The Core Program at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation consists of Visiting Fellowships and Artist Residencies in Studio Art and Critical Studies.
About
The fellowship is designed for emerging scholars with a rigorous research practice, who may also have an interest in creative disciplines such as poetry, music, visual art, and performance. The fellowship is a space for scholars to rest, write, and explore ways in which their scholarship may expand across genre and form.
Each Fellow will be provided with the following: air travel to and from Detroit; an apartment and study space for 4-8 weeks, located on a private floor of the Aleo Bed & Breakfast on Detroit’s east side; a generous stipend (depending on the length of stay between 4-8 weeks); per diem; and assistance with local library facilities.
Should they wish, Fellows will have ample opportunities, facilitated as appropriate by the Foundation, to interact with the broader Metro-Detroit community of artists, writers, curators, and scholars. The minimal commitment asked of each Fellow will involve a seminar about their work with an invited audience or a lecture, offered to the broader Detroit public; participation in one dinner conversation organized by the Foundation with input from the Fellow; permission to publish some of the work undertaken at the Foundation in a forthcoming annual publication; and finally, we ask that the Foundation be acknowledged upon publication of work supported by the Foundation.
Application Information
The application portal opens in 2026.
The application deadline is February 2026.
Application package: You should submit your completed application in PDF to the Foundation’s Slideroom. Any inquiries can be made to fellowship@modernancientbrown.com
Your application must include the following:
A current curriculum vitae.
Statement of purpose (500 - 750 words). This should consist of an outline of your proposal and what you hope to achieve in the given time. Please place your proposal within the larger scheme of your developing project if applicable.
A work sample (writing - score - 10 mins of film or sound, etc.) of approximately 15 pages or.
Names and contact details (emails) of three references who have agreed to write on your behalf. DO NOT SUBMIT REFERENCES.
Current Fellows
Kya Lou
Kya Lou (b. San Diego, CA) is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Their practice threads through film, sculpture, performance, and photography. Her work is grounded in color spectrums, spiritual metadata, and complicated truths. From 2017 to 2021, they ran a color grading studio called COLOURED ONLY. Since then, Lou has worked as a colorist across a wide range of commercials, films, and art installations. With a background in post-production, they build foundations that consider the residue of every frame. Their recent work includes an 18-channel video installation on choreographer Alvin Ailey, created in collaboration with artist Josh Begley and curator Adrienne Edwards. The piece was featured in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it received widespread critical acclaim. Lou is currently developing a feature-length film and running a private comedy salon.
“I look forward to spending time in Detroit, a city that has long inspired me for its cultural ecosystems and the radical sonic legacy of techno as a form of Black temporal encoding. The fellowship will support the development of a new body of work that combines my interests in comedy and installation. It will also allow me to continue writing a book that traces my personal and political relationship to color and celluloid.”
Nandi Comer
Nandi Comer is the co-director of Detroit and the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly). She served as the second Poet Laureate of the state of Michigan, 2023–-2025. She has received various fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets, and Kresge Arts in Detroit.
“As a Modern Ancient Brown Fellow, I will complete Children of Malice, a poetry project that revisits the 1992 police killing of Malice Green through archival research, oral history, and experimental form. Rooted in the voices and cultural memory of Detroiters, this work explores how the 1990s techno and hip-hop scenes, political unrest, and community resistance shaped a generation. This fellowship provides the critical time and resources needed to preserve a fading history and to explore how music, culture, and memory inform identity and healing.”
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell (b. 1991), is a Detroit-born Brooklyn-based artist who primarily works within lens-based media (i.e. photography, video), performance, sound, and writing. Darryl is also a curator, DJ, organizer, and educator. Darryl received their Bachelor of Fine Art from Wayne State University in 2015 and their Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, where he studied under artists Xaviera Simmons, Ayanah Moor, Faheem Majeed, and Roberto Sifuentes. Darryl works under the philosophy of F.U.B.U (“This Shit Is For Us*). Darryl is always thinking about how their work can aid in a larger conversation about blackness, and its many intersectionalities. Their work explores the displacement of black and brown people, femme identity, strength, the black family structure, sexuality, gender, safe spaces for all black bodies, and personal stories, all while keeping in mind the accessibility of art.
Darryl is a Core Member of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers) an artist collective spanning across the US, a 2025 Emergent Resident at the RCAH Michigan State University, 2024 Atlantic Center of the Arts Resident, 2023 Baxter Street Camera Club Artist in Residence, 2022 Lighthouse Works Fellow, Fire Island Artist in Residence, 2021 Artist in Residence at the Kehinde Wiley Black Rock Senegal Residency, a 2021 Red Bull House of Art Resident, 2019/2020 Document Detroit Fellow, 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow of Visual Arts, 2018 Artist in Resident at Northeastern Illinois University, 2018 Luminarts Fellow in Visual Arts, 2017/18 Hatch Project Artist in Resident at Chicago Artist Coalition, 2017 Artist in Resident at ACRE Artist Residency, and a 2017 semifinalist for the Edes Fellowship. Darryl has performed and exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Chicago, IL, Cranbrook Art Museum Bloomfield Hills, MI, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, AZ, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
“With the support of this incredible fellowship, I’ll embark on new video work that explores worldbuilding through the lens of Black liberation, using Detroit as both backdrop and metaphor.”
