“Matter of Intelligence” Fellows 2025–27

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC)—an artist-focused research center and public forum for art, culture, and politics based at The New School—is pleased to announce the appointment of four fellows under its 2025–2027 Focus Theme “Matter of Intelligence”: Moriah Evans (New York), Mashinka Hakopian (Los Angeles), Joyce Joumaa (Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam), and Kira Xonorika (Los Angeles), awarding 100,000 USD in direct artist support.

Over two years, “Matter of Intelligence” approaches intelligence as a subject of inquiry that actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. The newly appointed VLC Fellows will explore multiple facets of intelligence, from embodied and relational approaches to its use in systems of classification and evaluation, through topics encompassing AI, interspecies and planetary intelligence, and non-Western knowledge systems. In alignment with the Center’s upcoming programs, seminars, publications, and exhibitions centered on Matter of Intelligence, these projects foster public understanding and critical engagement with intelligence, its colloquial pervasiveness, and its currency in contemporary society. 

The Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. Launched in 1993, a year after the VLC’s founding, the fellowship has placed artists at the heart of the Center’s activities. Vera List Center fellowships are low-residency, two-year engagements during which the fellows research and develop their projects drawing from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center, its extended network, and The New School faculty and students. 

Each fellow receives a 25,000 USD award—an increase from the previous 15,000 USD stipend—along with varying production and presentation funds, as well as research, curatorial, professional development, and network services to help realize ambitious projects. Their appointment, which runs through Spring 2027, launches this fall with presentations at the Vera List Center’s signature annual event, the VLC Forum, on October 17 and 18, 2025, alongside other artists, writers, scholars, and thinkers convened around the topic of intelligence. 

This year’s fellows were selected from a group of twenty-six artists invited to propose fellowship projects, following a two-round application process that drew 1,040 individuals and collectives from over 58 countries. An advisory panel of curatorial peers, former fellows, New School students and faculty, and experts on the Vera List Center’s board made recommendations. The advisory committee included David Bering-Porter, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School; Sharon Hayes, artist and 2006–07 VLC Fellow; Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Art; Larissa Nez, Diné scholar and 2022–24 Borderlands Curatorial Fellow; Sadaf Padder, curator and VLC Advisory Board member; and Jan Tancino, Public Engagement Fellow, MA in Media Studies at The New School.
 

Meet the VLC Fellows
Moriah Evans, New York
Moriah Evans is a New York-based artist working in and on the form of dance as an artifact, object, and culture with its histories, protocols, default production mechanisms, modes of staging, and viewing. Evans approaches choreography as an ideological pursuit capable of probing the intersections of embodiment, performance, and politics. Evans’ fellowship project, […/+*^%<>----&@!!!!^^^]: SOMATIC SUMMIT (edited title) continues the artist’s investigations into how the knowledge our bodies hold furthers our understanding of one another.

Mashinka Hakopian, Los Angeles
Mashinka Hakopian, PhD (b. Yerevan, Armenia) is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design. Her research attends to ancestral intelligences: feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems. Hakopian’s fellowship project, Ancestral Intelligences, argues for ancestrality as a method of intervention in computational media, tracing practices that refuse data coloniality and the epistemic erasures of artificial intelligence.

Joyce Joumaa, Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam, Boris Lurie Fellow
Joyce Joumaa is a video artist and writer working between Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. Her work explores microhistories within Lebanon to understand how past structures shape contemporary realities. Central to her practice is an interest in the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds from these tensions. Joumaa’s research project, Calibrated Alien, examines the historical and contemporary uses of intelligence testing as a tool of exclusion in migration governance and surveillance systems.

Kira Xonorika, Los Angeles
Kira Xonorika is an interdisciplinary artist and author based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles, California), working across generative AI, film, robotics, fashion, sculpture, performance, and text. Xonorika's work explores the connections between technoscience, interspecies and planetary intelligence, worldbuilding, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecology. For the VLC Fellowship, Entangled Cosmotechnics, Xonorika reimagines intelligence as relational and symbiotic through film, performance, robotics, and Indigenous epistemes—envisioning interspecies futures beyond domination and cognitive hierarchies.

For more information about each fellow, visit www.veralistcenter.org. To keep up to date with VLC programs, subscribe to the VLC weekly newsletter.