Engaging Artists Fellowship

Engaging Artists Fellowship is a year-long professional development program from More Art that helps emerging NYC-based artists and community organizers build a sustainable socially engaged and public art practice. Fellows receive a stipend of at least $750 per person and participate in mentorship, structured workshops, and collaborative project development.

The fellowship curriculum focuses on connecting art to community issues, equipping artists with tools to sustain long-term civic practice. Eligible applicants must be NYC-based artists of any discipline, over 18 years old, not currently enrolled in a degree program, and able to commit 15 hours per month. The 2026 application deadline was April 9, 2026.

Engaging Artists Fellowship – More Art Engaging Artists Fellowship More Art’s year-long Engaging Artists Fellowship is designed to help emerging NYC artists and community organizers develop and sustain a socially engaged and public art practice.

The Fellowship curriculum includes mentorship and structured opportunities for peer feedback and community building, cultivating the cohort as a collaborative and collective learning environment, alongside workshops and artist talks tailored to participants’ interests and needs, and access to programming opportunities in New York City.

The infrastructure and laboratory provided by More Art allow selected emerging and underrepresented artists to gain a deeper understanding of the history and vitality of public and socially engaged art. This fellowship encourages artists to not only expand and to develop their social practice but also to promote use of socially engaged art as a tool for change.

EA Fellows will finish with a culminating presentation at the end of the fellowship year. Many fellowship projects become multi-year initiatives, and, as such, the culminating presentation is not a conclusion of the fellows’ work but rather an opportunity to highlight their budding creative practice and project journey. The 2026/27 application for the Engaging Artists Fellowship is now open!

The deadline to apply is April 9th, 2026 by 11:59pm EST. Click here to apply to the Fellowship Timeline + selection information March 9, 2026: Application opens. April 9, 2026 by 11:59 EST: Applications due.

May/June 2026: Shortlisted candidates will receive interviews. June 2026: Selected Fellows will be notified. August 2026: Fellowship year starts.

July 2027: Fellowship year ends. We held a Virtual Information Session for this year’s Fellowship on Wednesday, March 18th. In this session, we introduce More Art, share general information about the Fellowship program and structure, address key questions on the application, and answer participant questions.

Click here to watch the recording of our 2026/27 Fellowship Information Session. Please email madison@moreart. org with any questions about the Fellowship or application process by April 6th and we will respond as soon as possible!

The Fellowship brings together a cohort of 6–8 artists who engage through a hybrid model of virtual and in-person gatherings, with an emphasis on in-person participation to cultivate a shared, collective learning environment. Each Fellow will receive monthly 1-to-1 individualized mentorship sessions with More Art staff.

Additionally, the Fellowship Leader will facilitate monthly generative workshops, invited artist talks, discussions, and collaborative feedback sessions , tailored to the practices and needs of the cohort. The program will culminate in culminating presentations by each Fellow , public or otherwise, of or about work developed over the course of the program.

At the end of the year, Fellows can expect to receive a small stipend of at least $750 each (each member of a collective will receive a stipend) to be used for expenses related to their practice. Fellows can also expect to spend 15 hours per month on average on More Art-related work.

Some topics covered in previous workshops include: Education for and history of Socially Engaged Art (SEA) Step-by-step Guide to Creating Socially Engaged Public Art How to Propose your Public / SEA Project Equitable practices and ethics to consider for SEA The Engaging Artists Fellowship offers insights and strategies to collaborate with communities, rebuild and shape our society, and build sustainable careers.

More Art welcomes applications from NYC artists of all disciplines, including but not limited to: visual artists, performers, choreographers, designers, and new media artists. Currently enrolled undergraduate students may not apply. Collective applications are welcome.

An interest in socially engaged practice is crucial. The Fellowship is a program for incubation, experimentation, collaboration, and implementation stages of early socially engaged public art projects. We understand and encourage artists who see the combination of socially engaged work and creative practice as a long-term commitment no matter how much of a body of work they’ve generated previously.

Interest in More Art’s work and eagerness to learn (no prior experience in public art or socially engaged art necessary!)

Willingness to present, support, and attend work produced in community and public settings, as opposed to galleries and museums Strong commitment to More Art’s values, including but not limited to social justice and public engagement, inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and collaboration Commitment to intersectional thinking and artmaking Willingness to act with care and respect toward all collaborators, including More Art staff, other Fellows, and community members Eagerness to contribute to a nurturing environment with and for Fellows Interest in establishing and/or sustaining partnerships with community-based organizations, advocacy groups, agencies, neighborhoods, places, individuals and/or groups of New Yorkers Belief that art and artists are integral to empowering social justice movements by creatively illuminating social issues, engaging new audiences in activism, and catalyzing public discourse Not enrolled in a degree program during the time of the Fellowship NYC-based during the time of Fellowship We ask that Fellows not commit to more than 2 other residencies and/or fellowships during their Fellowship year with More Art to avoid scheduling conflicts and over-commitment Fellowship output + expectations Over the course of the Fellowship year, Fellows are expected to: Develop a Theory (or theories!)

of Change , with help from the Fellowship Leader Develop a set of individualized goals for the Fellowship year Develop a culminating presentation (public, or otherwise), with assistance from More Art staff, of or about the work you’ve developed during the More Art Fellowship Attend monthly 1-to-1 individualized mentorship meetings with More Art staff Attend monthly in-person and virtual workshops/artist talks Have a question?

Contact us Please email madison@moreart. org with any questions about the Fellowship program or application process by April 6th, 2026 and we will respond as soon as possible! Explore some of the conversations and events facilitated by Engaging Artist Fellows and More Art.

Andrew Freiband: Rethinking Systems, Reaffirming Artists’ Insights “Art is not the production of artworks; art is research. And if we view art as research, we recognize the outcomes as our knowledge, and I’m interested in the kinds of knowledge that artists have unique access to. ” A conversation between Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran on creative collective Xenoduo, More Art's 2024 EA Commission Artists.

Freya Powell: Recovering Lives Lost and Giving Voice to the Silenced An interview with Freya Powell —“Ambiguous loss has been a huge part of the pandemic. So many people have lost loved ones — they just disappeared from our lives, we haven’t been able to gather to properly mourn these losses. ” Towards networks of collective care in the street.

/ Hacía redes de cuidado colectivo en la calle. María Bonomi and Lucía Cozzi examine the power of collective art making in fostering community care. Engaging Artists Commission Huiyi Chen (she/her) is an artist, researcher, writer, and educator working across moving images, performance, and digital technology.

INTELLIGENT MISCHIEF is a creative studio and cultural futures lab that creates public art and social dream spaces that offer the necessary space and time needed to unleash Black imagination to shape the future. orion (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer based in New York. Isabella Vargas (she/they) is a multimedia artist who works at the intersection of media and activism.

Naya Lee Chang (she/her) is an NYC-based public artist who remixes the built environment with site-specific sculptures that visually riff on existing architecture or infrastructure, and conceptually uncover stories from a place’s real or imagined past.

Brandon Shaw McKnight (he/her/they) is an incredible multi-hyphenate artist—director, singer, choreographer, performer, and teaching artist—whose work fuses opera, theatre, dance, sacred music, and visual art into transformative, boundary-breaking experiences. Guided by Black Feminist Insurgency, asmara (she/they) is dedicated to the reality that freedom is a place we can build and arrive at in this lifetime.

Wenjun Chen (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist working on new media, focusing on exploring the mixed relationship between real and virtual. His work involves the fields of self-identity, internet and technology, data and personal data. Camille-Louise “Cam” Kouba Mbayo (she, they, we) is a queer Congolese-born Brooklyn-based abolitionist, nerd-artist, daughter, sister, friend, process becoming.

Tatiana Lahera Kalainoff (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer, data visualization artist, environmental/3D maker and educator. With experience at the intersection of data + design, she transforms complex information into impactful narratives, using data analytics + visual design.

Bella Stenvall (she/her) is a queer, mixed Filipino movement artist based in the unceded homeland of the Lenape people (colonially known as Brooklyn, New York). She considers herself a life-long student of many movement practices.

