Lewis Center Names Next Hodder Fellows
Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. This year’s recipients include sculptor Carlos Agredano, performing and visual artist Satoshi Haga, novelist Ayana Mathis, composer Peter Shin, and playwright Catherine Yu.
“The Lewis Center is thrilled to welcome this impressive and diverse cohort of Hodder Fellows, and to express our enduring gratitude to Mrs. Hodder for making their time with us possible,” said Lewis Center Chair Judith Hamera in making the announcement. “These inventive and rigorous artists challenge our perceptions of foundational issues, from the seeming solidities and histories of urban infrastructures and personal beliefs to the ephemeralities of belonging and connection. We look forward to the insights, new ideas, and collaborations they will bring to us in their fellowship period.”
Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, or other kinds of artists or humanists who demonstrate, as the program outlines, “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts.” Artists from anywhere in the world may apply in the early fall each year for the following academic year. Past Hodder Fellows have included novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, painter Mario Moore, poet Natalie Diaz, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, playwrights Lauren Yee and Martyna Majok, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa.
Agredano lives and works in Los Angeles. He plans to work with Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute to expand his research methods about hyper-local air pollution. Building on Robert Smithson’s concept of the “non-site” — a type of land artwork that indexed specific locations across New Jersey — Agredano aims to create a new land artwork that addresses the absent social and political contexts of the “non-site” in America.
Haga is a performing and visual artist from Fukushima, Japan, who began his artistic career in the 1980s in New York City. He is a director of binbinFactory in New York City, collaborating with Rie Fukuzawa since 2010, where they merge Eastern and Western cultures through their dance and theater performances. Haga said that his time as a Hodder Fellow will center the development and groundwork for his new project, “Night Forest.”
Mathis is a novelist and essayist based in New York City. She describes her fiction and nonfiction as explorations of the same subject: the lived social and historical experience of poor Black women and families. As a Hodder Fellow, Mathis will work on a memoir-in-essays entitled My Brief Salvation, a collection of critical and personal essays about iterations of belief in literature, political life, and the writer’s own formative years in Philadelphia in the turbulent 1980s.
Shin is a composer from Kansas City, Mo., based in Los Angeles. During the Hodder Fellowship year, Shin will create his second work for the vocal band Roomful of Teeth in collaboration with the modern music collective Wild Up. His first work, Bits torn from words, was recorded on Roomful of Teeth’s 2024 Grammy Award-winning album, Rough Magic. Yu is a Chicago-based writer of plays and opera librettos. Her time as a Hodder Fellow will focus on the writing of a play about an Asian American immigrant family told through a Japanese narrative structure.
In addition to creating new work, Hodder Fellows may engage in lectures, readings, performances, exhibitions, and other events at the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of which are free and open to the public.