Berg Global Artist-in-Residence FellowshipVanderbilt University

The Berg Global Artist-in-Residence Fellowship program brings accomplished visual artists to Vanderbilt for a residential fellowship designed to expose the campus community to new perspectives, media, and ideas in the visual arts and to offer the opportunity for collaboration on a range of creative projects and initiatives.

The Berg Fellowship provides accommodation as well as a generous award stipend to cover both the expenses of residency and the honorarium for the fellowship. Stipends vary according to the length of the fellowship, typically one semester.

"Understory" by Lanecia and Ciona Rouse

Current Fellow

Lanecia A. Rouse

Lanecia A. Rouse is an artist based between Richmond, Virginia, and Houston, Texas, whose multifaceted practice encompasses collage, abstract painting, photography, and curatorial work with non-profit organizations. Rouse’s practice is rooted in an ongoing curiosity about history—personal, inherited, and collective—and a commitment to bearing witness to the textures of lived experience. She approaches art as a space to notice, to gather, and to reconsider the narratives that shape us and the ones we choose to carry forward. Through collage, she re-contextualizes photographs, family archival materials, found objects, and abstracted language. Language operates in her work as both mark-making and verse, contributing to the visual and conceptual layering of each piece.

Artist website

Incoming Fellow

Ekene Ijeoma

Ekene Ijeoma is a first-generation Nigerian-American artist based in New York City. He researches social, political, and environmental systems to develop multimedia works that poetically expose inequities and mutually empower communities. Working across monumental and personal scales, his practice spans community-based land works, interactive light installations, and data-driven sculptures and performances.

Ijeoma’s interdisciplinary projects include community events where trees are planted for Black lives in green spaces across the US, jazz performances in which notes are removed from the Star-Spangled Banner at the increasing rate of incarceration in the US, interactive sculptures in which a wage-based height map of NYC is submerged in water at rising rent costs, participatory installation that invites participants to synchronize their breaths and energies with his, and another that invites them to hold hands together to activate lights and symbols.

Artist website