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Residency Fellowship

One US-based applicant per season of the International Residency will be awarded a Full Fellowship, which covers all program fees for the season. A jury consisting of NARS staff and select art professionals review applications on the merit of artistic quality and level of need, studio practice, and the potential professional development and benefit from engaging with the NARS community. Only US-based artists are eligible to receive the Full Fellowship.

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Meet the Previous Residency Fellows

Season III, 2025

Jayden Ashley

Brooklyn based visual artist Jayden Ashley (b. 2002) explores the vacuum between Black experiences and external perceptions of Blackness. Ashley uses history, language, and iconography to juxtapose realities and perceptions of Blackness and provoke viewers to question their perceptions about race.

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Season I, 2025

Gloria Fan Duan

Gloria Fan Duan’s studio-based practice explores the aesthetic connections between nature and technology. She has exhibited internationally at Art Basel in Basel, Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, and the Wrong Biennale, with projects featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.

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Season IV, 2024

Ali Kaeini

Ali Kaeini's paintings and textiles, inspired by Iranian history and architecture, explore themes of memory, forgetfulness, war, and solitude. He achieves this by reproducing silhouettes of museum artifacts and recycling used fabrics. Ali earned his MFA from VCU in 2023 and was awarded the MacDowell Fellowship and VMFA Professional Award in 2024. He currently lives and works in New York.

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Season III, 2024

Sarah Ahmad

A multi-media artist based in the American Southwest and Pakistan; Sarah Ahmad’s work confronts environmental racism. The ‘nature gap’ and the disproportionate weight of climate disaster experienced in rural and marginalized communities. Ahmad’s Sacred Geometric patterns illuminate creation’s underlying oneness. She employs public art in service of earth-centered, community healing.

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Season II, 2024

Basharat Ali Syed

Basharat Ali Syed's practice explores the collective catharsis inherent to post-colonial identity and examines the regressive dichotomy of ontological existence within a cross-border conflict nation. The work assembles to interrogate the variance of colonial legacies of structural violence and dispossession. The encounter with political displacement has disrupted conventional notions of belonging, compelling the cultivation of a sense of home in places that were never inherently home. His practice explores the remnants of memory in cultures of oppression while evoking ironic hybridity between reverence and violence.

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