Faculty and Alums Receive United States Artists 2025 Fellowships
The School of the Arts is well represented in the United States Artists 2025 Fellowships. Among this year’s recipients are Associate Professor and Chair of Visual Art, Miya Masaoka, Theatre alum Shayok Misha Chowdhury ‘16, and Writing alum Joan Naviyuk Kane '06.
The Chicago-based nonprofit awards each recipient $50,000 in unrestricted funding as well as access to professional development resources. The fifty recipients are artists of all career stages working within and across diverse fields, including architecture and design, visual art, dance, film, music, theater and performance, and writing. Each recipient was anonymously nominated to apply by a rotating group of art professionals.
Masaoka, a composer, sound artist, and musician, has created work for orchestra, video, and installation. Through embodied perception of vibration, her work seeks new modes of listening in order to explore the natural and man-made worlds. Her work in improvisation has led to recorded and performed collaborations with fellow artists such as Pauline Oliveros and Cecil Taylor. A Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and Rome Prize Fellow, venues for her work have included the Venice Biennale, Tanglewood, and the Park Avenue Armory.
Chowdhury’s work as a writer and director has earned him numerous awards in both fields, including an Obie Award for directing and Whiting Award for writing. He utilizes his partial fluencies in Bangla and English to break down language and rebuild it in his own fashion—inviting people to retune their ears to their own “peculiar music.” His playwriting debut, Public Obscenities, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His poems have been featured in many journals, including The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, and Hunger Mountain.
The author of eleven collections of poetry and prose, Kane has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other prizes. Additionally, she has co-edited several anthologies, including the forthcoming Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) and the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (House of Anansi Press, 2017). Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq, Kane has raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, and now in Oregon, as Associate Professor at Reed College.
“We are honored to announce the 2025 USA Fellowship with this wonderfully skilled and multifaceted group of fellows,” said USA president and CEO Judilee Reed. “Much like this cohort, our support through the USA Fellowship is enduring and manifold, extending beyond a momentary and monetary contribution to establish a durable and sustainable relationship that artists may draw on at each stage of their careers.”
Since its founding, United States Artists has awarded more than $40 million to more than one thousand artists. See a full list of this year's fellowship recipients here.