Tracia “trae” Banuelos-Rovaris (she/they) is an artist, social researcher, and facilitator based in Harlem with roots in Wichita, KS, where she developed a foundational, reproductive justice approach that guides all of their work. Cindy Hwang (she/her) is an artist and organizer who lives and works on unceded Lenape land (Brooklyn, NY).

She organizes both autonomously and with Art Against Displacement, a collective of artists and cultural workers that opposes predatory development in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Dena Igusti (they/them) is a queer Indonesian Muslim writer born and raised in Queens, New York.

They are the author of CUT WOMAN (Game Over Books, 2020), which has been listed as a 2022 Perennial Award Winner, Entropy Mag Best Of 2020-2021, and 2020 Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick. Cal Fish (they/them) is a cross-disciplinary artist from Sea Cliff, NY based in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.

Their work is multi-modal and immersive, often employing interactive sonic tools/sculptures, experimental pop music, video, sewing soft and social sculpture. Nava Derakhshani is a New York / Johannesburg-based mixed-media artist. Mei Ling (she/they) self-identifies as a cis-gender, queer Chinese-American and Gong Fu Cha Practitioner.

Jessica Angima (she/her) is a first-generation Kenyan American organizer, meditation teacher and social practice artist. In a constant state of process, she facilitates intimate community through the exploration of art, justice, and contemplative practice. Danielle (she/they) is a blind, queer and Blackarican native New Yorker dabbling in organizing, performance and poetry.

Carrie Sijia Wang (she/her) is an artist and educator based in New York. Ray Jordan Achan (he/him/his) is an Indo-Caribbean, Brooklyn based theater-maker. ayo (Alicia) Ohs (she/they/A.

O.) is a performer, educator, and community builder interested in what makes people laugh, cry, and continue. Buena Onda Collective (Dominika Ksel and Camila A.

Morales) is an eco-centered, paradigm shifting, transmedia collective that uses sculpture, installation and interactivity to playfully explore ideas around restoration, remediation and interspecies communication during the Anthropocene. María Bonomi & Lucía Cozzi María Bonomi (they/them) y Lucía Cozzi (she/they) are a Brooklyn-based artist duo from Argentina. Maya Simone Z.

(they/them) is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator from the South. Tanika I. Williams (she/her/hers) (b.

1981, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an award-winning filmmaker and performance artist. Yeseul Song is a South Korean-born, NYC-based immigrant, artist, and educator who uses technology, interaction, and participation as art media.

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose work focuses on place, our relationship with the land, and its impact on our identities. Amy Ritter grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania in a double-wide mobile home. She is influenced by working class people, their stories, workplaces, homes, and bodies; specifically those living in mobile homes.

Sean Desiree is a self taught artist and furniture maker, born and raised in the Bronx. Amy is a NYC based multidisciplinary artist and educator originating from Louisville, Kentucky. Her artistic practice spans from creating installations, paintings, drawings, mixed media sculptures, to publicly engaged works.

Andrew Freiband is an artist, filmmaker, producer, educator, and research-artist. He is the founder and director of the Artists’ Literacies Institute (ALI), an experiment in arts education and engagement that helps artists reframe their artistic practice as research, and then connects them to new possibilities for intervening meaningfully in social, ecological, political, civic, and economic systems.

Chantal Feitosa is a Brazilian American artist and educator from Queens, New York. She works between image-making, language, and pedagogy to explore themes of belonging, idealism, and care. Freya Powell uses time-based and linguistic platforms to explore language and its relationship to memory, myth, and history.

Inspired by South Korean online LGBTQ communities in the 2000s, Hyperlink Press is an online publication and curatorial collective to create intersectional platforms to showcase work by artists navigating the in-between spaces. Hanae Utamura is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist and an educator based in New York and Tokyo. Her work engages with historical memory, questioning the notion of progress in modernity, ecology and technology.

Yemisi “Juliana” Luna is on a journey as a multidisciplinary artist, leader, mentor, and narratorial creator. Mafe Izaguirre is a New York-based artist, graphic designer, and educator. Luisa Valderrama's work draws on her autobiographical experience of growing up between the rural region and the urban life in the city of Bogota.