Photo: Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Jen Everett
Jen Everett is a teaching artist working in collage, installation, and time based media to negotiate relationships between rupture, Black interiority, and knowledge production. She received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Jen was born in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. Everett has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Contemporary Art Museum - St. Louis, SCAD Museum of Art, ACRE Projects, Flux Factory, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Kunsthall Stavanger, and more. Recent solo exhibitions include Could you dim the Lights? (Krannert Art Museum - Champaign, IL) and Come Through (Rivalry Projects - Buffalo, NY). She has been an artist in residence at Fire Island Artist Residency, ACRE, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center and was a 2021–-22 Duke University DocX Archive Lab Fellow.
“The Modern Ancient Brown fellowship will afford me the resources to continue work on a hybrid book project that puts my late father’s photographic archive in conversation with my own creative practice. I am so grateful for the opportunity to return home and shape this work in collaboration with my loved ones in the midst of Detroit’s vibrant arts community.
Photo: Kya Lou
Photo: Khari Mason
Previous Fellows
Jennifer Harge
Jennifer Harge is an artist and educator rooted in the legacies and futures of Black experimental performance and Black spiritual traditions. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity.
Black Detroit has been a partner and teacher in Harge’s work. Through her movement collective, Harge Dance Stories, she created a choreographic platform to articulate the interior worlds of Black life and living through meditations on mourning, protest, femme and queer pleasure practices, and embodied liberation.
In 2023 she was the Alma Hawkins Visiting Memorial Chair in Dance at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught courses on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition. She has been commissioned to present work at The Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, Wexner Center for Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Cranbrook Museum of Art, and several other organizations and universities across the country. Her work has also been supported in the form of arts fellowships and grant awards including a 2023 Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellowship; 2022 Flourish Fund award by Culture Source; 2021 Wexner Center Artist in Residence; the inaugural 2018 Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women+ Dance Artists by Queer| Art; and a 2017 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship.
"The Modern Ancient Brown Visiting Fellowship will provide me with dedicated time and space to continue working on an archival manuscript. I am excited to have research time in Detroit as the project highlights creative strategies I've developed over the last 10 years as an independent artist in the city."
Zoë Hopkins
Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She holds a BA in art history and African American studies from Harvard University, and is currently working on her MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University, where she researches conceptual art of the Black diaspora. Her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Artforum, Jupiter Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtReview, Bomb Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She has also published essays in catalogs for Gordon Robichaux Gallery, the CUE Art Foundation, Tephra ICA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem (forthcoming). She has been the recipient of awards including the Gordon Parks Foundation Prize and the Hayden Lisson Fellowship.
"I am thrilled to be a visiting fellow in residence at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation this summer! During my time at MABF, I will be working on an experimental essay-based project concerning the entanglements between Black visual abstraction, poetry, and the metaphysics of improvisation. It feels so right for this project to be nurtured in and through Detroit, a place that has given birth to much of the art and music that has taught me about disobedient modalities of Black aesthetics."
Gervais Marsh
Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar from Kingston, Jamaica, whose work is deeply invested in concepts of relationality and intimacy, interwoven into the complexities of Black life. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Their work is rooted in Transnational Black feminisms, with recent curatorial projects including Contours of the Interior at VisArts Center and To be pained is to have lived through feeling with Canada NYC. Their writing has been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Financial Times, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. They have taught courses in Black Feminist theory, praxis, and performance and received fellowships from the Jamaica Art Society, Terra Foundation for American Art, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Northwestern University.
"The Modern Ancient Brown Foundation Fellowship will provide a generous space to continue developing an essay and exhibition project, and an intentional opportunity to learn with the complex creative community in Detroit. The projects think through the limits of reconciliation and relationality within a world structured by anti-Black logics. Alongside these realities, I consider the generative possibilities of difficult intimacies and reflect on sustained re-orientations towards the interior self."
Esther Kondo Heller
Esther Kondo Heller is a poet. They approach the filmmaking process as a poet. In their films, they layer and unfurl to articulate memory, resonance, and language. They are particularly interested in Static as a portal of recollection, communion, and archive. Their most recent film MU/T/T/ER was selected and screened at the Berlinale Expanded Forum Programme 2022. They are a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics and translating the poetry of Black German poet Raja Lubinetzki.
"I am immensely honoured and delighted to have been selected as a Modern Ancient Brown Visiting Fellow. The fellowship will support me in thinking with other incredible thinkers and artists and in composing materials for an experimental film on Black poetics as a technology and sound that makes, Denise Ferreira da Silva's arrangements of difference without separability possible."