mayfield brooks
(Photo by Brett Douglas Davis)

Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2022-2023 academic year. This year’s recipients include choreographer and performance artist mayfield brooks, opera singer and director Malena Dayen, playwright Virginia Grise, author Jamil Jan Kochai, and artist and writer sidony o’neal. 

In making the announcement, Michael Cadden, interim chair of the Lewis Center, said, “Each year we find ourselves amazed by the quality of our Hodder applicants and their proposed projects. This year was no different. We are delighted to invite this year’s fellows into the University community and we’re confident that their year of “studious leisure” will, as Mrs. Hodder hoped, lead to work that will enlarge the human community’s understanding of ourselves and the world we all share.”

Jamil Jan Kochai
(Photo by Jalil Kochai)

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, playwright Lauren Yee, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa. 

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.

To learn more about the Hodder Fellows, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.