Cody Ann Herrmann is a New York City based artist and community organizer with an interest in participatory design methods, public space, and urban resilience. Bryanna Bradley is a body-based broad, notorious ballet class crybaby, and Southeast Queens local circa 1995. Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist and activist.

Her practice advocates for changing commercial culture by using popular media genres to create discomfort and subsequent catharsis. Interdisciplinary artist Mengxi “Althea” Rao creates social engagement models to facilitate open and playful conversations around topics that are traditionally associated with shame and negativity, such as inherited privilege, mental illness, gender and sexuality.

Nolan Hanson is a trans artist whose practice centers the role of embodiment in contemporary social systems. I create theatre because I am always looking for an antidote to loneliness. I believe that everyone is lonely.

I make performances in which the audience is empowered to interact as a means of creating temporary communities in which strangers are, briefly, asked to take care of each other. Holland Cotter, New York Times art critic, wrote once that current political art does not address power, but shows how it works. A great deal of my artwork shows the sad workings of my society’s power.

Julian Louis Phillips is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance, sculpture, video, and participatory practices. Manuel Molina Martagon is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video and social engaged projects. Zaq specializes in large scale, site-specific sculptures, absurd objects and potentially treasonous conceptual projects.

Ro is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work grapples with memory, intimacy, and place. Candace Thompson is a media maker and land steward fascinated by the feedback loops of ecology, economics, culture, history, media, and daily human interaction. Floor Grootenhuis is a Dutch/Kenyan artist whose contemporary art practice is conceptual and socially engaging, collaborative and gives new value to the ‘everyday’.

Born in Kintampo Ghana, Tijay’s work has been exhibited globally including the Longwood Art Gallery NY, Green Drake Art Gallery PA, Lincoln Medical Center NY, The National Museum of Ghana, and Ravel D’Art, Cote d’Ivoire. Adam Golub is a video artist, documentarian and storyteller. His work seeks out the intersection between journalism, art and activism by looking for those points where theory meets lived experience.

Noé Gaytán is an artist, writer, and educator. He was born and raised in Southern California and is now based in Brooklyn. Melissa Liu is a Chinese American cultural worker, activist, as well as emerging oral historian and social sculptor.

The Workers Art Coalition works to amplify the voice of social justice movements through the vision of labor, ​manifested in public art forms. A native New Yorker, Álvaro Franco's interest in film led him to participate in the Ghetto Film School, and enroll in the Film/Video program at the City College of New York, where he earned his B. F.

A. degree. Tiffany Fung is an artist, organizer and cultural worker passionate about the human experience.

Camila Ruiz is a Colombian artist living in New York City. Her artwork consists primarily of handmade embroidery pieces, with figurative yet cartoonish images. Edward Salas (b.

1990, Queens, New York) Is an artist and educator whose work explores ideas of representation and identity as a Latinx in the United States.

Nguyen Tran Quynh // Richard Tran is a Vietnamese Amerasian American, born and raised in the intersecting Black, Latinx, and Vietnamese neighborhood of Uptown, Chicago, spending most of their childhood days in their family's hole-in-the-wall restaurant, pinching their nose shut while refilling bottles of fish sauce and wiping down crusty sriracha caps. Vanessa is a multimedia artist from Ecuador.

Born in Callao, Peru, Bryan Rodriguez Cambana is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator living and working in New York City. Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, filmmaker and oral historian who is passionate about creating interactive, participatory stories documenting social change.

Aldo’s sophisticated eye for minimal landscapes and his almost flemish-peinture approach to portraiture make an unexpected contrast with the committed themes he chooses to represent. Ethan Shoshan is an artist, community activist, and non-profit computer a/v technical consultant committed to building communities and support around social justice, art and activism.

Arya Samuelson is a writer and editor whose work straddles the lines between myth and realism, poetics and prose, fiction and truth. Ilaria Ortensi is an artist and art educator with an interest in architecture, urban landscape and the representation of contemporary spaces. ANEETA MITHA is a Bay Area-based visual artist using photography, film, and new media to interrogate concepts of identity, visibility, and political complacency.

Dani DeLade received their Masters from the School of Visual Arts and is a licensed creative art therapist. Emily Chow Bluck is an artist, educator, and organizer based in New York City. Jonathan Gardenhire (b.

