En Foco is proud to announce the 15 recipients of the 2025 Artist Fellowship, marking a decade of one of the nation’s only fellowships dedicated exclusively to lens-based artists of color. Now in its 10th year, the En Foco Artist Fellowship continues to serve as a vital platform for elevating stories that are often excluded from dominant cultural narratives rooted in personal history, migration, community, and creative resistance.
Selected from a highly competitive pool of 155 applicants from across New York State, this year’s 15 fellows represent a visionary cohort working across photography, video, installation, and interdisciplinary visual storytelling.
The 2025 En Foco Artist Fellowship recipients are:
Ashley Peña, Dean Majd, Destiny Mata, Jarret Murphy, Jeremy Dennis, Juan Alvarez, Justin “Seude” Hunte, Kalada Halliday, Kelena Burwell, Maria Jose Maldonado, Néstor Pérez-Moilère, Stephanie Ayala, Wayne Liu, Yukai Chen, and Zain Alam.
Kalena Burwell, known artistically as Perle, is a New York-based photographer and visual storyteller exploring themes of community, memory, and healing. Their work engages with Black life and identity, drawing inspiration from personal narratives and collective histories. Perle has participated in the Women Photograph mentorship program and has been an artist in residence with Herschel. Their practice is deeply rooted in collaboration, using photography as a medium for storytelling and emotional exploration.
Kalada Halliday is a photographer and educator living and working in the Bronx. He makes images of his daily life, and his work is centered on putting a lens to the spaces he inhabits and the communities he is a part of. He is grateful for photography as a means of engagement and exploration, and hopes to continue making photographs for as long as he is able.
Yukai Chen (he/they) is a lens-based artist born in Xiamen, China, and currently living between Xiamen and New York. Their work examines the construction and transformation of spaces and identities, exploring how people shape and reshape them over time. Moving with steady intent and an enduring gaze, Chen lingers in spaces, weaving through site visits, prolonged observation, and meticulous composition before the shutter clicks. Their practice gathers the ephemeral, stitching together fleeting instants until each image emerges, born not from haste but from the quiet weight of lived experience. Chen’s work has been featured in The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, and PhMuseum. They are a recipient of the NYSCA Support for Artists Award.
Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, and lead artist and founder of the non profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Jeremy Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. Jeremy also serves on the advisory board of the Boys & Girls Club of Shinnecock Nation, The Church of Sag Harbor, Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., and WNET Group’s THIRTEEN/WLIW Community Advisory Board. He lives and works in Southampton, New York, on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.
Ashley Peña (b.2000) is an image maker who’s interested in holding up a mirror to the complexities of Black diasporic existence, resistance, and identity viewed through the lens of her Dominican-American heritage. Through print and installation, her work bears witness to the conditions of Black life in our colonial environments across lands. Her work being shaped by these lands scarred by repression, censorship, human rights abuses, genocide, & the lived experiences of the people impacted by these histories. She is interested in developing a new set of iconography that captures the complexities and diverse experiences of Afro-diasporic peoples, challenging reductive notions of homogeneity.
Dean Majd (b. 1990) is a Palestinian-American self taught lens-based artist born and based out of Queens, New York. His diaristic work primarily engages with trauma and how it manifests within contemporary masculinity when negative emotions are repressed, particularly personal and collective grief in relation to addiction, violence, and self destruction. His work also explores the complexities of the Arab-American dichotomy and the Palestinian diaspora, and oftentimes how those overlap. Majd has been profiled by Aperture, Matte, AnOther Magazine, Sekka, and has made editorial work for The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ Middle East, and The Face, among others. His work has been on display at the Museum of the City of New York part of ‘New York Now: Home’ (2023), and he has lectured at the International Center of Photography. He is passionate about cinema, immensely devoted to his friends, and a proud New Yorker.
