TWO-YEAR APPOINTMENT: Kamara Thomas, a singer/songwriter/storyteller, was selected along with choreographer and disability advocate Christopher “Unpezverde” Nunez as a Princeton Arts Fellow for 2022-24. (Photo by Derrick Beasley)

Choreographer, educator, and disability advocate Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez and singer-songwriter-storyteller Kamara Thomas have been named Princeton University Arts Fellows for 2022-2024 by the Lewis Center for the Arts, and will begin two years of teaching and community collaboration 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. 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 over 700 applicants in dance, music, creative writing, theater, and the visual arts.

“We had our strongest pool of applicants ever this year, across all disciplines,” notes Stacy Wolf, director of fellowships, professor of theater, and director of the Program in Music Theater. “Christopher and Kamara will be phenomenal additions to our community as artists and as teachers, and we’re thrilled to support their work for the next two years.”

Born in Costa Rica, Núñez is a visually-impaired choreographer, educator, and accessibility consultant based in New York City. His performances have been presented at The Brooklyn Museum for The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Battery Dance Festival, Performance Mix Festival, and Dixon Place, among others. As a performer, his most recent collaborations include Dressing Up for Civil Rights by William Pope L, presented at The Museum of Modern Art.

Thomas is a singer, songwriter, and multidisciplinary storyteller, and, as she says, “a songspeller and mythology fanatic” based in Durham, N.C. Her storytelling is collaborative and multi-faceted, weaving together musical and theater performance, community art-making, ritual, and visual elements including film, masks, archival material, and photography. In collaboration with the Denver-based theater company Band of Toughs, Thomas is currently developing “Tularosa: An American Dreamtime,” a storywork based on her 2022 album of the same name, which explores the American psyche through the mythology of the American West. She has created commissioned work for Cassilhaus, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina.