(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. This year's recipients include poet Jos Charles, photographer and visual artist Eric Gyamfi, theatermaker nazareth hassan, composer Amirtha Kidambi, and choreographer and performer Anna Sperber.
"The Hodder Fellowship is a remarkable opportunity, and we're delighted to welcome these extraordinary artists to our community for a year," said Acting Chair of the Lewis Center Stacy Wolf, who is also a professor of theater and director of the fellowship programs. "The terms of Mrs. Hodder's gift— 'a year of studious leisure' —captures the Lewis Center's commitment to supporting groundbreaking artmaking, which these artists exemplify. We're eager to see, hear, experience, and read the transformative work—the music, dance, theater, visual art, and creative writing—that this cohort of fellows will create, enabled by the fellowship."
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, visual artists Chitra Ganesh and Mario Moore, poet Natalie Diaz, choreographers Leslie Cuyjet and Okwui Okpokwasili, composer Joseph C. Phillips, Jr., playwrights Lauren Yee and Martyna Majok, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa.
Jos Charles, photo by Sergio de la Torre
Jos Charles is the author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022); feeld, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018); and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Charles teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency M.F.A. program and resides in Long Beach, California. As a Hodder Fellow, she will continue work on a collection of poetry and prose, Vita Nova, which straddles memoir, ars poetica, and literary criticism.
Eric Gyamfi, photo by Alfred Quartey
Eric Gyamfi is a photographer/visual artist, living and working in Ghana. He holds a B.A. in information studies with economics from the University of Ghana and an M.F.A. from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Gyamfi was also a fellow at the Photographers' Master Class (Khartoum 2016, Nairobi 2017, and Johannesburg 2018) and participated in the Nuku Studio Photography Workshops (2016) and World Press Photo West African Master Class (2017), both in Accra in Ghana. His work has been featured in Ecologies and Politics of the Living at the 2021 Vienna Biennale; both the 11th and 12th Bamako Encounters at the Musée National du Mali/Mémorial Modibo Kéita; Fixing Shadows: Julius and I at Foam in 2019/2020 and Autograph in 2023; the 74th Berlinale International Film Festival, including the venues Forum Expanded, Betonhalle, Silent Green, and Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art 1& 2 in 2024; The New York African Film Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2023 and The Africa Center in 2024; Punya 2.0 at Kunsthallbern, Switzerland in 2024); Kɔηsεt Pāti in Accra in 2025; 59th Carnegie International; and others. Gyamfi's practice takes the photographic medium as a primary interest, focusing on examining and reprogramming its processes and materials to expand their functionality. During his fellowship year, Gyamfi will continue to expand his experiments with camera/photographic technologies, turning also to Princeton's archives to trace practices and practitioners whose work resonates with this evolving curiosity.
nazareth hassan, photo by Alexander Mejía
nazareth hassan is a Brooklyn-based writer, director, and musician. Their performance and theater work includes Practice at Playwrights Horizons, Bowl EP at The Vineyard Theater, Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, Security Theater at Judson Memorial Church, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their first interdisciplinary book, Slow mania, will be published in 2025 by Futurepoem. In 2022-2023, they were the dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London. They were a 2023-25 Jerome Hill artist fellow and the 2024-25 Tow Playwright in Residence at The Vineyard Theatre. Their time as a Hodder Fellow will focus on a neologism play exploring the performativity of the creation of new words and memes as virality in shifting political contexts, and the theft of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in digital culture.
Amirtha Kidambi, photo by Samantha Otero
Amirtha Kidambi's work spans free jazz, punk, electronic, noise, and South Asian music and challenges systems of power towards the "decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical" (NPR). Kidambi is a composer-improviser, vocalist, scholar, educator and organizer, leading the protest jazz band Elder Ones. Noting her base in Lenapehoking-Brooklyn, Kidambi collaborates with Luke Stewart, Darius Jones, Mary Halvorson, Rafiq Bhatia, William Parker, Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley and other groundbreaking artists, receiving recognition from Pitchfork, Wire Magazine, Fader, and The New York Times, touring internationally at Rewire, SESC (Brazil) Unsound, Big Ears, and other venues. As a composer, she has scored the anti-colonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA and global film festivals. Central to her practice is her work as an organizer and educator, "working against oppression in all its forms." She is currently a working artist fellow at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, hosting a new podcast called Outernational, which explores the role of music in social movements. Kidambi has received grants and residencies from Pioneer Works, Roulette, Rockefeller Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Asian Cultural Council, and Jerome Foundation. Kidambi has served as faculty at CUNY Brooklyn College, The New School, and Bennington College, with a forthcoming scholarly publication in the Routledge Voice & Identity Studies Reader. For the Hodder Fellowship, she plans to engage in artistic research-composition on class and the role of music in labor movement's mutual counter hegemonic struggles, presenting her learning in communal hybrid performance-discussion-improvisation sessions, aimed at raising class consciousness.
Anna Sperber, photo by Peter Kerlin
Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her performances are rooted in the poetic potency of choreography and its potential for perceptual transformation. She received a 2022 New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Choreographer / Creator for Bow Echo. Her work has been presented and commissioned by venues including The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater, The Chocolate Factory, Roulette, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and the American Dance Festival (ADF). Sperber has received fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation, Ucross, Loghaven, The Marble House Project, The Yard, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Movement Research, among others. Her work grapples with the freedoms and constraints of living in a body. It is grounded in presence and viscerality, embracing the aggression often denied within the feminine. During her time as a Hodder Fellow, Sperber will explore collective attention and action: how performance draws us into heightened states of noticing, and how bodies and environments transform one another.
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.
