Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center Reveals 2023-24 Fellows

Twenty writers and visual artists from eight countries have been selected for the Fine Arts Work Center’s 2023-24 Fellowship program and will spend seven months in the town that inspired generations of creative luminaries like Eugene O’Neill, Jackson Pollock, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The Fine Arts Work Center counts authors Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, Jacqueline Woodson, Denis Johnson, and Ann Patchett; poets Louise Glück and Ada Limón; photographer Jack Pierson; filmmaker Jennie Livingston; and groundbreaking visual artists Jacolby Satterwhite and Tala Madani among its alumni. More than 1,000 fellows have passed through the program in its lifetime and have gone on to win, among other honors and awards, one Nobel Prize for Literature, two Poet Laureate appointments, four Pulitzer Prizes in fiction, four Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, four MacArthur Fellowships, and five National Book Awards.

The ten writers and ten visual artists in the 2023-24 cohort were selected from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants for the seven-month residency program, a rare “no strings attached” fellowship that doesn’t require recipients to teach or work and allows them to focus solely on their own creative development. The 2023-24 Fellows hail from Iran, Finland, Egypt, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Canada, Venezuela, and across the United States. The residency includes housing, workspaces, and a monthly stipend valued at approximately $50,000 per fellowship. The Fellows are chosen through a rigorous, blind jury process that is focused solely on the merits of their work. Aligned with its Strategic Plan, the Work Center has also offered an increased stipend and a new access fund for extraordinary fellows’ costs such as travel, moving, and visa processing. 

“We’re excited to welcome one of the most internationally diverse classes of new Fellows in our history,” said Fine Arts Work Center Executive Director Sharon Polli. “Our Fellowship program allows artists and writers uninterrupted time to focus on their work for seven months in a landscape that’s known for its beauty and solitude, giving them both the space to create and the support of a new group of visionary peers.”

“For me, it was total freedom to be the person I needed to be,” said past Writing Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri of her residency experience. “And so, in some sense, I’ve never left.”

In 2022, the Rona Jaffe Foundation established a new fellowship for an emerging woman writer of exceptional promise in partnership with the Fine Arts Work Center, in honor of celebrated author Rona Jaffe. The inaugural Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow is writer Hannah Perrin King, who won The Georgia Review‘s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry, and New Millennium Writings’ 48th New Millennium Award for Poetry. “To say my experience at FAWC was a gift does not begin to describe it. It was a portal, a metamorphosis. I am new, and for that I will always be grateful,” said Perrin King.

The 2023-24 Writing Fellows work in different forms spanning novels, essays, poetry, and short stories. The Visual Arts Fellows work in mediums including painting, sculpture, video installation, participatory projects in public spaces, and collage. The writers’ and artists’ practices draw on a diverse range of topics including immigration and identity, cross-border conflicts, and queer experiences from adolescence through adulthood.

During the residency, some Fellows share ideas with each other across disciplines, taking advantage of the Work Center’s opportunity for unique collaborations. Other past Fellows have spoken about how living near the sea for the first time in their lives has brought out surprising, powerful, and occasionally unsettling elements in their work. While in residence, Fellows have the opportunity to share their work, and experience their colleagues’ work, through public readings and exhibitions that are open to the community and are often attended by past Fellows, residents and visitors, leadership of the town’s cultural institutions, and many illustrious local artists and writers. 

“When I finished graduate school, I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. After I settled in, I found a path of rocks, called the breakwater, that led to the Long Point Light Station. The walk was about nine miles, round trip. That’s where I began to dream, to think of possibilities of a new life,” said current U.S. Poet Laureate and past Fellow Ada Limón.

The Work Center was founded in 1968 by a group of brilliant creatives, including painters Robert Motherwell and Jack Tworkov and poet Stanley Kunitz to provide artists and writers with a community where they could gather in the early stages of their development. For more than half a century, the Work Center has remained true to its mission of granting artists time, space, and a group of supportive peers. Each generation of Fellows ideally moves on from the Work Center with a firm belief in their ability to pursue a life as a practicing artist or writer.

2023-24 Writing Fellows 

• Adeniyi Ademoroti (Nigeria) is from Lagos and received his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

• Molly Anders (United States) is a fiction writer from Kentucky.

• David Hutcheson  (United States) is a poet from eastern Carolina living in the Hudson River Valley. 

• Grace Chao (United States) is a writer born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area 

• Jack Eley (United States) is a poet from the Midwest.

• Lindsay Miles (Canada) is a writer from Toronto 

• Kechi Nomu (Nigeria) is a Warri-born Nigerian writer 

• Tyler Raso (United States)  is a poet, essayist, teacher, and dabbler in visualities.

• Avigayl Sharp (United States) is a writer from Chicago

• Seth Wang (United States) is working on a novel

2023-24 Visual Arts Fellows 

• Miguel Briceli (Venezuela) is an artist, architect, and educator. 

• Rehab El Sadek (Egypt) is a US–based Egyptian artist whose work utilizes sculpture, light, shadow, and memory to investigate the layered reality of the immigrant experience.

• Jeff Gibbons (United States)  is an intermedia artist whose work has been shown internationally in México, Japan, and across Europe.

• Oscar Morel (United States) is a figurative collage artist from the Bronx who constructs narratives of the afro surreal—iconographic scenes of the afro Caribbean experience unfolding in the landscape of urban living. 

• Micha Patiniott, 2nd Year Fellow  (the Netherlands) creates minimalistic and atmospheric paintings of everyday objects and processes in flux, blurring the boundaries of the mundane and the cosmic

• LaRissa Rogers (United States) is a Black and Korean visual artist raised in Ruckersville, VA. 

• Tinja Ruusuvuori, 2nd Year Fellow  (Finland) is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker with a focus on subjective and creative documentary-making.

• Zeinab Shahidi Marnani  (Iran) is a sculptor who lives and works in Tehran and New York. 

• Agnes Walden (United States) is a painter concerned with transgender subjectivities and the ways in which attempts to describe trans life are conditioned by allegory. 

• Sasha Wortzel (United States) is a visual artist and filmmaker using film, video art, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings.

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