The Henry Luce Curatorial Fellowship provides the opportunity for an outstanding scholar to assist in the interpretation and care of the RISD Museum’s Native North American collection through active engagement in provenance research, cataloging, building a network of experts and tribal representatives, reviewing storage and display requirements, and creating interpretation and programming based on this work.

Sháńdíín Brown joined the RISD Museum as the inaugural Luce Fellow in June 2021. Sháńdíín graduated from Dartmouth College with majors in anthropology and Native American studies and a minor in environmental studies. At Dartmouth, she was an intern for Native American art at the Hood Museum, where she co-curated an exhibition, Unbroken, which explored traditional and contemporary Native American ceramics. While still an undergraduate, she also held internships in the American Section of the Penn Museum and Education Department of the Heard Museum. Most recently, Sháńdíín was an Anne Ray Intern at the School for Advanced Research Indian Arts Research Center where she was immersed in curatorial, education, registration, and collections care work. She was also a part-time curatorial assistant at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native American Art as well as a part-time research assistant for a Native American Art exhibition at the Barnes Foundation.

The Nancy Elizabeth Prophet Fellowship at the RISD Museum is a 2-year, full-time position for artists and scholars embarking on careers in the arts and considering the museum profession and the roles museums play in an increasingly diverse society. Named in honor of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, an artist of Narragansett and African heritage and RISD’s first known graduate of color, this program provides significant professional-practice opportunities to high-achieving college and graduate school alumni up to 3 years post-graduation.

This year, Ahmari Benton joined the RISD Museum as the 2021-2022 Nancy Prophet Fellow. Ahmari is a mixed-media visual artist committed to exploring the convergence of museum interpretation and social activism. She obtained an interdisciplinary BFA from Howard University in 2019 with coursework integrating painting, garment construction, and textile science. Presently, she is pursuing her MA in museum studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ahmari acquired museum-education and community-engagement experience through internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Met Cloisters, and the Phillips Collection.

Each calendar year, the museum invites local artists and designers working in any medium to apply for our Artist Fellowship. One selected artist receives a stipend, professional development support, and the opportunity to work closely with our collections and staff members to realize a proposed project rooted in object-based research. The fellow has access to a range of resources at RISD, including support from museum staff and access to RISD faculty, technicians, and libraries. In collaboration with Museum staff, the fellow also has opportunities to share their work with the public through talks, demonstrations, performances, publications, or other formats.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic we are not hosting a 2021 Artist Fellow, but the program will resume in 2022. Past Artist Fellows are: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (2020), Dana Heng (2019), Becci Davis (2018), Walker Mettling (2017), James P. Falzone (2016) and Xander Marro (2016).

The museum's Digital Media Fellowship is a 2-year, full-time position for an artist, designer, podcaster and/or filmmaker embarking on a career in the arts. The fellowship provides a college or graduate school alum up to 3 years post-graduation with professional practice opportunities in a professional studio environment. The fellow participates in all aspects of the RISD Museum's creative production process, creating informative audio and video content about the RISD Museum’s collection and exhibitions and about art making techniques.

Carson Evans, the museum's 2019-2021 Digital Media Fellow, is a video artist and designer whose work probes visual and material culture through motion. Her work with the museum has appeared in both exhibitions and publications, and has been recognized by the Society of Environmental Graphic Design. She holds a BA in humanities from Yale and an MFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design.

Together with RISD Academic Affairs, the museum offers RISD faculty members a limited number of 2-year fellowships as residents in a curatorial department. The fellowships provide faculty members across disciplines the opportunity for in-depth research in the collection to enhance their work and teaching practices. They also provide an avenue for engaging in the day-to-day life of the museum.

Lindsey Beal is a photo-based artist in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, and Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She combines research about historical and contemporary women’s lives with historical photographic processes; often including sculpture, papermaking, and artist books in her work. Inspired by the ways in which contemporary American society views women, she investigates how women lived in the past, drawing parallels and contrasts between women's lives then and now. Both through presentation and subject matter, she connects the viewer to the past and how it reflects today’s political and social culture. She connects her imagery to photographic history, how it was practiced, developed and presented by early photographers.

Matthew Bird has spent the past 25 years working in different parts of the art, design, and gift professions. Trained as an industrial designer and metalsmith, he designs products that are distributed to gift stores, museum stores, galleries and catalogues throughout the US and overseas. He regularly participates in trade- and craft-show juries and is a frequent guest critic and lecturer at various schools and universities. He has developed and managed multiple retail environments and participated as a designer and buyer for several others. First as an exhibitor, then as a marketing consultant and later as a buyer, Bird has attended hundreds of wholesale and retail trade shows, bringing him in contact with a wide range of manufacturers, designers and consumers.

The Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship is a three-year position for an outstanding junior scholar who wishes to pursue a curatorial career. The Mellon Fellow is fully integrated into the RISD Museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and participates in strengthening the Museum’s engagement with the academic curricula at Brown University and RISD. The fellow supervises the department’s active study room and acts as the primary liaison between the department and faculty teaching from the collections, including making regular presentations to classes. They undertake research in their area of expertise, leading to an exhibition to be presented in the third year.

Conor Moynihan, the Museum's 2019-2021 Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, is a PhD candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, working on a dissertation titled "Queer Spectacles, Precarious Bodies: Remainders of Orientalism, Primitivism, and Exoticism in Contemporary Transnational Art and Performance from the Middle East." Conor has curated exhibitions on queer art (Drama Queer, 2016, Vancouver, BCE, with Jonathan D. Katz), the relationship between illness and health (Ill at Ease: Dis-ease in Art, 2017, Buffalo, NY), and most recently on forms of giving and taking care (Three Acts, Three Scenes: Your Care, My Care, Careful Care, 2018, Brooklyn, NY, with Natalie Fleming). He has written criticism for a number of print and online journals, including Artforum. His research also encompasses Middle Eastern studies and disability studies.