The Borderlands Fellowship is an initiative of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. The fellowships are awarded biennially to two artists, scholars, or thinkers to support research projects that create communities across different geographical, cultural, and political landscapes.

Jointly appointed by the VLC and CIB for a two-year cycle, the fellows are invited to create a research project, and each receives a research award of $15,000. Each Fellow’s practice focuses on the relevance of place, reflecting on questions of borderlands through an Indigenous lens.

Guided by the vision and principles articulated by project co-director Natalie Diaz (Mojave, Akimel O’odham), this joint initiative provides an arc of joint research, encounters, and experiences set in motion by two related research projects on notions of borderlands and place. Borderlands Fellows are selected by a panel from a pool of invited applicants who were nominated by experts in the field. Artist Jackson Polys serves as Borderlands Advisor to the artists and the fellowship program.

The 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellows are artists Beatriz Cortez and Fox Maxy. The 2022–2023 Borderlands Curatorial Fellow is Larissa Nez. The inaugural Borderlands Fellows for the 2020–2022 cycle were artists Maria Hupfield and Carolina Caycedo.

Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. The appointments provide the opportunity to research and develop a project drawing from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center and The New School, and to bring the research and resulting work to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary public programs and organizational networks. The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands is an Indigenous space at ASU where students, faculty, and guests catalyze and constellate stories, knowledge systems, and language within and across our many borderlands through conversation and performance.