Destiny Mata is a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker based in her native New York City, focusing on subculture and community. She comes from a lineage of photographers—her grandfather was a part-time wedding photographer, her aunt a fashion photographer, and her mother documented family moments, instilling in her the power of photography from an early age. Mata found her voice capturing live music, the everyday life of her Lower East Side neighborhood, and stories of home. Her work explores themes of gentrification, housing rights, and the underground NYC punks of color music scene. She studied photojournalism at LaGuardia Community College and San Antonio College before serving as Director of Photography Programs at the Lower Eastside Girls Club for two years. Her work has been supported by the Magnum Foundation Fellowship (2023), WORTHLESS Studios Residency (2022), and the Magnum Foundation US Dispatches Grant (2020).
Néstor Pérez-Molière was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently resides in The Bronx, New York. His art entails a process of self- discovery; a series of confessionals revealing private conflicts; hoping towards catharsis. Through this cathartic process he hopes to connect with the viewer’s struggles and depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a source for political action rather than its antithesis. Néstor exposes mental health issues like depression, dysmorphia, food addictions, and loneliness: describing their mechanisms, scrutinizing their origins, and illuminating the impossibility of fixing them. His practice mainly takes place in the realm of photography but has also incorporated performance, drawing, video, installation, and intaglio techniques into his works.
Wayne Liu was born 1979 in Taipei, Taiwan, like my parents, but unlike my grandparents, who fled from Sichuan, China after the Second World War and the Chinese Civil War in 1949. At five, I moved with my parents to Dallas and then to New Jersey, where I learned to be American. When I was eleven, we moved back to Taiwan, where I learned to be Taiwanese, with much confusion involved. The imaginary identity of historical China was in Taiwan, through the politics of my grandparents’ generation, while at the same time, I resisted forming a Taiwanese identity, since in my mind I was still living in the suburbs outside New York. Residing in New York City since 1999, my identities lie somewhere between not fully Taiwanese, not Chinese and not American.
Jarrett Murphy makes arrestingly beautiful nightscapes. He creates images that question the relationship between man and nature. His series, The Ecotone, is focused on the duality of man’s presence and absence, as nature is being constructed around and by civilization. Jarrett Murphy, originally from Elkins Park, just north of Philadelphia, PA, is a graduate from Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, New York. Murphy attributes his interest in art to his parents, who, while not artists, encouraged him to draw and paint on his walls as a child. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
This year also marks a new chapter for the fellowship. In 2024, En Foco unified its longstanding Photography Fellowship and its Media Arts Fund into a single, more expansive program, designed to meet the evolving needs of artists working across a spectrum of lens-based and time-based practices. This expanded format allows the organization to support more artists annually and to provide a more robust suite of resources, including curatorial mentorship, publication support, and sustained professional development opportunities.
Each fellow receives a $1,500 award, individualized guidance, and will be featured in a culminating group exhibition scheduled for Fall 2025 at Inspiration Point in the Bronx, as well as in a special edition of Nueva Luz, En Foco’s flagship photographic journal. These platforms offer not only visibility but a deeper engagement with the curatorial process and the opportunity to be part of En Foco’s growing legacy of artist support and advocacy.
The 2025 exhibition and Nueva Luz issue will be curated by Alison Pittman-Kuo, a celebrated curator and artist whose work centers memory, ritual, and diasporic narrative. Pittman-Kuo brings a bold, intuitive, and collaborative curatorial vision to this year’s fellowship, with a deep commitment to uplifting underrepresented voices.
En Foco extends its heartfelt gratitude to the 2025 Artist Fellowship panelists: Oji Hanyes, Elle Pérez, and Alison Pittman-Kuo. Their insight, rigor, and care shaped this year’s selections and reflect En Foco’s ongoing dedication to equity in the arts.
“This milestone year reminds us how essential it is to invest in artists not only as visionaries, but as documentarians of history, culture, and transformation,” said Oscar J Rivera, Managing Director of En Foco. Since its inception, the En Foco Fellowship has now supported 100 artists, contributing to a living archive of lens-based art shaped by cultural diversity and creative innovation. Through exhibitions, funding, publication, and mentorship, the Fellowship creates long-term opportunities that center artists of color as essential narrators of American history and experience.