1992, Lower East Side, New York) is an artist and art worker whose work explores representations of race and sexuality, often with an emphasis on Black male embodiment. Ligaiya Romero (they. them.

theirs. siyá) is a documentary filmmaker and visual artist working with collective memory and the decolonial imagination.

Whether making buildings from cheesecloth, envisioning underground networks between fungi and tree roots, or designing open-ended dialogues as starting points for reflection and community activism, Priscilla Stadler explore the resilient and precarious structures of connectedness - sometimes among humans,and sometimes among plants.

Bridget Bartolini is a socially engaged artist, educator, and aspiring oral historian who uses story-sharing to strengthen community connections. Soi Park is a Korean artist working in the photographic medium. Uday K.

Dhar is an artist of South Asian descent who has lived in the United States since 1971. Trokon Nagbe is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and former BRIC Visual Artist in Residence who was born in Liberia, West Africa. Sara Z.

Meghdari (b. 1988 in Karaj, Iran) is an Iranian-American Interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to parents of Chinese descent, Chee Wang Ng (b.

1961) lives and works in New York City. Andrew Nemr is one of the most diverse tap dance artists today. An international performer, choreographer, educator and speaker, Andrew has played with Grammy Award winning musicians across multiple genres, founded and directed the tap dance company Cats Paying Dues, and co-founded the Tap Legacy™ Foundation, Inc., along with his mentor Gregory Hines.

Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Michelle Melo is an artist living and working in New York. Her work has been shown internationally including South America, Europe and The United States. Born in Lima, Peru, studied Art at the "Escuela Nacional Superior de Bellas Artes del Perú" and graduated from art school with several awards and honors.

Christie Neptune is an Interdisciplinary Artist working across video, photography, sculpture, and performance arts. Grèzes is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in video. In his work he searches for the intriguing and confusing shapes that involve perceptual issues.

Annie Kurz is a Hungaro-German interdisciplinary artist and designer currently working and living in Süßen, a small town near Stuttgart, Germany.

Alon Nechushtan’s music adventures has brought him to various far corners of the globe such as the Yokohama ‘Rejoicing Sounds’ Festival in Japan with his contemporary orchestral compositions, The Manila Cultural Center of the Arts, with his Clarinet Concerto for the Philippines Philharmonic Orchestra, The Sao-Paolo Brazil Jewish Music Festival with his groove based Quintet Talat, Toronto and Montreal with his words beyond Jazz Trio and Tel Aviv New Music Biannale with his Compositions for Large Ensemble.

Hidemi Takagi was born in Kyoto, Japan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Takagi has exhibited both nationally and internationally (London, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris). Julia Rooney is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the space between analogue and digital media, gesturing towards a world in which the two tenuously coexist.

Jamie Marie Rose [b. Peoria, IL] is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates anything from cast sculptures to ephemeral, site-specific installations. Anthony Heinz May has completed numerous public installations in recent years, including locations at McKinley Park in Chicago, Governors Island, Manhattan, Quebec and Roanoke, VA.

Travis Fairclough is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Sue Jeong Ka’s work seeks to meet communal needs.

From commemorations of female Asian immigrants from the 19th century, to a trilingual community newspaper and a piece assisting queer and immigrant homeless youth in New York in applying for federally issued IDs, she mobilizes traditional art spaces to provide community services and in so doing to critique the public structures in which we exist.

Fanny Allié's practice is influenced and directed by refuse, lost and overlooked elements of daily life. Flávia Berindoague’s works address subjects that intertwine human activities and their effects on social relations and nature, approaching themes such as collective memory, language, temporality, nature, geography, and violence.

Kate Weigel grew up in Eastern Maine on the land of the Wabanaki Confederacy, and maintains strong ties to her home there. Anne Peabody's multidisciplinary practice involves correlating human experience and the natural world. Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle works as a socially engaged and time based media artist in the Rio Grande Valley along the US/ Mexico border.

Corinne Cappelletti is a performer, teacher and maker of dance as well as Somatic Movement Therapist based in Brooklyn, NY. Anna Adler is an artist and educator working in sculpture, installation, and performance with a focus on staged narrative, storytelling and social practice.