Fellows

Jaleesa Renee Wells, PhD, is an artist, entrepreneur, and interdisciplinary scholar investigating the intersections between culture, society, and enterprise. She is an assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Oakland-based Artist as First Responder, Black Cultural Zone, and EastSide Arts Alliance. She’s published on Black representation in cultural policy (in Arts Management & Cultural Policy Across the African Diaspora), hybrid entrepreneurial contexts and concepts (in the Research Handbook on The Sociology of Organizations), and Black women’s experiences in higher educational institutions (Gender Work …

Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a community-engaged writer, artist, and educator. She is an assistant professor at UCSB’s Department of Chicana/o Studies. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the San Francisco-based Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. Her research explores how anti-immigration policy impacts immigrant children’s lives through methodological tools centering on participatory art and creative expression. Her first book, titled Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children, was published by NYU Press in 2023. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in Arizona and California, Drawing Deportation gives readers a

kt shorb is an assistant professor of theater and dance at Macalester College. They are also a director, scholar, and facilitator. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, they will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Saint Paul-based Theater Mu. They hold a BM in music composition from Oberlin Conservatory, an MA in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in performance as public practice from UT-Austin. shorb’s scholarship is rooted in critical race studies, queer studies, performance studies, and creative practice-as-research. It examines how queer people of color theater artists enact heroic

siri gurudev hernández is a trans nonbinary writer, performance artist, activist, and researcher from what we know today as Bogotá, Colombia. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, they will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the San Antonio-based Esperanza Peace & Justice Center. They have a PhD in theater and performance studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Their work orbits around the questioning and destabilization of the gender binary, the visibilization of racialized gendered violence, and the transformative work of embodied critical spirituality. hernández encountered performance when they started gender transition and joined activist collectives in

Claudia Sofía Garriga-López is an assistant professor of queer and trans Latinx studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico.  As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the San Juan-based Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico. She has a PhD in American studies from New York University. She is working on her book manuscript titled Gender for All. She conducted long-term participatory research with trans, feminist, and queer activists and artist groups in Quito, Ecuador, and is currently researching transfeminism’s emergence in Puerto Rico. Garriga-López

J.V. Decemvirale is an assistant professor of art history and global cultures at Cal State San Bernardino. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, he will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Los Angeles-based Self-Help Graphics & Art, Inc. An Angeleno of Italian and Peruvian descent, his research focuses on contemporary American community art politics. Decemvirale most recently published a chapter in the anthology Self Help Graphics at Fifty (UC Press, 2023), an exploration of the storied Latinx art organization’s aesthetic foundations. He is currently working on his book, Keeping Fires in the Hinterlands, a decolonial untwining of art’s hidden histories

Amanda Boston is an assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current projects explore gentrification’s racial operations in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and their role in the making and unmaking of the borough’s Black communities. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Brooklyn-based Laundromat Project. Boston holds a PhD and an MA in Africana studies from Brown University, an MA in political science, and a BA in political science and African & African American studies from Duke University. She is a trustee emerita of

Maro Youssef is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and the Strauss Center for National Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and speaks Arabic, English, and French. Her research focuses on gender, social movements, religion, and policy in the Middle East and North Africa. As an applied sociologist, she has shared her research findings with academics and policymakers through oral and written briefings with Congress, the US State Department, USAID, the UN, the Foreign Ministry

David C. Thompson is a Research Fellow in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He received a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2020. Thompson’s research examines prisons and incarceration in Brazil, with a particular focus on Rio de Janeiro. This work draws on ethnographic methods to bring into focus the horizons of punishment—that is, the futures that are made and unmade within an expanding penal landscape. His current project turns towards Brazil’s interfaith “decarceration” movement—the coalition of activists, NGOs, and religious groups who work to eliminate mass incarceration and address

Evan Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and associate editor of the journal Sociology of Religion. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Political Theory and Social Policy from Michigan State University’s James Madison College. His research examines religious change, belonging, and diversity in public life. His RSDR fellowship will support the preparation of a book manuscript. Using decades of survey and administrative data, this book challenges the assumption that rising religious disaffiliation and spirituality are detrimental to the health of American democracy. Instead, it