As En Foco enters its 51st year of operation, the organization remains rooted in its founding principles, by artists for artists, with a commitment to building a more inclusive and vibrant future for photography, media, and visual culture.
Honorable Mentions
En Foco also extends special recognition to the following artists whose applications advanced to the second round of deliberations. Their work reflects the strength, originality, and powerful vision present throughout this year’s applicant pool:
Alassane Sy, Aleyana Mitchell, Antonio Pulgarin, Asherde Gill, Bernardo Almonte, Carlos Hernandez, Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi, Cheril Sanchez, Christopher Perez, Clementine Morel, Corey Q Baron, Dahveed Wilkins, Dayana Rivero, Dondre Stuetley, Fernando Zelaya, Jasmine Garoosi, Jasmine Huang, Jessica Angima, Josefina Moran, Josh Farria, Joshua Poyer, Juan Orrantia, Juyon Lee, Kraig Blue, Laila Stevens, Lamar Kendrick-Dial, Mateo Arciniegas, Momo Takahashi, Muyassar Kurdi, Mónica Félix, Nicole Goodwin, Nigel Jones, Peter Alegre, Roberta Dorsett, Sanjna Selva, Steven de Medina, Tyler Nelson, and Xavier Robles.
In recognition of the incredible depth of talent reflected across all submissions, artists named as honorable mentions, and many others who applied will receive priority consideration for upcoming En Foco opportunities, including future exhibitions, publication in Nueva Luz, professional development programs, and potential funding support. En Foco remains committed to cultivating long-term relationships with emerging and established artists whose work aligns with our mission.
En Foco is proud to announce the 15 recipients of the 2025 Artist Fellowship, marking a decade of one of the nation’s only fellowships dedicated exclusively to lens-based artists of color. Now in its 10th year, the En Foco Artist Fellowship continues to serve as a vital platform for elevating stories that are often excluded from dominant cultural narratives rooted in personal history, migration, community, and creative resistance.
Selected from a highly competitive pool of 155 applicants from across New York State, this year’s 15 fellows represent a visionary cohort working across photography, video, installation, and interdisciplinary visual storytelling.
The 2025 En Foco Artist Fellowship recipients are:
Ashley Peña, Dean Majd, Destiny Mata, Jarret Murphy, Jeremy Dennis, Juan Alvarez, Justin “Seude” Hunte, Kalada Halliday, Kelena Burwell, Maria Jose Maldonado, Néstor Pérez-Moilère, Stephanie Ayala, Wayne Liu, Yukai Chen, and Zain Alam.
Juan Alvarez, aka Wamoo, is a Dominican-born, Washington Heights- raised and based musician and media-based artist, working at the border between visual art, music and live performance. His audiovisual work is constructed by means of collage art, reconstructing existing materials and bringing them into new contexts. He is mainly inspired by the video art of Joan Jonas and Pipilotti Rist, as well as music producers J Dilla and Tainy. He has exhibited at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, SuperBlue Miami, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Andrew Freedman Home, among others. He has also been featured on publications like “Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora”, an arts publication published by Illinois State University; and “Apricity”, published by the University of Texas at Austin. He studied at the University at Albany, SUNY, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in two concentrations, Philosophy and World History.
Zain Alam is an artist of Hindustani origin born in Flushing and raised outside of Atlanta. His work emerges from a lifelong question: in what ways can rhythm and tone convey the ineffable? He contemplates especially the distance between the effable in one language and what lies beyond translation to another. His interdisciplinary work is guided by his training as a composer, and as a student of Islamic art and philosophy. Alam’s writing has been published in Miami Rail and the New Yorker, and his projects featured in Vice, Village Voice, and the New York Times. Across video, performance, and installation, his work has been staged at the Rubin Foundation, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (CARA). Alam completed his graduate work in Islamic studies at Harvard University. He is a 2025 Vermont Studio Center digital media/film fellow currently at work on the installation piece Meter & Light: Night, exhibiting this summer at The Shed.
