(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. This year's recipients include sculptor Carlos Agredano, performing and visual artist Satoshi Haga, novelist Ayana Mathis, composer Peter Shin, and playwright Catherine Yu.
“The Lewis Center is thrilled to welcome this impressive and diverse cohort of Hodder Fellows, and to express our enduring gratitude to Mrs. Hodder for making their time with us possible,” said Lewis Center Chair Judith Hamera in making the announcement. “These inventive and rigorous artists challenge our perceptions of foundational issues, from the seeming solidities and histories of urban infrastructures and personal beliefs to the ephemeralities of belonging and connection. We look forward to the insights, new ideas, and collaborations they will bring to us in their fellowship period.”
Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, or other kinds of artists or humanists who demonstrate, as the program outlines, “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts.” Artists from anywhere in the world may apply in the early fall each year for the following academic year. Past Hodder Fellows have included novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, painter Mario Moore, poet Natalie Diaz, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, playwrights Lauren Yee and Martyna Majok, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa.
Carlos Agredano, photo byNori Rasmussen
Carlos Agredano lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He describes his work as utilizing ready-made and process-based sculptures to materialize issues of race and inequity, particularly within the context of American urban planning in Southeast Los Angeles. He notes his research outlines how two discriminatory practices—racially restrictive covenants and redlining—influenced the construction of Los Angeles’ public freeway system in the 20th century. Agredano’s most recent exhibitions include: Por El Rio organized by Clockshop at the Los Angeles State Historic Park; Scupper and Strong Winds Ahead at François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles; Smog Check at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles; CO, SO2, NO2, O3, PM2.5 and PM10 at the New Wight Gallery at UCLA; and In Practice: You may go, but this will bring you back at the Sculpture Center in New York City. He received his A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard University and his M.F.A. in Sculpture from the UCLA School of Art.
As a Hodder Fellow, Agredano plans to work with Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute to expand his research methods about hyper-local air pollution. Building on Robert Smithson’s concept of the “non-site”—a type of land artwork that indexed specific locations across New Jersey—Agredano aims to create a new land artwork that addresses the absent social and political contexts of the “non-site” in America.
Satoshi Haga, photo by Reggie Shiobara
Satoshi Haga is a performing and visual artist from Fukushima, Japan, who began his artistic career in the 1980s in New York City. He shares that as a native of Fukushima, he reflects on the impact of nuclear power on humanity and the lasting effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident disaster. He is a director of binbinFactory in New York City, collaborating with Rie Fukuzawa since 2010, where they merge Eastern and Western cultures through their dance and theater performances. Their work has been featured in numerous venues and festivals, including DanceNow, Performance Mix Festival, and Le Festival de Bargemon in France. In addition to their performance work, Haga and Fukuzawa are recipients of a number of residency programs and grants including an Eva Dean Dance residency supported by a Mertz Gilmore Dance Research Grant, a Seanse Art Center Residency at Volda University in Norway, a Baryshnikov Art Center residency, a SU-CASA residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), and a LMCC Arts Center Residency at Governors Island.
Haga notes that his time as a Hodder Fellow will center the development and groundwork for his new project, “Night Forest.”
Ayana Mathis, photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Ayana Mathis is a novelist and essayist based in New York City. She describes her fiction and nonfiction as explorations of the same subject: the lived social and historical experience of poor Black women and families. She is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), which was the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. The Unsettled was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award and was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023 and a best of 2023 by The New Yorker and Oprah Daily. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times bestseller, a selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Mathis’ essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, among others. She was a 2024-25 Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is pursuing her Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary. She teaches at Hunter College in the M.F.A. Program.
As a Hodder Fellow, Mathis shared she will work on a memoir-in-essays entitled My Brief Salvation, a collection of critical and personal essays about iterations of belief in literature, political life, and the writer's own formative years in Philadelphia in the turbulent 1980s.
Peter S. Shin, photo by Jonathan Lee
Peter S. Shin is a composer from Kansas City, Missouri, based in Los Angeles, California. Described by The New York Times as “a composer to watch” with music that is “entirely fresh and personal,” Shin notes he is drawn to understanding how his music folds into the broader conversations around human connection, representation, and belonging in the United States. In its citation for the Charles Ives Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters observed that Shin “has already established an individual voice,” singling out Hyo, a work commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In the work, Shin reflects on his family’s immigration story from South Korea, exploring themes of genealogy and life’s impermanence against the backdrop of anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Academy praised the work for “a sophisticated wide range of beautiful orchestral sounds that unfold within a strong narrative,” calling it “honest, clear, heartfelt, original music.”
During the Hodder Fellowship year, Shin shares that he will create his second work for the vocal band Roomful of Teeth in collaboration with the modern music collective Wild Up. His first work, Bits torn from words, was recorded on Roomful of Teeth’s 2024 Grammy Award-winning album, Rough Magic.
Catherine Yu, photo by Luke Fontana
Catherine Yu is a Chicago-based writer of plays and opera librettos. Her plays include In Spite of My Ambivalence, which was a 2024 Venturous Playwright Fellowship nominee; In Love and Friendship, which received a 2023 Second Round selection by the Austin Film Festival; Le Jeté, a 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semifinalist; The Day is Long to End, produced in 2018 at the University of Florida; and The Sun Experiment, which received a Fringe NYC Overall Excellence in Playwriting Award and was named among Time Out New York’s Top Ten Nightlife and Music Events of the Week in August 2014. She has held fellowships from IAC, New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, Soho Rep, and New York Theatre Workshop. Her opera librettos have been commissioned by Atlanta Opera and Strange Trace. She is a resident playwright with Chicago Dramatists. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a M.F.A. from New York University.
Yu’s time as a Hodder Fellow will focus on the writing of a play about an Asian American immigrant family told through a Japanese narrative structure.
In addition to creating new work, Hodder Fellows may engage in lectures, readings, performances, exhibitions, and other events at the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of which are free and open to the public.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Hodder Fellows, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year, most of them free.
