The Lunder Institute for American Art is excited to welcome a new cohort of fellows for the 2025 calendar year.
Awarded to scholars, researchers, and artists whose work aligns with The Lunder Institute’s mission of expanding the boundaries of American Art, fellowships foster experimentation, research, and production at all stages of practice by providing space, time, and resources to incubate leading work in the field.
Lunder Institute fellowships include remote and residential appointments, with each fellow interacting with the Colby College community through a variety of outlets including onsite visits, engagement with academic departments, facilitating public programs, and mining the Colby College Museum of Art’s collection.
Ernest A. Bryant III, Lunder Institute Fellow
Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., is an American artist, critic and professor. He is the founder and host of the discussion series “Criticism + Value,” a forum for sharing experimental essays about art, and hosting performative, public conversations between living and non-living artists.
Bryant holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, a MFA from Yale School of Art, and a MFA from the NY School of Visual Arts.
william cordova, Ossorio Fellow
william cordova is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner interested in the roots of abstraction, history of textile encoding and non-linear narratives. He is a co-founder of the Bass Collective and CCC (Coffee Cup Collective), founder of the Florida AIM BIENNIAL, and co-curated the Greenwood Centennial in Tulsa, OK in 2021.
Bryant holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Yale University.
Established in 2019 and supported by the Ossorio Foundation, the Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant provides financial support to artists affiliated with the Colby Museum and its Lunder Institute to further their intellectual pursuits, research, and the creation of new artworks that expand the boundaries of American art.
Alexandra Grant, Lunder Institute Fellow
Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based visual artist whose work explores issues around communication across languages, literary traditions, and cultures. is a co-founder of independent publisher X Artists’ Books and the creator of the grantLOVE Project, which has raised funds for arts-based nonprofits. She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York and carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid.
Grant holds a MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and her BA from Swarthmore College.
Hannah Haynes, Lunder Institute Fellow
Hannah Haynes is an author and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Communication and Intercultural Studies at a public liberal arts college in New England. She writes on white rhetoric, critical and comparative ethnic studies, and social movements and is currently completing her second book tentatively titled Vulnerable Agents: Childhood, White Women, and Multicultural Whiteness that draws on intersectional scholarship while attending to gendered and racialized power dynamics.
Haynes holds a PhD and MA from the University of Michigan and a BA from Williams College.
Dianne Smith, Lunder Institute Fellow
Dianne Smith is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and video. She is a Nancy Graves Foundation Awards Grant Recipient and received a Fulbright from The United States Consulate General in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Smith holds a MFA from Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany via Plymouth University in the UK.
Michael Namingha, Lunder Institute Fellow
Michael Namingha (Tewa/Hopi) is a photographer that utilizes his work to document environmental changes and the impacts of industrial excavations. His work he’s able to create dialogue between the ancestral landscapes of the Pueblo people and the oil industry with a non-confrontational approach that invites audiences to witness the true environmental effects of the oil and gas industries and brings attention and awareness to the treatment of Pueblo homelands.
Namingha holds a BBA from Parsons School of Design.
Top row, left to right: Ernest A. Bryant III, Dianne Smith, Alexandra Grant
Bottom row, left to right: Michael Namingha, Hannah Hanyes, william cordova
All photos courtesy the individuals
Continuing 2024–25 Fellows
Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, Ossorio Fellow, Visiting campus in Spring 2025