United States Artists Announces 2026 Fellows and Berresford Prize Recipient During Its 20th Year
Today, United States Artists (USA) announces fifty 2026 Fellows alongside the Berresford Prize recipient as the organization commemorates its 20th Anniversary. The USA Fellowship, an award of $50,000, grants artists the freedom to allocate funds to their unique needs — whether towards expanding their practice, covering living expenses, accessing healthcare, or investing in their communities. The Berresford Prize is a $50,000 annual award honoring a cultural practitioner for their significant contributions to the advancement of artists in society.
In addition, USA Fellowship awardees receive tailored support such as financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and personal care. These accompanying resources reflect USA’s agility in addressing artists’ evolving needs, being in constant dialogue with artists on how their practices and livelihoods can be most effectively supported. In other words, the award recognizes that artists are whole people with real-life needs, not just producers of cultural output.
“For two decades, United States Artists has advanced a simple yet powerful conviction — that artists are essential to the imagination and health of our society,” said Judilee Reed, President and CEO of United States Artists. “Our commitment to unrestricted support, with programs such as the USA Fellowship, has enabled artists across every discipline and place to sustain their livelihoods, take creative risks, and define their own paths forward. Through the Berresford Prize, we recognize that there are creative administrators who create the conditions that support artists. The legacy of USA relies on the vitality and enduring impact of these artists and administrators, whose work continues to reimagine and enrich our collective future. We look forward to the next twenty years and beyond.”
USA Fellows are selected based on their groundbreaking artistic visions, unique perspectives within their fields, and evident potential for the award to make a significant impact in their practices and lives. The Fellowship is awarded through a year-long, peer-led selection process in ten disciplines. Each year’s cohort reflects the current cultural and societal moment, honoring a plurality of voices from diverse backgrounds and often-overlooked experiences, identities, and perspectives.
The 50 artists in the 2026 cohort span 19 U.S. states and Washington D.C., having made names for themselves through work that is activated by audiences and interlocutors. Many of this year’s Fellows explore personal archives, trace artistic lineages, and move fluidly between inheritance and invention. In doing so, they enlighten histories, surface overlooked narratives, and challenge the status quo of whose stories are preserved.
Among the 2026 USA Fellows cohort, six interdisciplinary media artists are awarded: Anjali Kamat, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Nancy Baker Cahill, Nat Decker, and Nathan Young. In a media landscape shaped by platforms, algorithms, and speed, these artists slow things down. They ask questions about memory, power, archives, and voice. Many work collaboratively or community-first, and their practices move across film, audio, installation, and digital space.
Below, we’re highlighting this year’s USA Media Fellows and the ideas they’re exploring.
Anjali Kamat is an illustrator from India whose portfolio is filled with vibrant still-life collages brought together with a handmade stop-motion touch. She began developing this approach during lockdown, when stepping away from digital work led her back to drawing and cutting paper by hand; filming the pieces as they slid into place started as a small behind-the-scenes experiment, and soon became a playful animation style that attracted wide attention.
Photo by Anokha Venugopal
The Men in the Middle" by Anjali Kamat, 2015. Dissent Magazine.
Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika is a scholar, journalist, and artist who researches and teaches in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is the co-host and co-creator of Gimlet Media’s Peabody Award–winning podcast Uncivil. His January 2015 article on vocal color in public radio, produced for Transom.org, was featured by NPR, The Washington Post, and BuzzFeed, trended nationally on Twitter, and sparked a nationwide conversation about diversity in public media.
Photo by Marcelo Saraiva.
Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists and composers whose work transforms digital and civic spaces, linking sound, language, and light in explorations of culture, history, and technology. Their practice spans from early Internet art to large-scale public installations.
“The fellowship is both a meaningful affirmation and an important resource. The fellowship will make it easier for us to investigate new materials, it will give us time to conduct necessary research, and it will support our collaborations. We are honored by the acknowledgment of our work and deeply grateful for this support.”
“Right now we’re developing new public-space projects in Boston and Philadelphia, and continuing RingShout, a long-term work we’re building toward launching as a musical satellite. Last year we spent significant time developing GuideStar, a sound-and-laser work presented at the Space Needle in Seattle, alongside our AI project The Skeuomorph at the Qualcomm Institute. That research has opened several new directions that we are moving into preproduction over the next two years” the artists shared when asked about the projects they’re most excited to develop.
“As we move into 2026, we’re celebrating 30 years of collaborating, and so much of our work grows out of that sustained conversation. At the same time, the longer we work, the more we learn from the natural world. Even when our projects directly reference science, history, or mythology, nature continues to teach us.”
