Interdisciplinary artists Niall Jones and Tamara Santibañez have been named Princeton University Arts Fellows for 2025-2027 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 800 applicants in creative writing, dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.
Niall Jones. Photo credit: Heather Cromartie
Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. He shares that his work navigates a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices that move across dance, performance, sound, text, photography and video. He constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement and in/completeness. Growing up in the American South, in Richmond, Virginia, he played saxophone and trombone in middle school and high school. He notes that these instruments taught him “how to play, how to glide, how to navigate the discrepant notes, rhythms, timings, positions and contradictions between Blackness and queerness, selves and others.”
Jones points to this quote by artist and activist David Wojnarowicz as influential to his own work: “Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”
Jones discovered dance while in college, noting, “Dancing felt like something that mattered. Dancing, learning to move a body alongside others learning to move their body, helped make imaginable, over and over again, what we could be and what we could do if, following Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant, we consent not to be a single being.”
Jones’ recent performance works have been presented at Abrons Arts Center, the Chocolate Factory, The Shed, Performance Space, Danspace Project, and The Kitchen@Queenslab in New York City; Jack Art Center in Brooklyn; MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York; Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, Germany; Performance Space New York, NY; and as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3, in Philadelphia. Jones is currently a visiting faculty member in the B.F.A. Dance Lab and Low-Residency M.F.A. in Dance program at Bennington College for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Tamara Santibañez. Photo credit: Ann Schwartz
Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. They note that their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics, memory work, and the meanings we make from bodily adornment. They approach the body as a site for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives through oral history interventions. Their work as a tattoo artist views the body as a site for memorializing the language and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build and map alternative worlds.
In 2019, they were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and were a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Their work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, Selenas Mountain, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press) and the poetry chapbook Memory Lane (2024). They received their B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Printmaking and M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, where they were awarded the Oral History Master of Arts’ Future Voices Fellowship for 2021, and were a recipient of Duke University’s 2024 DocX Fellowship: Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures.
“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, Niall and Tamara 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.”
“We are eager to welcome Niall and Tamara to the Lewis Center,” adds Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. Both are creative polymaths, and their rich, rigorous interdisciplinary contributions complement and expand the courageous and exciting work already happening in our studios and rehearsal rooms.”
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.
