Art Critic Fellowship
Launching in 2025, AICA-USA’s Art Critic Fellowship supports emerging writers by providing mentorship, professional development workshops, and publication.
About the Program
AICA-USA is excited to announce the Art Critics Fellowship Program, reflecting our ongoing commitment to supporting critical writing within a vibrant arts ecosystem. As the oldest professional organization for art critics and writers in the United States, we believe that thoughtful criticism is essential—not only for the arts community but also for enriching the experiences of individual viewers, writers, and artists alike.
While writing programs continue to shrink and many publications are reducing or eliminating their cultural coverage entirely, the central tenet of our charter — the support of art criticism as a discipline – has never felt more pressing. Over six weeks, fellows will engage in four lectures led by award-winning editors and writers to discuss the joys and concerns of writing and editing art criticism today, and will meet one-on-one with their assigned mentors to develop a piece of criticism for publication on the AICA-USA website. We embrace an expansive definition of art, which includes performance, dance, video art, and other transmedia practices. Each of our mentors comes with a distinct voice, area of focus, scholarly positions, sets of concerns, editorial background and mediums. From radio to small press to newspapers to academic forums, each mentor brings a rich diversity that speaks to the different avenues that artists and critics take on the way to publication in this 21st century landscape.
We particularly encourage applicants from non-traditional backgrounds to apply. To enhance accessibility, the program is hybrid, allowing for in-person meetings when fellows and mentors are in the same location, with lectures streamed online. When applying, please indicate any accessibility measures that would support your participation in the program.
Timeline & Structure
The program opens on January 6, 2025 and ends on March 7, 2025. Fellows are required to meet with their assigned mentor at least four times over the course of the program, and to attend every lecture. There is no cost to attend, and Fellows will be awarded a stipend of $750 to cover potential lost wages while participating in the Fellowship and will be compensated according to W.A.G.E. standards for their work upon publication in the amount of $250.
Timeline
Program Dates: January 6 - March 7, 2025
Orientation: January 6, 2025, 7PM ET (Virtual)
Lecture #1: January 11, 2025, 11:30AM ET (Virtual)
Lecture #2: January 25, 2025, 11:30AM ET (Virtual)
Lecture #3: February 8, 2025, 11:30AM ET (Virtual)
Lecture #4: February 22, 2025, 11:30AM ET (Virtual)
Final Draft Due: March 7, 2025
Eligibility
You must be 18 years or older and living in the United States or Puerto Rico. Also, you must be able to commit to all program dates.
Students are eligible to apply. This program is specifically designed to be between semesters to provide students the opportunity to gain experience beyond the academic setting.
Although it's not required, applicants are encouraged to have an interest in visual arts, writing, criticism, art history, and contemporary visual culture.
2025 Fellows
Emily Alesandrini
May Howard
Amy Kennedy
Francess Archer Dunbar
Kit Xiong
Emily Alesandrini (she/her) is an arts writer, curator, and art historian working in New Orleans and New York. Her research concerns contemporary representations of race and gender with a particular focus on issues of opacity, ornament, and the diasporic body in art by women and artists of color. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The Offing, Burnaway, and BOMB, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Alesandrini graduated from Smith College with a BA in Art History and continues her studies as a doctoral student in Art History at Bryn Mawr College.
Francess Archer Dunbar is a writer and poet. She teaches and archives student poetry with O, Miami’s Sunroom program in public schools, and previously worked with the Miami Book Fair and served on the screening committee for the 41st Miami Film Festival. Her writing about her hometown can be found in Burnaway Magazine, the Art Newspaper, and the Miami New Times.
May Howard is a writer, artist, and curator whose work explores the artistic interdependencies between materiality, process, technology, and the body. Her multidisciplinary practice centers the social and political dimensions of spaces and objects. Howard received an M.A. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She currently serves as the Curatorial Assistant of Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her writing has appeared in Glasstire, Surface Design Journal, and Burnaway.
Amy Kennedy writes fiction and nonfiction about the ongoing climate crisis and the surreal spaces where heavy industry and community intersect. She created ALongNewThread.com, a website examining ecological grief and environmental injustice. Amy is a Loyola Institute of Environmental Communication Fellow, a DeGroot Foundation Courage to WRITE grantee, and a 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant recipient. Her work has appeared in the Southeast Review and Burnaway. Her first book Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing received an Antenna Press Publishing Award and will be released later this year.
Kit Xiong is a speculative fiction writer and critic interested in the intersections of science, technology, art, and literature. They review fiction for the Buffalo Hive, a local nonprofit arts publication in Western New York. Their other works have appeared in Cornelia, Sine Theta Magazine, and One Teen Story.
Lecturers
Sky Goodden
On Coaxing Critical Courage and Taking Editorial Care
January 25, 2025
11:30AM ET
Virtual via Zoom
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Sky Goodden will draw on over a decade of experience as a publisher, editor, and critic, to discuss the tenets of writer-led art publishing and editorial care. What makes editing collaborative? What are the mainstays of coaxing originality, clarity, and meaning-making from a text? How do we protect critical courage? And when working with writers from regions that are too often left out of contemporary art conversations, what should we be looking out for, and providing?
Sky Goodden is the founding publisher of Momus, an international art publication, podcast, and mentorship platform for art writing and criticism. Goodden has published in numerous catalogues, art books, and publications including Frieze, Art in America, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She is based in Montreal.