Photo by Anson Teague Wigner
Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose work examines complex systems, exploring the intersections of consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Using a blend of analog and digital media, she creates immersive experiences, video installations, sculptures, and conceptual projects rooted in drawing. Since 2018, she has served as Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free AR public art platform that fosters resistance, inclusive participation, and social sculpture. Her monumental AR works, informed by ecofeminist land art, highlight interdependence and the more-than-human, while critically engaging emerging technologies to imagine alternative futures.
“[Receiving the USA Fellowship] means so much on multiple fronts; it acknowledges the potential impact of iconoclastic practices like mine, which don’t fit neatly into fixed categories, it liberates me to continue to be able to take creative risks, and on a pragmatic level, relieves me (however briefly!) of ongoing financial strain. It could not come at a better time.”
“I am excited about an ambitious, multisensory, immersive art project I’m developing for 2027. The project will use digital bioacoustics and adaptive algorithms to entangle human and more-than-human communication — to create new possibilities for empathy/curiosity in the face of social injustice and ecological collapse,” adds Nancy Baker Cahill.
Photo by Mark Escribano
“I find a lot of inspiration in books and films that many find depressing, but I feel are critical to helping me imagine how to co-build in such a dark national and planetary moment. I’ll just name a few recent inspirations by category: Film: Sirat and Come and See. TV: Pantheon and Adolescence. Books: Enshittification, The Blue Machine, After the Internet, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I’m also endlessly inspired by our (currently under snow, but not for much longer) garden; it provokes more wonder than I could ever have imagined possible.”
Augmented reality animation still of CENTO by Nancy Baker Cahill, via 4th Wall app, 2023. Photo by Amy Knoll Fraser.
Nat Decker is a Chicago-born, Los Angeles–based artist whose work explores the intimacies of queer and disabled lived experience as a provocation toward collective care and liberation. Working across digital and material mediums, they use 3D software and computers as assistive tools to trace connections between body and technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as both cultural celebration and critique of conventional desirability politics. This practice informs their sculptural work, creating non-functional mobility devices as aesthetic commentary on usefulness. Decker is also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for organizations including p5.js, New Art City, Creative Growth, the LA Spoonie Collective, and various projects at UCLA.
Photo by Ry Noor
Root-bound by Nat Decker, 2025. Digital rendering. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Nathan Young is an artist-scholar-composer whose expanded practice spans sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental music. His work often engages the spiritual and political, reimagining Indigenous sacred imagery to challenge and subvert notions of the sublime. A founding and former member of the Indigenous artist collective Postcommodity, Young holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts. His work has been supported by Creative Capital, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Pew Foundation, the Carnegie Mellon Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Sundance Institute. He also served as an elected member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Tribal Council from 2016 to 2020.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
Peyote Box by Nathan Young. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Across the full list of fellows, you’ll find glass artists, ballad singers, filmmakers, fiber artists, poets, tap dancers, composers, civic designers, media makers, and knowledge keepers in traditional Indigenous and Appalachian communities alike. It is a cohort defined not by a single aesthetic, but by a shared commitment to artistic life as a way of thinking, remembering, resisting, and imagining.
As part of its ongoing commitment to uplifting artists and responding to their needs, USA also recognizes the vital contributions of those who support and advance creative communities. Established in 2019, the Berresford Prize honors administrators, curators, scholars, and producers who create platforms and conditions for artists to thrive. The Prize awards individuals shaping sustainable pathways for artists and cultural practitioners.
The 2026 Berresford Prize recipient, Lori Lea Pourier (Oglala Lakota), is a long-standing arts leader who has made an enduring impact on the cultural preservation, advocacy, and artistic possibilities of Indigenous Arts ecologies across the nation. From her early career at the First Nations Development Institute and the International Indigenous Women’s Network, to her founding of the First Peoples Fund, where she is now Senior Fellow, Pourier has created a legacy of supporting and advocating for the work of Native artists and arts communities for nearly 30 years.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award named in recognition of Susan Berresford. I first met Susan early in my career during her tenure at the Ford Foundation. As a young Native woman entering the Foundation’s offices for the first time, I could not have imagined the path that lay ahead. In 2006, while hosting Ford Foundation staff and grantees in the Black Hills of South Dakota, we witnessed the launch of United States Artists. Since then, many First Peoples Fund artists and culture bearers have gone on to be recognized by United States Artists—an enduring reflection of the vision and investment that began in those early years,” said Pourier.
We share works by digital artists as well as digital arts exhibitions, events, and open calls daily on Instagram — follow us for more and subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss new blog posts.
