3 Indian-origin artists win $50,000 USA fellowship

Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, USA fellowship logo, and Anjali Srinivasan / website-unitedstatesartists.org

Three Indian-origin artists have received the 2025 United States Artists (USA) fellowships. These prestigious awards, granted by the Chicago-based nonprofit United States Artists, recognize exceptional artists across various fields. 

The fellowship provides each recipient with $50,000 in unrestricted funding and professional development support. USA Fellowships are designed to support artists at all career stages through tailored resources and services. 

This year, the USA fellowship recognized 50 artists from around the world, including three of Indian origin—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Anjali Srinivasan, and Shayok Misha Chowdhury.

Since its establishment in 2006, the fellowship has honored over 800 artists, supporting excellence and innovation in literature, visual arts, music, theater, dance, and film.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Nezhukumatathil, a half-South Indian, is a poet and essayist. She is best known for her New York Times best-selling collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. 

Her literary repertoire includes four poetry collections, including Oceanic, Lace & Pyrite, and a chapbook co-authored with Ross Gay. 

Nezhukumatathil has received numerous awards, including a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. 

She currently serves as the poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the storytelling platform of The Sierra Club, and is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Her latest work, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, is a collection of essays exploring food and culture.

Reflecting on her journey as a writer, she noted, “When I first started writing poems, I rarely, if ever, was exposed to any love poems by an Asian American woman—ones that included motherhood AND sensuality AND brown skin AND the outdoors, so I think a tiny part of me thought it was forbidden in some way, and when you see an absence and void of your body and your desires in American letters, what does that do to a young writer?”

Anjali Srinivasan

Indian artist and designer Srinivasan has been deeply engaged in creative collaborations with traditional glass artisans in India since 1996, focusing on research and design initiatives for socio-economic empowerment.

She studied Accessories Design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She later pursued a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, specializing in glass and digital media.

Describing her artistic approach, she shared, “I enjoy the investigative process of creation most deeply when my glass does un-glass-like things. For I am interested not in what is, but what can be.”

Srinivasan’s innovative work in glass art has earned her several prestigious awards, including the Swarovski Designer of the Future Award (2016), the Jutta Cuny-Franz Memorial Award (2017), the Irvin Borowsky International Prize in Glass Arts (2017), and the 35th Rakow Commission by the Corning Museum of Glass (2020). 

She has also been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant for Art Writers from Creative Capital and grants from the American Association for University Women. In 2023, she was named a Brother Thomas Fellow.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury

Chowdhury, an India-born writer, director, and performer based in Brooklyn, has established himself as a leading voice in contemporary theater.

He received several awards in his artistic career, including an Obie Award and a Whiting Award, and his playwriting debut, Public Obscenities, was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. 

Public Obscenities is a bilingual play, performed in both Bengali and English, that was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick and recognized as one of The New Yorker’s Best Theater Productions of 2023.

As a storyteller deeply engaged in language and identity, he remarked, “My partial fluencies allow me to pull language apart and make something new from the clockwork inside. My hope is that leaning into the hyper-specificity of my own vernacular invites all kinds of people to notice—to tune their ears toward—their own peculiar music.”

Chowdhury is also a two-time Sundance Fellow and is the creator of Vicitra, a series of short films exploring queer South Asian imagination. A Kundiman, Fulbright, and NYSCA/NYFA fellow, his poems have been featured in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hunger Mountain, and more. 

He’s currently collaborating with his physicist mother on Rheology, set to premiere at The Bushwick Starr in April 2025, co-produced with HERE Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company.