NEW YORK, NY (May 29, 2025) – 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 in direct artist support and additional services over two years.

With the VLC Fellows leading the way, Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. The newly appointed VLC Fellows explore multiple facets of “intelligence,” from embodied and relational approaches that center non-Western knowledge systems to its deployment in systems of classification, evaluation, and surveillance.

“The 2025-2027 fellows and their projects, which we’re thrilled to support and present at the VLC over the next two years,” said Eriola Pira, Curator and Director of Programs, “think through and beyond dominant systems of knowledge and offer expansive, often unexpected perspectives on the nature of intelligence—its emergence, its embodiment, its histories, and its futures. By reimagining how we relate to one another, to machines, to memory, and the cosmos, these artists invite us into urgent public conversations about what it means to know, feel, and imagine otherwise.”

In alignment with the Center’s upcoming programs, seminars, exhibitions, and publications, 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 fellows contribute to and deepen the intellectual foundation of the VLC.

“The fellowship is a core programmatic initiative of the VLC,” said Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, “and this interdisciplinary cohort of fellows—working across movement, writing, video, installation, and archival research—pushes the boundaries of how we define and engage with intelligence in both art and politics, especially in a moment marked by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence and deepening ideological divides that undermine intellectual life.”

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. Since its inaugural fellow, Maurice Berger, the program has supported forty-six distinguished artists and scholars, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Maria Hupfield, Adelita Husni Bey, Carolina Caycedo, Bouchra Khalili, Jill Magid, Lorraine O’Grady, Walid Raad, and most recently, Carmen Amengual, Beatriz Cortez, Fox Maxy, Omar Mismar, and Anna Martine Whitehead.

“Little did we know that thirty years on, cultural and educational organizations would face threats more profound than those of the 1990s Culture Wars that led to the founding of the VLC. At this critical moment, we are honored to welcome Moriah Evans, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika to the VLC. As they join a succession of visionary fellows, we reaffirm our commitment to offering the long-term support and care that artists urgently need—especially those whose work challenges, questions, and reshapes the political realities of our time.”

Each fellow receives a $25,000 award—an increase from the previous $15,000 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.

“As part of the VLC’s sabbatical year, we reimagined the Open Call as a multi-phase invitation—one that honors the depth and breadth of creative practice, scholarship, and lived knowledge held within our extended communities,” said Eriola Pira, Curator and Director of Programs. “In doing so, it has become not just a selection process, but a curatorial gesture—shaping how we think, listen, and make meaning together throughout our two-year journey into the complexities of intelligence. This approach is collective intelligence in action: an evolving, shared process of inquiry that emerges through dialogue, collaboration, and mutual recognition, which each of the fellowship projects enacts in different ways.”

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. 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 2006–2007 VLC Fellow; Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Art; Larissa Nez, Diné scholar and 2022–2024 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.

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, 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. Firunts Hakopian’s fellowship project, Ancestral Intelligences, takes up “ancestral intelligences” as a method for intervening in dominant imaginaries of artificial intelligence, turning to occluded pasts to attune to pluriversal futures.

Joyce Joumaa, Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam, VLC 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. Xonorika’s fellowship project, Entangled Cosmotechnics, 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/fellowships. To keep up to date with VLC programs, subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

ABOUT THE VLC
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is an artist-focused research center and public forum for art, culture, and politics. It was established at The New School in 1992—a time of rousing debates about freedom of speech, identity politics, and society’s investment in the arts. A leader in the field, the center is a nonprofit that catalyzes and supports politically engaged art, public scholarship, and research throughout the world. It fosters vibrant and diverse communities of artists, scholars, and policymakers who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change. Through public programs and the VLC Seminars, the Jane Lombard Prize and artist and student fellowships, and publications and exhibitions that probe some of the pressing issues of our time, we curate and support new roles for the arts and artists in advancing social justice. www.veralistcenter.org

VLC FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
Established in 1993 with the inaugural fellow, writer and scholar Maurice Berger, the Vera List Center Fellowship Program supports the development and presentation of ambitious art and research projects by national and international early or mid-career artists, writers, scholars, and activists, especially those who are members of underrepresented communities in the art world and those who struggle to find support because of the experimental, political, and/or research-intensive nature of their practice. As commissions, the resulting VLC Fellowship projects are presented to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary public programs and institutional networks. With each Biennial Focus, a new VLC Fellowship cohort is appointed based on submissions to an open call or by nomination. Learn more about the VLC Fellowship, past fellows, and their projects here.

MATTER OF INTELLIGENCE
With new advances in artificial intelligence, these and other questions about intelligence and intelligent life are increasingly being asked, with a sense of urgency, as the promise and threats of AI loom large. Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence as a subject of inquiry with tangible, material implications. It considers intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. In an echo of its etymological roots in legere (Latin, to collect), two years of Matter of Intelligence at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics brings together and links different forms of intelligence, of being and knowing. Art provides the transdisciplinary lens for this expansive consideration of intelligence and its multiple manifestations, including art itself as intelligence and an intellectual activity. Learn more about Matter of Intelligence here.