NXTHVN is thrilled to announce our Cohort 07 Studio and Curatorial Fellows: 

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo, Alexandra Bell, Tara Fay Coleman, Benita Nnachortam, Masud Olufani, Haejin Park, Chayse Sampy, Juanita Sunday, and Kristopher Wright

Founded by Titus Kaphar and Jason Price, NXTHVN offers one of the only Fellowships that unites curators and artists, furnishing them with the fundamentals to thrive in their practice. During the course of the program, Curatorial Fellows receive a $45,000 stipend and Studio Fellows receive a $35,000 stipend for the Fellowship year, 24-hour access to dedicated work and/or studio space and subsidized on-site housing. The program culminates in a group exhibition at a prominent gallery. 

In line with NXTHVN’s vision of providing intergenerational mentorship, each Fellow is paired with a New Haven public high school student to guide them in their artistic and/or curatorial ambitions. Since 2019, NXTHVN’s Fellowship program has served as a springboard for artist careers. Notable individuals who have completed the NXTHVN Fellowship include Felipe Baeza, Layo Bright, Alexandria Couch, Kenturah Davis, Fidelis Joseph, Ashanté Kindle, Alexandria Smith, Vaughn Spann, Patrick Quarm, Vincent Valdez, and many more. 

NXTHVN’s Cohort 07 welcomes Fellows from varying locations across the globe including Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Nigeria, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Korea. Artistic practices include sculpture, painting, assemblage, printmaking, mixed media, journalism, writing, and photography.

 

ABOUT THE FELLOWS

SOPHIA-YEMISI ADEYEMO

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (b. Burlingame, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture. She combines the visual impulses of non-canonized Afro-diasporic practices (folk and ritual objects, protest art, shanty structures, adornments, the makeshift and the make-do) with the history of painting to create devotional and disobedient objects. Her work depicts a lexicon of painted moments that reference digital media and attempt to intercept our passive role as witnesses. The sculptural elements—fashioned from found materials—take on the cloak of these paintings. Inspired by her late father, Adeyemo understands her practice as engaging in Black fugitivity: a lineage of strategic maneuvers, born of scarcity, urgency, and tact, which work to undermine exploitative systems. Understanding grief as a site of radicalization, Adeyemo’s work seeks to reconstruct our individualized mourning into a collective force of resistance. Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery, BRIC, c1760 Gallery, Picture Theory Gallery, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art, among others, and has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art Cube, and “Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen”. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at BRIClab Contemporary Arts Residency, Lazuli Residency (now Radical Imagination Projects), and the New York Academy of Art. Adeyemo was the 2024 recipient of The Real Art Award, and a finalist of the 2021 Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters.

ALEXANDRA BELL

Alexandra Bell is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative production, consumption, and perception. Through investigative research, she considers the ways media frameworks control how narratives involving Black communities are depicted and in turn disseminated under the aegis of journalistic “objectivity.” She accumulates news records, mines editorial databases, and restructures textually and visually produced narratives to control the elasticity of language and image. By physically outlining and revising editorial frameworks, she attempts to wrestle media depictions from dominant institutions and impart the power of interpretation and definition to the collective public. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award (2018), Catchlight Fellowship (2019), Soros Equality Fellowship (2019), Sarah Arison Artadia Award (2020), and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University (2022). She received her B.A. in Humanities from University of Chicago and an M.S. from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

TARA FAY COLEMAN

Tara Fay Coleman is an artist, independent curator, and cultural worker whose practice aims to explore how power, race, and history shape what is seen, and what is systematically obscured. Working across art, writing, and curation, she centers Black cultural production that resists dominant narratives, and reclaims the right to self-representation. Rooted in lived experience, her work aims to challenge institutions to confront their exclusions, while creating space for stories long marginalized. Her goal is to always curate with a commitment to presence, complexity, and care, and she envisions cultural spaces where artists are not only visible, but central, and where art fosters joy, connection, and self-determination.

BENITA NNACHORTAM

Benita Nnachortam is an artist, cultural producer, and arts administrator from Lagos, Nigeria. She holds a B.Sc. in International Law and Diplomacy from Babcock University (2014) and an M.A. in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023). Benita has her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she was a Gilbert Fellow. In her studio practice, Benita uses photography, printmaking, mixed media, and sound to preserve and reimagine cultural memories while exploring the intersections of community and identity through storytelling. Her work has been featured at Norwest Gallery, Melville J. Herskowitz Library, Evanston, Art Fair Detroit, The Flagstaff Strand Art Gallery, Michigan, SITE Galleries Chicago, and the NLELE Institute of Photography, Lagos. Benita founded Kuta Arts Foundation (2016) in Abeokuta, Nigeria, nurturing emerging talent through exhibitions, residencies, and workshops. She co-hosts and produces “Parallel Perspective,” a podcast and video series at Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies that bridges academia, culture, and the arts through dialogues with leading cultural workers.

