This year, we will again be offering two fellowships. Each Fellowship is worth up to $3,722 to fund a two-week summer workshop at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, USA. The fellowships cover room, board, and tuition for a two-week workshop, with an additional stipend going directly to the Fellow to cover $500 in expenses. The Fellowship is intended to increase diversity, equity, and access across the field of the ceramic arts. In particular, attention will be paid to race, gender, and socio-economic status, with unique circumstances such as wartime military service, medical conditions, and unconventional family structures also considered. Therefore, Artaxis encourages artists of diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. The 2026 Fellowship Selection Committee is comprised of: Malene Djenaba Barnett, Jonathan Christensen Caballero, and Nicole McLaughlin. After an initial round of reviews by the Artaxis Board of Directors, our distinguished Fellowship Selection Committee will choose the final recipients for the 2026 Fellowship.
Eligibility:
- Artists 18 years of age or older, at any stage of their career. Applicant does not need to be a student.
- Applicant can not be an Artaxis member. If you have already been accepted to Artaxis, you are not eligible for the fellowship.
- Artists must demonstrate financial need in their letter of intent.
- The Fellowship is designed to offer an experience that would otherwise not be possible for the applicant; priority will be given to applicants with less experience in workshops, residencies, or similar opportunities.
- This Fellowship is open to US-based and international applicants. Artaxis will provide international applicants with letters of invitation, but cannot offer additional funding or support with acquiring a visa.
- Artaxis often asks Fellows to be involved in programming to help promote the fellow, their work, and the Artaxis Fellowship. If selected for the Fellowship, you agree to be involved when asked.
- You agree to complete a fellowship report within 30 days after the workshop.
The 2026 Artaxis Fellowship is supported by Artaxis members and funded by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts to nurture talent within creatively driven individuals by offering financial support to underrepresented artists.
If you have any questions, please email us at contact@artaxis.org.
Photo credit: Amanda Kowalski
Aerial view of Haystack campus. (image by Chris Maddox)
Meet our 2026 Artaxis Fellowship Selection Committee:
Malene Djenaba Barnett
Malene Djenaba Barnett is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, textile surface designer, and founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a global platform for independent Black makers. Her work draws on her African Caribbean heritage, using mark-making and pattern to explore cultural identity. Malene’s art has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and featured in major publications including The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Galerie magazine. In 2024, she released her first book, “Crafted Kinship: Inside the Creative Practice of Contemporary Black Caribbean Makers,” highlighting the stories and creative processes of over 60 Caribbean artists. A Fulbright grantee, Malene is recognized for her advocacy of Caribbean makers and Black diasporic ceramic traditions, and she frequently lectures and participates in artist residencies. She is based in Brooklyn, New York, when not traveling to research Black diasporic aesthetics.
Jonathan Christensen Caballero
Jonathan Christensen Caballero is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Utah. He received BFA and MFA degrees in ceramics and sculpture from Utah State University and Indiana University Bloomington. His work has been exhibited nationally in The Regional, the first major multi-museum survey dedicated to contemporary artists based in the Midwest, co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; in the NCECA Annual: Social Recession at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati; and in Figuring Space at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia. He is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Florida State University. Christensen Caballero’s artistic practice explores themes of Latin American labor, oral histories, indigenous material culture, and human figurative sculpture.
Nicole McLaughlin
Nicole McLaughlin is a ceramic and fiber artist. As a daughter of an American father and Mexican mother, her identity has long been shaped by a collision of two cultures. Nicole was born and raised in Massachusetts but spent much of her early childhood in Mexico. As a first generation Mexican-American she is heavily influenced by her multicultural upbringing and her childhood memories of visiting her mother’s hometown in Mexico. Nicole received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Mo. Her studio practice engages in the preservation of craft traditions through intentional reinvention. Nicole draws inspiration from Mexican ceramics, textiles, and cultural tradition to explore the intersection of motherhood, femininity and cultural inheritance. The reflection on her evolving identity after becoming a mother has brought with it, the greatest responsibility—to foster a connection that transcends time.
Click here to learn more about Haystack
The 2026 Artaxis Fellowship is generously supported by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is an international craft school located on the Atlantic Ocean in Deer Isle, Maine.
Meet 2025 Artaxis Fellow, Paige Bennett:
2025 Artaxis Fellow, Paige Bennett, is a sculptor and ceramic artist who is currently a BFA student at the Kansas City Art Institute. Vulnerability, people, and life’s everyday insecurities are concepts that heavily influence her work. She has always been fascinated with sculpting the human figure and continues to explore that through these concepts. Make sure to follow her on IG at @paigebsculpts.
Meet 2025 Artaxis Fellow, Micah Lewis-Vǎn Sweezie:
2025 Artaxis Fellow, Micah Lewis-Vǎn Sweezie is a ceramic artist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. They earned their BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with a primary focus in ceramics and sculpture. Sweezie’s practice is influenced by dichotomous elements of culture and craft from their upbringing in both Vietnam and America. Find Micah on Instagram at @ceramicnoodles.
Meet 2024 Artaxis Fellow, Bianca Turner:
Bianca Turner is a ceramic artist with a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Hartford. Currently, an artist in residence at the Worcester Center for Crafts Her multicultural background, influenced by Jamaican immigrant parents, fuels her passion for art, color, and transformative expression. For the past six years, she has immersed herself in the captivating world of ceramics, finding freedom in shaping and molding clay to visually convey emotions and ideas. Bianca’s sculpted pieces serve as vessels of connection, inviting viewers to embark on a sensory journey of interpretation and engagement. With a commitment to pushing artistic boundaries, she explores techniques, colors, and textures to foster unity and understanding within diverse communities. Through her vibrant and transformative creations, Bianca invites you to experience the convergence of art, color, and the expressive power of ceramics.
Meet 2024 Artaxis Fellow, Jerrie Fabrigas:
Jerrie Fabrigas is an artist from San Diego, California. Her work deals with the concept of “homeland” from the perspective of the diaspora and encompasses building mythologies, exploring spirituality, and dissecting the complexities of identity. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of California, Irvine, and her current research involves pre-Colonial Filipino mythology, weaponry, fashion, and body modification.
Meet 2023 Artaxis Fellow, Lucky Moe:
Lucky Moe is a Southeast Asian Ceramist from Rakhine, Burma. The style of her works is inspired by nostalgia for childhood memories from her time growing up in Burma. Lucky started her art career in Illustraton. Her process includes transforming her drawings into figurative sculptures to tell various stories from her life.
Meet 2023 Artaxis Fellow, Alvaro Villa:
Alvaro Villa describes his creative practice as a form of magic. He is a Dallas, Texas based multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses primarily in working with the figure and familiar objects in ceramics. His work branches across different modes of art making from painting, sculpture, and performance art, all stemming from the ability to take his energy and ideas of spirituality, witchcraft/brujeria, astrology, tarot, and his memories and experiences through the lens of his queer and Latino identity into manifested reality. He recently graduated from the University of North Texas where he earned his three degrees in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics, Sculpture and Drawing & Painting, as well as a minor in Art History.
Meet 2022 Artaxis Fellow, Jayne King:
Jayne King is a Chicago-born Jewish artist in their last semester of undergraduate study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they’ve spent their time focusing on ceramics, object collection, and book making. Their ceramic studio practice aims to ask questions about the nature of memory, the haunted space, and the chain of living connection through the reconsideration of the heirloom porcelain object. The goal of the work is to explore the intersections between the human desire to safeguard personal narrative and nostalgia, the history of ceramic objects as vessels for storage and preservation, and the ways in which Jewish tradition informs how King has come to understand their relationship to their ancestor’s past and the consequential present. They are graduating from SAIC’s BFA program in May 2022, and are currently a resident artist at The Digs Chicago.
Learn more about Jayne here: https://www.jaynemarieking.com/
Meet 2022 Artaxis Fellow, Eugene Ofori Agyei:
Eugene Ofori Agyei (1993) is a ceramic sculptor, fiber and installation artist and an educator originally from Ghana living in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana with a BA in Industrial Art, majoring in Ceramics in 2018. Prior to his MFA at the University of Florida, he was assigned as teaching and research assistant in the same school where he received his BA for one year. Eugene is the 2020/2021 recipient of the University of Florida Grinter Fellowship award and 2022 Artaxis Fellowship award.
Meet 2020 Artaxis Fellow, Nyasha Madamombe:
Learn more about Nyasha here: https://nyashamadamombe.com/
Meet 2020 Artaxis Fellow, Nicole McLaughlin:
Nicole McLaughlin was born and raised in Massachusetts but spent much of her early childhood in Mexico. As a first generation Mexican-American, she is heavily influenced by her multicultural upbringing and her childhood memories of visiting her mother’s home town of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Nicole received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. She has exhibited nationally, internationally, and has work in several private collections. Currently, she serves as the Ceramics Teaching Fellow at Tabor Academy in Marion, MA. Nicole continues to draw inspiration from Mexican ceramics, textiles, and cultural traditions in hopes of showing how her life has been shaped by a collision of two cultures.
Learn more about Nicole here: https://www.nicoleamclaughlin.com/
Artaxis Conversations with Nyasha Madamombe and Nicole McLaughlin:
Listen to an Artaxis Conversations interview with Artaxis Board President, Bobby Tso and our 2020 Artaxis Fellows, Nyasha Madamombe and Nicole McLaughlin.Meet 2019 Artaxis Fellow, Moises Salazar:
Moises Salazar is a non-binary queer artist from in Chicago. They currently attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Undergraduate Program were they primarily focus in ceramic sculpture and painting. Being born queer and to immigrant parents has cemented a conflict within Moises Salazar’s political identity, which is the conceptual focus of their practice. The work of Moises Salazar is meant to to showcase the trauma, history, and current state that undocumented immigrants and queer folk face. It is by examining the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, queerness and the United States history that Moises Salazar addresses the reality of the barriers that immigrants and queer individuals face with the intention to begin to dismantle the myths and stereotypes used to criminalize and dehumanize them.
Learn more about Moises Salazar and their work here: https://www.moisessalazar.com/
Meet 2019 Artaxis Fellow, Donté Hayes:
Learn more about Donté Hayes here: https://dontekhayes.com/
Meet 2018 Artaxis Fellow, Raven Halfmoon:
Learn more about Raven Halfmoon and her work here: http://www.ravenhalfmoon.com/
Meet 2018 Artaxis Fellow, Kathy Garcia:
Learn more about Kathy Garcia and her work here: http://www.kathy-garcia.com/
Meet 2017 Artaxis Fellow, Soe Yu Nwe:
Soe Yu Nwe working at Haystack
Learn more about Soe Yu Nwe and her work here: https://www.soeyunwe.com/
Meet 2016 Artaxis Fellow, Natalia Arbalaez:
Natalia Arbelaez working at Watershed
Learn more about Natalia and her work here: http://nataliaarbelaez.com/