Stephanie Ayala was born in New York City. She received an Associate of Science degree in Media Studies from Bronx Community College. She pursued a major in Latin American Studies with a minor in Studio Arts at City College of New York. Due to the pandemic, Stephanie became even more intentional about learning art both within and beyond academic spaces. She finds that studying ecology, art, and spiritual roots extends deeper than a classroom setting—it is about cultivating a practice that reaches beyond traditional structures of learning. Her work is rooted in the understanding that artistic practice is a form of self-betterment, constantly evolving beyond the spaces we are accustomed to thinking of as sites of education.
Justin Suede Hunte is a lens-based artist born and raised in the South Bronx. He began his artist journey following the passing of his father which led to a desire to depart the corporate world he once felt forced to transverse after graduating from college. Now, Suede focuses his attention and passion on documenting both urban and rural life all while creating engaging visual stories that highlight art, creatives of color and cultural phenomenons. As a self- taught conceptual artist and photojournalist, Suede has documented, photographed and written content covering a wide array of assignments and commissions including but not limited to Lincoln Center, Jean-Michel Basquiat HBCU Tour, The New School, New York Landmarks Preservation and Governor’s Ball Music Festival. Suede also recently completed a summer artist residency on Governors Island through BronxArtSpace in Summer 2024. Suede graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in English Literature and a concentration on Maritime Studies.
María José Maldonado is a Salvadorian-Ecuadorian artist born, raised and proudly living in Queens, NY. Her films focus on transness and queerness as family legacy and revered inheritance. Her docushort “My Fierce Aunt Bianca” has screened at Inside Out’s 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, New York Latino Film Festival, TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival, San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and others. María José was a Visual AIDS Fellow 2023, participated in BRIC’s Documentary Intensive Film Lab 2022 and Toronto Queer Film Festival Film Lab 2020, the lead in award winning Canadian short “Saturday Fuego Diablo” (Dir. Anita Abbasi, 2022), Lambda Literary Speculative Fiction Fellow 2022, Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Writers Workshop Fiction Fellow 2021, Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellow 2020, Barbara Deming Fund 2020 feminist fiction grantee & Queer|Art Mentorship Literature Fellow 2019 mentored by Charles Rice-González. Graduated from Howard University, Dartmouth College, Phillips Exeter Academy and PS64Q.
Proud mother of Izalco, a one-year-old toddler.
This year also marks a new chapter for the fellowship. In 2024, En Foco unified its longstanding Photography Fellowship and its Media Arts Fund into a single, more expansive program, designed to meet the evolving needs of artists working across a spectrum of lens-based and time-based practices. This expanded format allows the organization to support more artists annually and to provide a more robust suite of resources, including curatorial mentorship, publication support, and sustained professional development opportunities.
Each fellow receives a $1,500 award, individualized guidance, and will be featured in a culminating group exhibition scheduled for Fall 2025 at Inspiration Point in the Bronx, as well as in a special edition of Nueva Luz, En Foco’s flagship photographic journal. These platforms offer not only visibility but a deeper engagement with the curatorial process and the opportunity to be part of En Foco’s growing legacy of artist support and advocacy.
The 2025 exhibition and Nueva Luz issue will be curated by Alison Pittman-Kuo, a celebrated curator and artist whose work centers memory, ritual, and diasporic narrative. Pittman-Kuo brings a bold, intuitive, and collaborative curatorial vision to this year’s fellowship, with a deep commitment to uplifting underrepresented voices.
En Foco extends its heartfelt gratitude to the 2025 Artist Fellowship panelists: Oji Hanyes, Elle Pérez, and Alison Pittman-Kuo. Their insight, rigor, and care shaped this year’s selections and reflect En Foco’s ongoing dedication to equity in the arts.