 

MASUD OLUFANI

Masud Olufani is an Atlanta based multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator. He was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in multiple cities including New York, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, and Atlanta. He is an assistant professor of art and visiting arts fellow at Morehouse College. He also teaches at the United States Federal Prison in Atlanta, Georgia. Olufani has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. He is a featured artist in the 2024 Dakar Biennale in Senegal. Olufani is a summer 2025 resident at Yaddo. He has completed residencies at The Vermont Studio Center; The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences; and Tallier Portobello Norte in Panama. He is a 2018 Southern Arts Prize State Fellow; and a recipient of a 2015-16’ MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant. Olufani enjoys traveling, exercise, reading and long meandering conversations.

HAEJIN PARK

Haejin Park (b. South Korea, 1992) is a painter who uses watercolor as a fluid emotional archive. She earned her MFA from Yale University in 2025 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Through bleeding hues, she constructs raw, expressive faces—diaries of acceptance that hover between presence and absence. Her fragmented figures, bruising with inks, immerse her complex narratives into fleeting bursts of color. Her work has been exhibited at Future Fair and Perrotin Gallery in New York. She is the recipient of the Yale School of Art Dean’s Award and Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan Scholarship. She has presented her work at the Pictoplasma Conference and The Yale University Art Gallery. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and It’s Nice That.

CHAYSE SAMPY

Chayse Sampy is a mixed media, Afro-surrealist artist from Houston, TX. She completed artist residencies at Sanman Studios and Asia Society Texas in 2024, the same year she debuted her first solo show at Sanman Studios. A graduate of Florida State University (MFA, 2023) and Louisiana State University (BFA, 2020), Sampy’s work investigates Black interiority, intergenerational memory, and cultural resilience through painting, collage, and installation. She currently serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston and instructor at the Glassell School of Art. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, with recent group exhibitions at the Context Projects (2025), Texas Biennial (2024), Pen + Brush (2024), the FSU Museum of Fine Arts (2023), the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (2023), ArtFields (2023), the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (2023), the Ritz Theater and Museum (2023), and Nia Cultural Center (2022).

JUANITA SUNDAY

Juanita Sunday is a New Haven based curator, creative strategist, and Afrofuturist thinker that creates immersive spaces that breathe, dream, and remember. As the force behind initiatives like the 6th Dimension Festival and the Black Futures Institute, Juanita fuses curation with community- building, transforming exhibitions, festivals, and public programs into portals for radical imagination and collective healing. Her work is a love letter to Black memory and a blueprint for the future. Her accolades include the 2023 Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, 2024 CT Arts Hero (New Haven), and 2025 CT Arts Fellowship for artistic excellence. She was recently admitted to the Curatorial Practice MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art and will be attending in the fall of 2026.

KRISTOPHER WRIGHT

Kristopher Wright (b.1991, Denver, CO) is an American Artist known for his colorful, larger-than-life paintings that explore moments of celebration, togetherness, joy, and loss within American life. The convergence of painting, screen printing, and collage techniques in Wright’s work sparks new transformative opportunities to investigate storytelling, familial bonds, and the nature of living memory. These large-scale paintings initially draw inspiration from Wright’s own life and experiences while also incorporating elements of found photography, machine diagrams, maintenance manuals, and anatomical studies, inviting viewers to make new meaningful connections to these works. Wright graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied painting, printmaking, and Art Education in 2014. Since then, his work has been shown in various exhibitions throughout the country, Most notably, his debut solo exhibition Just As I Amat Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022, as well as group showings at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and K Contemporary in Denver. Wright is currently represented by K Contemporary and opened his inaugural solo exhibition Rock, Salt & Nails November 2024. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum and the Art Bank in McCook, NE.

 

ABOUT NXTHVN

NXTHVN, is a new national arts model that empowers artists and curators through education and access to a vibrant ecosystem. Supported by intergenerational mentorship, cross-sector collaboration and local engagement, NXTHVN accelerates the careers of the next generation and fosters retention of professional art talent while helping catalyze New Haven into a world-class, sustainable arts community.  

SUPPORT

NXTHVN’s work is made possible through the generous support of our community of funders, partners, and champions.

We are proud to receive major support from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, the City of New Haven, the RISC Foundation, Inc., and the State of Connecticut. We’re deeply grateful to the Arison Arts Foundation, Sean and Nancy Cotton, Suzanne McFayden, Kelly Williams, Bedari Foundation, Ellen Susman, Michi and Charles Jigarjian, Maverick Carter, and The Fletcher Foundation for their leadership and investment in NXTHVN’s vision.

Our core programs are supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Gagosian, Hearthland Foundation. We are also grateful for funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and the Wolf-Kahn Foundation.

The Apprenticeship Program is sustained, in part, by the Avangrid Foundation and The Pincus Family Foundation.

We are especially grateful to our Board of Directors for their unwavering leadership and support: Kelvin Lee Beachum Jr., Anita Blanchard, Pamela Franks, Bennet Grutman, Titus Kaphar, Sheila D. Lipsey, Suzanne McFayden, Jason Price, Alexandra Shor, Hassan Smith, Ellen Susman, Everette Taylor, and Kelly Williams. 

We also extend our sincere appreciation to the many other foundations and individual donors who support our work.

For additional information on NXTHVN, please visit nxthvn.com

For press inquiries, please contact exhibitions@nxthvn.com