Meet the Newest Members of NYFA’s Artists’ Advisory Committee!
NYFA is pleased to welcome nine new members to its Artists’ Advisory Committee (AAC). These artists play an important role in ensuring that NYFA stays true to its mission of serving artists at critical stages of their creative lives.
The Artists’ Advisory Committee provides vital field insights, keeping NYFA informed about issues affecting artists and their communities and helping the organization respond to evolving needs. Advisors attend an annual meeting to review and approve the proposed selection of NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows before it is presented to the NYFA Board of Directors. Advisors serve three-year terms. The committee also includes at least one artist member of the NYFA Board of Directors, who serves as liaison to the Board (this year we have two!)
In 2025, NYFA reviewed the 15 Fellowship categories and surveyed Artists’ Advisory Committee members for feedback on discipline names and definitions. The goal was to ensure the language remains current, relevant, and accessible. Updated discipline definitions are now published on NYFA’s website, and were released with the launch of the 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Program.
NYFA thanks outgoing members Robert D’Alimonte, Amir Hariri, Steffani Jemison, Monteith McCollum, Joseph Morris, and Wenhua Shi for their service. Your insights and contributions will be missed!
We are also grateful to continuing members Martita Abril, Migdalia Cruz, Alvin Eng, Ulises Gonzales, Shanti Grumbine, Tommy Kha, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Sarah Oppenheimer, Christopher Rudd, Yolanda Sharpe, Juan Usera, Ann M. Warde, and Anna Warfield for their ongoing support.
New Advisors:
Leslie Arlette Boyce
NYFA Board Member
Artist and educator Leslie Arlette Boyce has an extensive background in designing and implementing interdisciplinary, multicultural, and holistic programs in the visual and performing arts to foster and expand artistic creativity and expression on the performing stage and within the university setting. In 2004, photographs from her African Burial Grounds series were accepted into the Photography and Print Division and archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The first to be awarded Photographer of the Month by the Lucie Foundation, Boyce has distinguished herself in the worlds of dance and photography. In June of 2011, she published The Glory of Brooklyn’s Gowanus: Legacy, Industry, and Artistry which received a mention by Sam Roberts, in The New York Times. Recent projects include her multidisciplinary performance piece The RETURN, which was awarded NYSCA funding in FY2024. With former Pina Bausch dancer Pau Aran Gimeno, six additional dancers, and a performing violinist and digital imagery, this project was presented before a standing room only audience at the Pen + Brush Gallery in New York, NY. Segments of Boyce’s As Seen By Others / And Then What Is debuted at the Brooklyn Public Library’s acclaimed Cinema Ephemera festival in 2022. It was awarded NYSCA funding in FY2022 and was part of NYFA’s Fiscal Sponsorship program. Boyce’s project, Beauties, was featured as part of a 2016 NYC-Arts/PBS segment on Pen + Brush Gallery.
Crystal Z Campbell
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Film/Video ‘24
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descent whose works centers the underloved. Working with archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold. Their practice spans moving image, painting, collage, installation, handmade paper, glass, and sculpture. Campbell’s works have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Center, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, Artists Space, Galerie im Turm, The Drawing Center, Nest, Urban Video Project (Everson Museum), ICA-Philadelphia, MOMA, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Tacoma Museum, Artissima, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, ReMai Modern, St. Louis Art Museum, Flaherty Film Seminar, National Gallery of Art, and others. Awards include a NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, and a DUKE DocX Fellowship. Campbell’s writing has been published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is an Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo in New York.
zakia henderson-brown
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Poetry ‘23
zakia henderson-brown is the author of The Body Losing Its Borders, winner of the Alice James Award Editor’s Choice; and What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She is a NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Poetry, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from Poets House, Callaloo Journal, Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her works appear in New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019); Adroit; Beloit Poetry Journal; Epiphany; No, Dear; North American Review; Obsidian; The Offing; and elsewhere. She has organized with Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and she co-founded No Disrespect, a Brooklyn-based anti-street harassment collective. She currently works as a senior editor at a nonprofit book publisher, and her list of accolades includes being a Pulitzer Prize finalist In a Day’s Work, recognized with an NPR Best Book of the Year for Inventing Latinos, and Prison by Any Other Name, which Publishers Weekly called a “must-read.” She is a Brooklyn native and resident.
