Visual artist Gi (Ginny) Huo and poet Nicole Sealey have been named Princeton University Arts Fellows for 2024-2026 by the Lewis Center for the Arts and will begin two years of teaching and community collaboration at the University in September.
The Arts Fellows program of the Lewis Center provides support for early-career artists who have demonstrated both extraordinary promise and a record of achievement in their fields with the opportunity to further their work while teaching within a liberal arts context. Funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the David E. Kelley ’79 Society of Fellows Fund, and the Maurice R. Greenberg Scholarship Fund, fellows are selected for a two-year residency to teach a course each semester or, in lieu of a course, to undertake an artistic assignment that deeply engages undergraduate students, such as directing a play, conducting a musical ensemble, or choreographing a dance piece. Fellows are expected to be active members of the University’s intellectual and artistic community while in residence, and in return, they are provided with the resources and spaces necessary for their work.
The two artists were selected by faculty in the Lewis Center for the Arts and Princeton’s Department of Music from a large, diverse, and multi-talented pool of more than 500 applicants in creative writing, theater, and the visual arts (applications for dance and music were not included in this round).
“At this moment, the power of the arts to build community and further our humanity matters more than ever,” notes Stacy Wolf, director of fellowships and professor of theater and American studies. “Selected from an exceptionally strong pool of applicants, Gi and Nicole are brilliant, groundbreaking artists and teachers who will surely transform Princeton students, faculty, staff, and the larger community. We’re thrilled to support their work for the next two years.”
Gi (Ginny) Huo. Photo credit: Saif Al-Sobaihi
Gi (Ginny) Huo is an artist and educator whose work considers the intentions of what people believe and the legacies of religious systems. Huo’s work has been exhibited and screened at places such as Franconia Sculpture Park, CANADA Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, BAMCinemafest, and The Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Huo has published three books with Small Editions and has participated in residencies and fellowships such as Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, Robert Blackburn Printshop Studio Immersion Project Fellowship, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Holding an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and B.F.A. from Brigham Young University, Huo has worked as the assistant director of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, youth programs manager at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design.
Nicole Sealey. Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry London. Sealey was a 2019-20 Hodder Fellow at Princeton and previously taught in the University’s Program in Creative Writing during the 2021-22 academic year.
“We warmly welcome Gi and Nicole to our Lewis Center community and are eager to be in conversation with them about their complex, compelling, and powerful work,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Both of them exemplify the courageous innovations so characteristic of our Princeton Arts Fellows, and they will make wonderful contributions to the ongoing vitality of arts production in the Lewis Center.”
The next round of Fellowship applications will open in July with a mid-September deadline. Guidelines will be posted on the Lewis Center website. For questions about the Fellowship program, write to lca-fellowships@princeton.edu.