Jasmine Amussen
Against Received Art Internet English
February 8, 2025
11:30AM ET
Virtual via Zoom
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“Critics must locate art in the most precise sense of the sense of place. There must be present the reasons, like shadows, around the art. Contrasts and comparisons must be made in the artist’s development and in relation to other art. Criticism is proportion. The signals of art criticism are the signs of art.” Quote by A. L. Stubbs at an AICA Member meeting, 1979. Discussing three pieces of criticism focusing on music, film, and writing, this lecture will focus on the signals the morphing “Art English” prevalent in criticism published mainly on the internet and the signs of art this criticism points to.
Jasmine Amussen is a writer and editor in based in Atlanta. Her writing focuses on Southern art, aesthetics, and traditions in popular culture. She holds an MFA in Writing from Bard College.
Seph Rodney
Organizing Get in the Game - a Curator’s View
January 11, 2025
11:30AM ET
Virtual via Zoom
Seph Rodney will discuss in practical terms how a huge exhibition such as Get in the Game (the largest show that SF MoMA has put together) gets organized and mounted. He will demystify how artists get selected and get invited to participate in this kind of large-scale show.
Seph Rodney, PhD is a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic and is now a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has also written on art for CNN, NBC, Art in America, American Craft Magazine, and several other publications. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism prize and in 2022 won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He is also a curator of contemporary art and a co-curator of Get in the Game, the largest exhibition that SF MoMA has undertaken, which opens October 2024.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
On Process
February 22, 2025
11:30AM ET
Virtual via Zoom
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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie will talk about process and will ask the fellows to work through some questions with her about pitching, filing, and fact-checking; about developing relationships with editors and publishers; about being a specialist versus a generalist and writing for readers at home versus abroad. She will talk about ethics, about the responsibilities critics have toward artists and audiences, and about being difficult, namely, knowing when, how, and/or why a long-standing collaboration should end.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a journalist and critic and the author of Etel Adnan (2018), on the paintings of the Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, and Beautiful, Gruesome, and True: Artists at Work in the Face of War (2022), about the work of Amar Kanwar, Teresa Margolles, and the anonymous filmmakers’ collective Abounaddara. Wilson-Goldie currently writes for 4Columns, Aperture, e-flux Criticism, and Mousse, among other publications, and her recent essays consider the work of artists such as Myriam Boulos, Huguette Caland, Ipek Duben, and Mounira Solh. In 2022, Wilson-Goldie was a practitioner-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Program, in 2013, and a fellowship from the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, in 2007. Wilson-Goldie was a lowly intern for The Village Voice, worked as a reporter and editor for Beirut’s now-defunct English-language newspaper The Daily Star, and spent many years as a contributing editor for Bidoun. She is a PhD candidate in art history and criticism at Stony Brook University (SUNY Stony Brook), where her research focuses on modernism, feminism, and decolonization in the Middle East and North Africa, with an emphasis on the work of groundbreaking but understudied women artists and the importance of cities such as Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers as major centers of art, culture, and political thought.
Mentors
Sarah Hotchkiss
Sarah Hotchkiss is a writer and artist living in San Francisco. She is the senior associate editor for the arts and culture desk at KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR and PBS affiliate. In this role, she covers visual art, film, museums, labor issues in the arts, and — her favorite — art happenings in unexpected places. She has written essays and reviews for Art in America, The Creative Independent, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Art Practical and Squarecylinder.
In 2019, she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation grant for visual art journalism. And in 2020, she received a Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California award for excellence in arts and culture reporting. From 2020 to 2023, she co-organized the alternative exhibition space Premiere Jr., commissioning new work from Bay Area artists for a 6-by-12-foot billboard in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and regularly exhibits her own artwork.
Shiv Kotecha
Shiv Kotecha is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018), and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His criticism appears in publications including 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, frieze, The Nation, MUBI’s Notebook, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. For the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he co-edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of experimental arts writing. He is Co-Chair of the Writing Discipline for Bard MFA—Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Claudia La Rocco
Claudia La Rocco is the author of the novella Drive By (Smooth Friend); the chapbook-length essays Certain Things (Afternoon Editions) and Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse); The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings (Badlands Unlimited); and the novel petit cadeau, published in live, digital, and print editions by The Chocolate Factory. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of Painters (Off the Park Press) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, for which she was guest curator. Her collaborators include visual artist Anne Walsh, choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and musician/composer Phillip Greenlief, with whom she is animals & giraffes, an experiment in interdisciplinary improvisation that performs across the US and has released three albums. She was a critic for The New York Times (2005-2015), editorial director of Open Space (2016-2021) and now edits The Back Room at Small Press Traffic; she also wrote a monthly multidisciplinary column for Artforum and served as a cultural critic for WNYC New York Public Radio, where she launched The Performance Club, an online and social hub for live art. La Rocco has received awards and residencies from such organizations as the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Contemporary Art Stavanger, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught and lectured throughout the US and abroad, including at Stanford and Princeton Universities, the School of Visual Arts, and ImpulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. Her writing has been widely anthologized, including in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Daniel Sack, ed; Routledge) and On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed; Triple Canopy), and her lectures and performance works have been presented by The Walker Art Center, On the Boards, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al.
Tausif Noor
Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing appears in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, frieze, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, as well as in various artist catalogues and edited volumes. He is the recipient of a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. He is currently Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Photo credit: Julie Wolf
Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Art Department and Principal Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, and critical medical anthropology. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard.
Photo credit: Alexa Trevino
Simon Wu
Simon Wu is a writer and artist. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, Bookforum, The Drift, and The New Yorker. His first book Dancing On My Own, was published in 2024 with Harper Collins. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA, and David Zwirner, among other venues. In 2021 he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and was featured in Cultured magazine's Young Curators series. He was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean.
Photo credit Jarod Lew.
