Niall Jones
(Photo by Heather Cromartie)

Interdisciplinary artists Niall Jones and Tamara Santibañez have been named Princeton University Arts Fellows for 2025-2027 by the Lewis Center for the Arts and will begin two years of teaching and community collaboration at the University in September. The two artists were selected by faculty from more than 800 applicants in creative writing, dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.

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 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.

Jones is an artist, performer, and teacher based in New York City. His recent performance works have been presented at Abrons Arts Center, the Chocolate Factory, The Shed, Performance Space, Danspace Project, and The Kitchen@Queenslab in New York City; Jack Art Center in Brooklyn; MoMA PS1 in Queens, N.Y.; Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, Germany; Performance Space New York, N.Y.; and as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3, in Philadelphia. Jones is currently a visiting faculty member in the B.F.A. Dance Lab and Low-Residency M.F.A. in Dance program at Bennington College for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn.

In 2019, they were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and were a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Their work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, Selenas Mountain, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press) and the poetry chapbook Memory Lane (2024).

For questions about the Fellowship program, write to lca-fellowships@princeton.edu.