Faculty and Alums Named 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows
Adjunct Associate Professor of Writing Jeremy Tiang, Theatre alum Zizi Majid '20, and Film alum Sushma Khadepaun '20 are among the artists granted the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship this year.
Established by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) in 1985, the fellowship draws on support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature to advance artists across the state and its Tribal Nations in pivotal stages of their careers.
Tiang, hailing from Singapore and residing in Flushing, Queens, has won international acclaim as a novelist, playwright, and translator. They have translated over thirty books across the Chinese-speaking world, including Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, which was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Their novel State of Emergency, published by World Editions in the US and UK in 2025 and Epigram Books in 2017, won the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize; their short story collection It Never Rains on National Day (Epigram, 2020) was shortlisted for the same prize. Tiang co-edited the decolonial translation anthology Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis, 2022) with Dr. Kavita Bhanot.
As a playwright, Majid advocates for a shared humanity. Her plays, including On the Vessel, They Came in the Night, and Return to Fall, probe the chasm between global politics and individual fulfillment. She has been awarded the Pacific Rim Prize for Playwriting (Kumu Kahua Theatre/University of Hawaii Manoa), has been a finalist for the Princeton Arts Fellowship and the Blue Ink Playwriting Award, and has thrice been a semi-finalist for the O'Neil National Playwrights Conference. Her work has been developed at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Syracuse Stage, WP Theatre and the Dramatists Guild Foundation, and she teaches at Syracuse University and Hamilton College.
Khadepaun is an Indian-born writer and director based in New York. Her stories explore ideas of home and identity as they converge with immigration and feminism. She was listed as one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film (2021), and most recently was a Fellow at the Film at Lincoln Center’s Artist Academy. Her films have played at major film festivals including Venice, Stockholm, Atlanta, Dublin, POFF Tallinn Shorts, Palm Springs, IFFLA, and Hollyshorts. Her work has been featured on NPR, BOMB Magazine, Focus Features Digital, and Canal Plus, among others. Khadepaun is currently developing her first feature film, Anita, with support from SFFilm, Sundance, Film Independent, and Gotham.
Since its inception, the NYSCA/NYFA fellowship has awarded 36.5 million dollars in unrestricted cash grants to more than 5,000 New York artists across 15 disciplines. As recipients, Tiang, Majid and Khadepaun join the list of acclaimed fellows emboldened to freely pursue their creative visions.