ARC Fellows

Leena Joshi

ARC Fellow, Artist, Writer, and Educator
Leena Joshi was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – they were chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Leena Joshi is an artist, poet, and educator working across sculpture, video, performance, and text. Their work considers experiences of desire, illness, and the labor of appearance for queer, racialized, and trans people, often engaging the digital and speculative as spaces to explore a shifting, illegible, and expansive definition of personhood. Joshi’s work is curious about new forms and practices in an embrace of amateurism and play. Leena’s poetry and written work...

Asma Kazmi

ARC Fellow, Artist, and Associate Professor of Art at UC Berkeley
Asma Kazmi was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2018 – she was chosen in the Faculty category.

Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts.

Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of...

Maurya Kerr

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Maurya Kerr was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Inverted Syntax, Chestnut Review, Tupelo Quarterly, little somethings press, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black...

Nathalie Khankan

2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Natalie Khankan was an ARC Fellow in Spring & Fall 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Nathalie Khankan is the author of quiet orient riot (Fall 2020), winner of Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin. Her work appears in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, The Volta, and Crab Creek Review. Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms, Nathalie currently lives in San Francisco. She teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of...

Alexandra Kleeman

ARC Fellow, Writer, and Assistant Professor of Writing at the New School
Alexandra Kleeman was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2010 – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun, Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2022.

Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,...

Fede Kong-Gonzalez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Fede Kong-Gonzalez was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – they were chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow category.

Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede...

Grace Lavery

ARC Fellow, Associate Professor of English Critical Theory and Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley
Grace Lavery was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2016 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her...

Maggie Lawson

ARC Fellow, Artist, and Chef
Maggie Lawson was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2017 – she was chosen in the Graduate category.

Maggie Lawson returned to the place four generations of her ancestors called home, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2020. She was awarded my MFA from the University of California Berkeley in May 2018. Lawson's artistic practice emerges in parallel with a focused awareness of the historical and sociological context in which she works. As many of her identities lie mostly inside of the dominant culture, Lawson uses her insider...

Anastasia Le

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Anastasia Le was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow category.

Anastasia Le is a poet and printmaker from the Lake Chabot area of the East Bay. Her work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review’s Midterm Five: Interlace/Intersect, the 2021 Southeast Asian Student Coalition anthology, and on the walls of her former co-op. She approaches poetry with a Vietnamese linguistic sensibility, but writes in English—she’s working on that. You can find her behind...

Anneka Lenssen

2019 ARC Fellow
Anneka Lenssen was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 - she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.

She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book...