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.
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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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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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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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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Mar Figueroa is an Ecuadorian-born painter currently based in New York. In her surreal autobiographical paintings, she explores her multifaceted identity and honors her Andean heritage. In 2020, she was recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient in the Art & Style and Immigrant categories. More recently, she was an artist in residence at Silver Art's Project in the World Trade Center and awarded the Hopper Prize in 2023. She currently serves as a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. Mar Figueroa received her education at the Rhode Island School of Design.
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