Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. This year’s recipients include poet Jos Charles, photographer and visual artist Eric Gyamfi, theatermaker Nazareth Hassan, composer Amirtha Kidambi, and choreographer and performer Anna Sperber.

“The Hodder Fellowship is a remarkable opportunity, and we’re delighted to welcome these extraordinary artists to our community for a year,” said Acting Chair of the Lewis Center Stacy Wolf, who is also a professor of theater and director of the fellowship programs. “The terms of Mrs. Hodder’s gift — ‘a year of studious leisure’ — captures the Lewis Center’s commitment to supporting groundbreaking artmaking, which these artists exemplify.”

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.

Charles is the author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022); and feeld, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018). She teaches as a part of Randolph College’s low-residency M.F.A. program and resides in Long Beach, Calif. As a Hodder Fellow, she will continue work on a collection of poetry and prose, Vita Nova, which straddles memoir, ars poetica, and literary criticism.

Gyamfi is a photographer/visual artist, living and working in Ghana. He holds a B.A. in information studies with economics from the University of Ghana and an M.F.A. from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. During his fellowship year, Gyamfi will continue to expand his experiments with camera/photographic technologies, turning also to Princeton’s archives to trace practices and practitioners whose work resonates with this evolving curiosity.

Hassan is a Brooklyn-based writer, director, and musician. Their performance and theater work includes Practice at Playwrights Horizons, Bowl EP at The Vineyard Theater, Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, Security Theater at Judson Memorial Church, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their time as a Hodder Fellow will focus on a neologism play exploring the performativity of the creation of new words and memes as virality in shifting political contexts, and the theft of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in digital culture.

Kidambi’s work spans free jazz, punk, electronic, noise, and South Asian music and challenges systems of power towards the “decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical” (NPR). For the Hodder Fellowship, she plans to engage in artistic research-composition on class and the role of music in labor movement’s mutual counter hegemonic struggles, presenting her learning in communal hybrid performance-discussion-improvisation sessions, aimed at raising class consciousness.

Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her performances are rooted in the poetic potency of choreography and its potential for perceptual transformation. She received a 2022 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator for Bow Echo. During her time as a Hodder Fellow, Sperber will explore collective attention and action: how performance draws us into heightened states of noticing, and how bodies and environments transform one another.