Fellowships are awarded to poet Eduardo C. Corral, choreographer Milka Djordjevich, visual artist Chitra Ganesh, playwright Dipika Guha, and visual artist Marc Andre Robinson

The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University has announced the selection of five Mary MacKall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2017-2018 academic year. Poet Eduardo C. Corral, choreographer Milka Djordjevich, visual artist Chitra Ganesh, playwright Dipika Guha, and visual artist Marc Andre Robinson are this year’s recipients of the Hodder, created to provide artists and humanists in the early stages of their careers an opportunity to undertake significant new work.

In making the announcement, Michael Cadden, chair of the Lewis Center, comments, “We’re delighted to offer these five extraordinary artists a year of what Mrs. Hodder called ‘studious leisure’ to give them the time required to work on projects that will allow them to develop as artists and win them new audiences.”

Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, or other kinds of artists or humanists who have, as the program outlines, “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts.” Artists from anywhere may apply in the early fall each year for the following academic year. Past Hodder Fellows have included poet Michael Dickman, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, playwright Will Eno, choreographer Nora Chipaumire, and composer and lyricist Michael Friedman.

Poet Eduardo C. Corral. Photo by Matt Valentine

Eduardo C. Corral is a poet and the son of Mexican immigrants. His first book, Slow Lightning, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Corral has also been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. His poems have appeared in Ambit, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. As a Hodder Fellow, Corral plans to research and write a sequence of poems informed by the life and the work of visual artist Martín Ramírez. He currently works as an assistant professor in the M.F.A. program at North Carolina State University.

Choreographer Milka Djordjevich. Photo by Lisa Wahlander

Milka Djordjevich is a Los Angeles-based choreographer whose work draws from a variety of compositional strategies, questions and preconceived notions of what dance should or should not be. Her work has been shown at several venues including the Kitchen, the American Realness Festival, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, the 2010 Whitney Biennial, REDCAT, Pieter, Machine Project, Showbox LA/Bootleg Theater, Hammer Museum, and Counterpulse, as well as abroad in Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Macedonia, Serbia and the United Kingdom. She has received funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Center for Cultural Innovation ARC, and the Suitcase Fund, as well as residencies at Movement Research, Fabrik Potsdam, PACT-Zollverein, Workspace Brussels, University of California Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) Hothouse, LMCC Swingspace, and Abrons Arts Center, among others. Djordjevich received a B.A. from U.C.L.A. and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. As a Hodder Fellow, Djordjevich will undertake the research and development of her fourth project in a series of works exploring the perception of the female dancing body in the so-called “neutral” space of the theater.

Visual artist Chitra Ganesh. Photo courtesy of Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics, and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2002. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts, and most recently the Juncture fellowship in Arts and Human Rights at the Yale University Law School. Her drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. For over a decade, Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and is held in prominent public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, and Museum of Modern Art. She is one of five artists whose work is currently on view through January 22 as part of the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, “Contemporary Stories: Revisiting South Asian Narratives.” During the fellowship year, Ganesh will pursue work on a multi-part feminist science fiction print project.

Playwright Dipika Guha. Photo by Jessica Benjamin

Dipika Guha is a playwright raised in India, Russia, and the United Kingdom. She was the inaugural recipient of the Shakespeare’s Sister Playwriting Award with the Lark Play Development Center, A Room of Her Own, and the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. Her play The Art of Gaman was developed at the Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep and topped the Kilroys List 2016. Her other plays include I Enter the Valley (Theatreworks New Play Festival 2016, Ruby Prize Finalist 2016), Mechanics of Love (Crowded Fire Theatre, Two by For, SIS Productions), Blown Youth (published by Playscripts), and The Rules (San Francisco Playhouse). Recent commissions include Yoga Play for South Coast Repertory Theatre and a translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor for Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Upcoming commissions include a play for Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, the McCarter Theatre’s Princeton Slavery Project, and in collaboration with Jeremy Cohen a new play for ACT. Guha is currently a playwright-in-residence at the Playwrights Foundation and an artist-in-residence at the Orville Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School. As a Hodder Fellow she will be working on a play about the history of partitions, homelands, and the politics of migration.

Visual artist Marc Andre Robinson. Photo by April McKoy

Marc Andre Robinson works in sculpture, drawing, and video that revolve around a psychology of historical, cultural, and familial belonging. His work has been presented nationally by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Art and Design New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, and internationally by Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. His awards include an Art Matters grant to travel to South Africa in 2010 and residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Rocktower in Kingston, Jamaica. Born in Los Angeles, Robinson studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He lives and works in Brooklyn and currently teaches at Parsons School of Design and Columbia University. With the Hodder fellowship, Robinson will integrate 3D scanning and modeling technology into his studio practice with a focus on creating outdoor works. 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.

To learn more about the Hodder Fellowship, visit the Fellowships page.