The American Academy in Rome mourns the loss of Nona Faustine, our 2025 Rome Prize Fellow in visual arts, who passed away on March 20. A highly praised photographer and visual artist who was born and raised in Brooklyn, she created work that searingly and poetically engaged with the legacies of history, race, and memory in the American landscape.
Faustine was awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize last year and arrived at the Academy in September with her daughter, Queen. From the beginning, she embraced Rome with openness, awe, and the keen visual intelligence that shaped her practice. She often spoke of how meaningful it was to experience the city—and the Academy—with Queen by her side.
During her three months at the Academy, Nona immersed herself in Rome’s architectural and historical textures. Her work examined the visual languages of monuments and empire, reframing them through a personal and political lens. She shared meals with fellows and residents, contributed generously to discussions, and exhibited her work in the Academy’s fall exhibition, Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge. Her presence on the campus was powerful—clear-eyed, warm, and deeply grounded.
After returning to the United States, Nona remained connected to the Academy. Though she could not come back to Rome, she left detailed instructions for how her studio should be presented during Winter Open Studios and wrote to us of her deep pride in what she had accomplished. “This has been an extraordinary gift to me, to my family, and to my daughter, Queen Ming.”
Faustine was a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and earned an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Brooklyn Museum, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and Harvard University. Her series White Shoes and Mitochondria reimagined photographic traditions through a Black feminist lens, confronting historical sites of enslavement and motherhood with unflinching care and authority.
In one of her final messages to the Academy, Nona wrote: “Each time I came back to the Academy, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m kind of home.’ The Academy opened up a whole new world for me.” She asked that whenever her name is spoken, we remember her this way: “Nona Faustine, American Academy in Rome Fellow.”
We will. We celebrate her life, her art, and her enduring place in this institution and in our hearts.