“This milestone year reminds us how essential it is to invest in artists not only as visionaries, but as documentarians of history, culture, and transformation,” said Oscar J Rivera, Managing Director of En Foco. Since its inception, the En Foco Fellowship has now supported 100 artists, contributing to a living archive of lens-based art shaped by cultural diversity and creative innovation. Through exhibitions, funding, publication, and mentorship, the Fellowship creates long-term opportunities that center artists of color as essential narrators of American history and experience.
As En Foco enters its 51st year of operation, the organization remains rooted in its founding principles, by artists for artists, with a commitment to building a more inclusive and vibrant future for photography, media, and visual culture.
Honorable Mentions
En Foco also extends special recognition to the following artists whose applications advanced to the second round of deliberations. Their work reflects the strength, originality, and powerful vision present throughout this year’s applicant pool:
Alassane Sy, Aleyana Mitchell, Antonio Pulgarin, Asherde Gill, Bernardo Almonte, Carlos Hernandez, Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi, Cheril Sanchez, Christopher Perez, Clementine Morel, Corey Q Baron, Dahveed Wilkins, Dayana Rivero, Dondre Stuetley, Fernando Zelaya, Jasmine Garoosi, Jasmine Huang, Jessica Angima, Josefina Moran, Josh Farria, Joshua Poyer, Juan Orrantia, Juyon Lee, Kraig Blue, Laila Stevens, Lamar Kendrick-Dial, Mateo Arciniegas, Momo Takahashi, Muyassar Kurdi, Mónica Félix, Nicole Goodwin, Nigel Jones, Peter Alegre, Roberta Dorsett, Sanjna Selva, Steven de Medina, Tyler Nelson, and Xavier Robles.
In recognition of the incredible depth of talent reflected across all submissions, artists named as honorable mentions, and many others who applied will receive priority consideration for upcoming En Foco opportunities, including future exhibitions, publication in Nueva Luz, professional development programs, and potential funding support. En Foco remains committed to cultivating long-term relationships with emerging and established artists whose work aligns with our mission.
The 2025 En Foco Artist Fellowship
The En Foco Artist Fellowship Program is designed to support artists of color who utilize lens-based mediums and digital media technologies in their creative processes. This program merges the previous Photography Fellowship and Media Arts Fund, creating a unified opportunity for photographers and media-based artists in New York State. While applicants may apply to both forms for photographers and media-based artists, they will receive only one award. Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of industry professionals, ensuring recognition for the highest-quality work.
The Artist Fellowship Program will:
En Foco is highly regarded for its leadership in support of artists of color and for its advocacy role in addressing issues related to cultural equity and access. Previous Fellows have gained access to numerous opportunities beyond the fellowship.
Artists who apply for the Fellowship, may also be considered for future issues of Nueva Luz, Exhibitions, and other opportunities.
WHO CAN APPLY – PHOTOGRAPHERS
WHO CANNOT APPLY
NOTIFICATION
Selected applicants will be notified in Spring 2025. En Foco seeks to select 10 photographers to be a part of the En Foco Artist Fellowship Program. Selected photographers will be featured in a 2025 group exhibition and the 2025 Nueva Luz publication, as well as receive a $1,500 honorarium and professional development and networking opportunities.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
WHO CAN APPLY – MEDIA BASED ARTISTS
WHO CANNOT APPLY
NOTIFICATION
Selected applicants will be notified in Spring 2025. En Foco seeks to select 5 media-based artists to be a part of the En Foco Artist Fellowship Program. Selected artists will be featured in a 2025 group exhibition and the 2025 Nueva Luz publication, as well as receive a $1,500 honorarium and professional development and networking opportunities.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
The application is currently closed. Please join our mailing list to receive updates on out 2025 Application cycle. Mailing List.
If you have questions about he Fellowship pease contact: [email protected]
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En Foco, Inc.
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Bronx, NY 10451
Email: [email protected]
Call: (917) 503-8017
