Meet our 2025/26 Fellows

Huiyi Chen (she/her) is an artist, researcher, writer, and educator working across moving images, performance, and digital technology. Rooted in diasporic experiences and living in-between worlds, her work explores the nuanced interplay between the mundanity of everyday life and the power structures that shape it. She flies a kite to trace the shapes of wind, tastes grass to learn stories of migration and interspecies kinship, and turns the kitchen into an assemblage of sound. She is always becoming.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Photography from the University of Southern California (2016), and an MPS degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University (2019). Her works have been showcased at IDFA, CPH:DOX, CultureHub, NYC Media Lab, and more. She currently teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Learn more & follow her work at chenhuiyi.com and @cho.cho.choo.

Isabella Vargas (she/they) is a multimedia artist who works at the intersection of media and activism. She works with experimental and nonfiction forms through video, audio, and animation in order to find poetic ways to reconstruct the stories of her intersecting communities. Her work focuses on processing the intergenerational trauma in diaspora, disabled, and queer identity. Vargas is a disability activist and organizer who gleans her narratives from direct interaction with members of the communities for whom she is advocating, striving to give a platform to their voices. Her storytelling prioritizes community building and care when amplifying the voices of those traditionally silenced.

Vargas is a previous BRIClab fellow, Emerge fellow with the San Francisco Longmore Institute, previous RespectAbility Lab fellow, and a recent MDOCS recipient. Vargas was also a previous UnionDocs fellow where her work centered on creating nonfiction content for NYC community organizations. Her most recent film work is set to premiere this fall in a future disability-centered  exhibition at BRICarts titled “to hold a we.”

Learn more & follow their work at isabellavargas.squarespace.com.

Ariana Swei (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer based in New York. Their visual arts practice queers space by blurring boundaries and disrupting power structures. Ariana’s work interrogates how systems such as racism, imperialism, and the patriarchy converge to impede and complicate what could be beautiful, intimate connections. Drawn to highly tactile materials and playful processes, Ariana often works experimentally with fabric, food scraps, found objects, and handmade paper.

Ariana’s art, teaching, and organizing practices are motivated by their grief and rage in response to personal and systemic injustices, as well as their desire for a softer, more interconnected world.

Learn more & follow their work at arianaswei.com and @ari_swee.

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. They study and practice traditions of feminist revolution to reignite the liberatory world-building that occurs before, during, and in the wake of global systems of domination. Inspired by the ancient relationship between women and nature, her work catalyzes the consciousness shifts necessary to restore dignity to the earth and third-world women; at the center of this is a reconfiguration of the feminine body as a precious and profound locus in earthly and cosmic ecosystems. As an artist of the experimental tradition, she focuses on raising social empathy through intimate community building and the creative practices of writing, performance, and film. As part of this practice, asmara practices agroecological conservation and grows food for free distribution to support resilient, sovereign community members at Ujamaa Garden in the Northeast Bronx.

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. He recently completed the Crane Directing Fellowship with Opera Columbus, where he staged La hija de Rappaccini, and is currently an Engaging Artist Fellow with More Art.

Brandon has performed on Broadway, in regional and international theaters, and brings the same passion to his work as a director and educator. As a teaching artist, he has worked with Everyman Theatre, Broadway Bound Kids, Maryland Opera, and numerous schools and community programs, inspiring students of all ages to unlock their creative potential.

What makes Brandon unique is his limitless approach: he doesn’t separate disciplines but instead creates work that combines them all to speak directly to people. Rooted in heritage, spirituality, and community, his art aims to inspire, heal, and ignite change. Moving forward, he is committed to creating revolutionary art that engages audiences not only as spectators but as participants in shared transformation.

Learn more & follow his work at bshawmcknight.art and @bshawmcknight.

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. Grounded in historical scholarship yet frequently whimsical and striking in form, Chang’s work intrigues busy pedestrians as well as community participants, who will find layers of meaning and opportunities for bodily engagement in her installations.

Recent public works include two twelve-foot-tall facades that broke up the RISD Museum’s colonial revival architecture with brickwork from around the world; prosthetic arms for a bronze statue of Caesar Augustus that was missing his original right appendage; and a material land acknowledgment in the form of sidewalk cracks mended with quahog shells. Chang graduated from the Brown | RISD Dual Degree Program with an AB in History with honors from Brown University and a BFA in Furniture Design with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She is the recipient of grants and awards including the Dorner Prize from the RISD Museum, several grants from Brown Arts Institute, and a 2019 award from YoungArts. In addition to being a More Art Fellow, Chang is currently part of the Art Students League Works in Public sculpture program, presented in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Learn more & follow her work at nayaleechang.com and @nayaleechang.

INTELLIGENT MISCHIEF—Terry Marshall (he/him) and Aisha Shillingford (she/her)—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. Our purpose is to boost invention and imagination, realign action logic and experiment with new forms of culture and civil society to create atmospheres of change.

We are cultivating a global archipelago of Black utopias, an autonomous, interdependence, speculative, real & surrealist constellation of places and spaces where Black folks are thriving, sovereign, and free.

Learn more & follow their work at intelligentmischief.com and @intelligentmischief.