Samantha Jacobs
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Folk/Traditional Arts ‘24
Samantha Jacobs is a Seneca artist of the Turtle clan from the Cattaraugus Territory. She learned beadwork from her mother Mary Jacobs. Jacobs is known for her beadwork and has a diverse repertoire that includes quillwork, painting, embroidery, and, tufting. She is a member of the Native Roots Artists Guild and the Nest Guild. Jacobs works on her home territory where she is the Cultural Learning Coordinator at the Stanley Huff Heritage Center. She shares her knowledge as a teaching artist through classes, demonstrations, workshops, and presentations. Jacobs has been a recipient of several grants and awards from CRNY, NYSCA NYFA Artist Fellowship in Folk/Traditional Arts; and most recently the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort and a Dreamstarter Creative award. Her work can be found in both private and institutional collections including the New York State Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Qasim Ali Naqvi
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Music/Sound ‘16
Qasim Naqvi is a percussionist, composer, and synthesist. Along with being the drummer of lauded cult minimalist trio, Dawn of Midi, Naqvi is an accomplished solo artist and his passion for multidisciplinary work has brought him into the world of film, dance, installation art, and the stage of orchestral and chamber music. His concert music has been commissioned and performed by The London Contemporary Orchestra, The BBC Concert Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Bang on a Can All Stars, Jennifer Koh, Stargaze, The Cello Octet of Amsterdam, The Helsinki Chamber Choir, and others. Naqvi’s love for collaboration originated from his love of improvised music. Having grown up as a jazz musician, and then exploring the experimental music scene of New York in the mid 90’s and onward, Naqvi has been actively involved in the New York improvised music scene as a drummer for almost 30 years. And for the past 10 years, Naqvi has been developing a musical language and a solo career performing with analog and modular synthesizers.
Kameron Neal
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Digital/Electronic Arts ‘20
Kameron Neal is an artist and designer working across video, installation, and performance. As a Public Artist in Residence with New York City’s Department of Records, he created Down the Barrel (of a Lens), an archival film installation interrogating NYPD surveillance. The project received first prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Neal’s work has recently been exhibited at Lincoln Center, Museum of the City of New York, and The Public Theater. His projects have earned a Creative Capital Award, The Vineyard Theatre’s Colman Domingo Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, and an Opera America Award for his collaboration with Paul Pinto. With Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Kameron collaborated on Rheology and MukhAgni, multimedia performance memoirs about death, presented at Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, and Under the Radar Festival. Kameron was a 2024–25 Movement Lab Fellow at RISD and is currently an Interdisciplinary Fellow between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
David Sandlin
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts ‘20
David Sandlin was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1956 and moved to the U.S. when he was a teenager. Since 1980, he has lived in New York City, where he makes art and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He has exhibited his paintings, prints, and drawings extensively in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his comics and illustrations have appeared in The Best American Comics 2015, 2012, and 2009; The New Yorker; Raw; and other publications. He has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation of the Arts, the Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, and other institutions.
Brigitta Váradi
Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program Mentor and Mentee
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Interdisciplinary Work ‘21
Brigitta Váradi is a Carpatho-Rusyn, Hungarian-born, self-taught artist living and working in Pine Plains, NY. She is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in the Interdisciplinary category and a grantee of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Arts Council of Ireland, Leitrim and Roscommon County Councils, and Culture Ireland. In 2008, she was recognized by President Mary McAleese for her contribution to the arts in Ireland.
Váradi has received residencies and fellowships at MacDowell, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the NARS Foundation, the Wassaic Project, the Marble House Project, the LOCIS-European Cultural Program, and the Leitrim Sculpture Center, among others. She has held solo exhibitions at the Al Held Foundation (commissioned by the River Valley Arts Collective), Civitella Ranieri, Burlington City Arts Center, Westbeth Gallery, Budapest Gallery, Leitrim Sculpture Center, and more.
Váradi was commissioned for site-specific government public art by the Department of Education and Science (Athlone) and by Sligo and Roscommon County Councils, Ireland. She has served as Residency Director for Chashama North since 2018.
Letha Wilson
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Photography ‘13 & ‘19
Letha Wilson was born in Hawaii; raised in Greeley, Colorado; and currently lives and works in Taghkanic, New York. She received her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Her work has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Solo exhibitions have been held at GRIMM Gallery in New York, London, Amsterdam; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, FR, Higher Pictures, New York. Her outdoor sculptures are currently at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Wilson has been awarded artist residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo, Walentas Studio Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She received NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships in Photography in 2013 and 2019. Wilson is currently visiting faculty in Photography at the Bard MFA Program.
The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program awards $8,000 unrestricted grants to artists living in New York State and/or one of the Tribal Nations located therein. Applications for this year’s awards will open in the fall. Sign up for NYFA’s bi-weekly e-newsletter, NYFA News, to receive updates.
The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional funding is provided by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Lawrence Foundation, and individual donors.