As the Class of 2026 Fellows prepare to depart this week, we celebrate the work they have accomplished during their time at the Academy, in Rome and beyond. A central part of the Academy's mission is to connect and support the community on campus with opportunities throughout the city, across Italy, and within the broader professional world. We hope that Rome serves both as an incubator for new ideas and as a launchpad for the next stage of our Fellows' artistic and scholarly journeys.
Our Fellows and Residents have left a mark on the city during their time at the Academy. Looking back at the second half of 2025 and the beginning of the academic year, we highlight the involvement of Fellows Cory Henry, Tameka Baba, and Akima Brackeen in the Finissage of the Biennale Architettura 2025 through the GENS program of conversations and conferences, as well as in the U.S. Pavilion exhibition PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, for which Susan Chin (2026 Resident) served as one of the commissioners.
The Academy's engagement with contemporary conversations on Black histories, cultural production, and transnational exchange has continued through the 2026 Black History Month initiative, Across Continuities, Circulation, Practices, organized by Curator-at-Large Johanne Affricot. At the center of the program was texts. tracks. (not an exhibition), a presentation by 2026 Resident Tony Cokes at the Academy. The initiative expanded beyond the Academy's walls through partnerships with Black History Month Florence at Murate Art District and Temple University Rome, creating a network of exhibitions, talks, workshops, and public programs featuring contributions from Fellows T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Heather Hart, Tameka Baba, Paula Gaither, and Cory Henry, extending the Academy's intellectual and creative community into broader public and institutional contexts.
Achievements Across Scholarship and the Arts
Among other notable projects, in April T.J. Dedeaux-Norris and Jefferson Pinder, both Fellows in Visual Arts, participated in Unsettled Matters at Centro Pecci, and Fellow in Literature Maya Binyam was part of the series of paired conversations of The Past Present and Future of Research: What Humanists, Artists and Scientists Can Learn From Each Other, a program organized in collaboration with Aspen Institute Italia. Katherine Dennis, Fellow in Ancient Studies, published "The Poetics of Slavery and Vergil's Georgics" this spring in a special issue of Classical Antiquity she co-edited.
Cynthia Liu, Fellow in Ancient Studies, was awarded a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Catalyst Award, which she will hold at the University of Warwick, where she is a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. Last week she organized an international conference "The Global Rhetoric of Antiquity" at the University of Oxford.
In May, Cory Henry, Fellow in Architecture, curated Joy: Conditions of Belonging at MAAM (Museo dell'Altro e dell'Altrove), an occupied museum space on the city's periphery. That same month, Jefferson Pinder, Fellow in Visual Arts, presented his performance Spazzino on the Scalea del Tamburino in Trastevere, not far from the Academy. Fellow in Musical Composition Oswald Huỳnh collaborated with La Sapienza University, presenting a workshop and a performance followed by a concert at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, alongside his colleagues from Trio Sheliak.
Huỳnh was recently awarded the Leo Kaplan Award, the highest honor presented by the ASCAP Foundation as part of the 2026 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and earlier this spring, he was named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Musical Composition. Just last week, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Fellow in Visual Arts, successfully defended their doctoral dissertation at Maharishi International University entitled "All Parts Forward: An Autoethnography of Confluence Across Fragmented Selves Under Pressure."
These examples represent only a fraction of the ways our Fellows have engaged with Rome and beyond during their year at the Academy. Through exhibitions, performances, publications, public programs, and partnerships with cultural institutions in Italy and internationally, they have contributed to a vibrant exchange of ideas that extends well beyond our campus. We look forward to following their future work and the impact they will continue to make in their respective fields.
A Season of Exhibitions, Performances, and Publications
Looking ahead, David Keplinger, Fellow in Literature, will appear alongside Stephen Colbert and Oprah Winfrey in a new PBS American Masters documentary on the poet Mary Oliver, Saved by the Beauty of the World, which will premiere on August 25. Keplinger was interviewed about his twenty-year friendship with the late poet, whom he visited at her home in Provincetown and later in Florida.
Eva del Soldato, Fellow in Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, will present papers at several conferences this summer, including the American Association for Italian Studies in Sassari, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and Campus Condorcet in Paris. Her forthcoming publications include contributions to Quaderni di Rinascimento (Olschki Editore, Florence), Late Ancient Greek Thinkers and Their Renaissance Reader (Bloomsbury, London), and The Forgotten Giants: Overlooked Scientific Revolutions in Natural Philosophy (Springer). Her next project, Metaphysical Topics Among Croatian Renaissance Aristotelians, will be supported by the Croatian Science Foundation.
We are also celebrating the academic achievements of two Fellows who have devoted significant creative and intellectual energy to their graduate studies. Last month, William Pedrick, Fellow in Ancient Studies, received his doctorate from Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology, and Darcy Tuttle, Fellow in Ancient Studies, received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. A heartfelt congratulations to both of them.
In July, our Fellows will take their work beyond the Academy, presenting in some of Italy's most evocative settings. On July 5, Lembit Beecher, Fellow in Musical Composition, will perform at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto alongside Laurie Anderson (Resident, 2006; Visiting Artist, 2026), as part of an ongoing collaboration among Mahler & LeWitt Studios, where Beecher will be in residence, and the Fondazione Carla Fendi. Meanwhile, Liz Glynn, Fellow in Visual Arts, will participate in Vulcana. Sublimation, a festival on the island of Stromboli taking place July 17–19. As the program's first official resident, Glynn will spend time on the island conducting research and developing new work for the festival's second edition, curated by Niccolò Gravina and Cornelia Mattiacci.
This has been a remarkably productive year, with each Fellow making the most of the Academy's intellectual resources, unique access, collaborative opportunities, and vibrant network of artists and scholars. For those who had the opportunity to engage with their work firsthand, Open Studios and Open Stacks offered a window into the extraordinary range of projects developed this year, welcoming more than 1,500 visitors over two days. Guests were invited to explore studios and collections, attend performances and presentations, engage in conversation with artists and scholars, and experience the spirit of creativity, inquiry, and discovery that defines the Academy.
Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of this year's Fellows and wishing them continued success in the next chapter of their careers.