2024 Residents

Aleesha Anderson (c/o '16)

UCSD Alumni Artist-in-Residence

March 11 - April 8, 2024

In partnership with the UCSD Makerspace

@zing.zing.dynamite

Aleesha Anderson, an alumni ('16) of the Interdisciplinary Computing & the Arts program in the Departments of Visual Arts and Music at UC San Diego. She will be fabricating a sculptural, cube-shaped "bench" as a public artwork for the campus.

Jenny L. Davis

Associate Professor

Anthropology and American Indian Studies

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Scholar-in-Residence

April 15 - 20, 2024

In partnership with Department of Literature & the Indigenous Futures Institute

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science.

Her research interests sit at the intersections of Indigenous language futurism (including language reclamation & revitalization); Queer Indigenous Studies; Speculative fiction and poetry; NAGPRA & repatriation; and collaborative/community-based methods. Her 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series. 

She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2021, she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage.