of a Black monolithic experience. She hopes that her subject matter serves to expand discourse surrounding Black subjectivity.

A special thanks to Sustainable Arts Foundation for supporting Fellowship artist Jessica Mehta.

2022-2023 Media Fellows

Meghana Bisineer is an Indian born artist, curator and educator. Making drawings, animations, films and installations, her work is shown internationally; across galleries, artist-lead spaces and international film festivals.

Nasim Moghadam is an Iranian born art educator and a multidisciplinary visual artist. Her installations focus on discrimination and hyphenated identity, and the constraints on women, their bodies, and their voices.

Rosa Park is a media artist, sound designer, and educator whose research interest is centered on the study of psychoacoustics, algorithmic composition for experimental film & video, sonification, sound sculptures, and the physicality of sound. Park explores various aural materials and their sonic characteristics in her work.

Trina Michelle Robinson explores the relationship between memory and migration through film, print media and archival materials. She wants to get to the root of lost memories, especially in relation to migration, whether the move forced or initiated by a search for new opportunities.