2026 cohort of IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows named

Flowers and limestone in front of Baier Hall at IU Bloomington. Photo by Chris Meyer, Indiana University

Eight Indiana University faculty members have been chosen for the Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows Program. It supports the work of faculty who are becoming national and international leaders in their fields.

The program amplifies and accelerates the fellows’ research and creative projects and supports their scholarly success. Fellows receive funding support for their research and professional development through training in areas such as grant writing, scholarly communication with the public, media training and digital scholarship.

IU President Pamela Whitten started the fellows program in 2022. It is supported by the IU Office of the President and IU Research.

“This fifth cohort of the Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows Program reflects the incredible depth of talent, creativity and scholarship at IU,” Whitten said. “These faculty members are building on IU’s longstanding history of excellence in the arts and humanities while demonstrating the essential role these fields play in advancing knowledge, enriching culture and addressing complex questions.”

This year’s cohort has four faculty members from IU Bloomington, two from IU Indianapolis and two from IU South Bend.

“The work of these fellows doesn’t stay inside the academy. It moves out into the world as performance, publication, exhibition and public conversation,” Assistant Vice President for Arts and Humanities Edward Dallis-Comentale said. “They are recovering lost histories, walking ancient landscapes to understand the present, building new institutions and finding audiences well beyond their disciplines. This combination of intellectual ambition and public impact is exactly what this program was designed to cultivate.”

Katina Bitsicas

Katina Bitsicas. Submitted photo Katina Bitsicas is an associate professor of media arts and production in The Media School, director of the EcoMedia Lab and affiliate faculty in the Environment, Society and Sustainability Institute at IU Bloomington. She is a new media artist who has exhibited worldwide. Her works bridge an interdisciplinary connection between the arts and sciences, combining found materials and archives with photographic and microscopic imagery of natural ecosystems.

Bitsicas’ fellowship project will involve developing the EcoMedia Lab and furthering her creative practice in BioArt and EcoArt. The lab will be an interdisciplinary research and creation studio dedicated to BioArt, EcoArt and experimental media practices that investigate living systems, environmental change and speculative futures. Bitsicas will develop an artist-in-residence program to support the programming and creative production in the EcoMedia Lab. She also plans to co-host a symposium on BioArt and biohacking in the spring of 2027.

Kelcey Ervick

Kelcey Ervick. IU photo Kelcey Ervick is a professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU South Bend, where she directs the creative writing program and the Literary Publishing Center. She is the author and illustrator of four award-winning books of fiction and memoir.

Her IU Presidential Arts and Humanities book project, “My Viking Name,” is a graphic memoir inspired by her experience of reclaiming her “maiden name” and reconnecting with her grandfather’s Norwegian village and the family members who share that name.

The project will juxtapose family photos and archival documents with colorful hand-drawn illustrations of people and places. As a cultural inquiry, the book will question the laws, customs and language used about naming. Specifically, it will illustrate Ervick’s personal story of changing her name, forging new ties with her Norwegian family and recovering a lost part of herself.

Shannon Gayk

Shannon Gayk. IU photo Shannon Gayk is a professor in the Department of English and lead of the Environmental Futures in the Arts and Humanities team at IU Bloomington. She is a scholar of medieval literature, religion, material culture and the environmental humanities. Gayk’s work explores the relationships among literary form, the sacred and the material world.

For her fellowship project, Gayk will advance three interconnected projects that explore the relationships among the material world, sacred experience, movement through landscapes and environmental thought. She plans to complete “Instruments of Christ: Performing the Passion in Early England,” a longue durée interdisciplinary monograph on the arma Christi, the objects associated with Christ’s Passion.

The fellowship will support “Saunter: Medieval Pilgrimages in Modern Europe,” a work of experiential and place-based writing that traces the modern afterlives of medieval pilgrimage. Gayk will also advance her work as editor of “The Oxford Handbook of Medieval English Literature and the Environment,” a collection that will bring together 50 scholars to map the emerging field of premodern environmental criticism.

Jennifer Muñiz

Jennifer Muñiz. IU photo Jennifer Muñiz is an associate professor of music and chair of the Music Department in the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at IU South Bend. A pianist, she has performed in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United States, and has released solo piano and chamber music recordings. Muñiz has performed with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra as an orchestral pianist since 2022.

Muñiz has an interest in the rebuilding of Chicago’s cultural life after the Great Fire of 1871. Her IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship project, “Forging an American Sound: Chicago’s Art Music,” intends to blend Muñiz’s specialties of piano performance and musicological research. It involves publishing a collection of Arne Oldberg’s manuscript chamber and solo piano scores, recording a chamber music album and hosting a speaker series at IU South Bend featuring prominent musicologists. The purpose is to expand scholarly and public awareness of an underrecognized chapter of American art music centered in the Midwest.

Jason Palamara

Jason Palamara. IU photo Jason Palamara is a composer and technologist and an associate professor of music technology at the Herron School of Art and Design at IU Indianapolis. His research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and live musical performance. He is the director of the IU Indianapolis Machine Musician Lab and co-developed the interactive AVATAR music software. Palamara’s new book is “Making Machine Musicians: AI for Live Music Performance.” He is the founder and director of IU Indianapolis’ DISEnsemble (Diverse Instrument Symphonic Ensemble), a student group that performs music on newly developed technology-based instruments.

For his fellowship project, Palamara will compose a live musical score for the 1925 silent film “The Lost World,” which is a major influence on modern science fiction films. His project, “Another Lost World,” will be a musical and media work that transforms the silent film into a multi-sensory theatrical experience. He will present the reimagined experience in the spring of 2027 with a cast of live musicians, actors, sound-effects specialists and custom-developed autonomous music systems.

Danielle Riede

Danielle Riede. Photo by iP Studio Sdn. Bhd. Danielle Riede is the Randolph H. Deer Professor in Painting at IU Indianapolis. She is an artist whose immersive paintings and installations explore movement, materiality and the sensory experience of space. Her work has been exhibited at major U.S. institutions and internationally.

Across Riede’s career, she has explored the idea of what painting can become when the body, materials and site are treated as one medium. She uses the studio as a laboratory for embodied inquiry and eco‑material experimentation.

Riede’s fellowship project will support the continued development of her “Wingspan” and “Venus Walks on Pearls” series in preparation for a solo exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. By combining natural materials with repurposed paint fragments, she will develop a large “paint-chip wall weaving” that will be featured in the exhibition. She will also research goddesses from antiquity to inform new installation-based works.

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa. IU photo Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa is an assistant professor in the Departments of English and American Studies and the Latino Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. Her research interests include race and feminist theory; Indigenous, Afro-Latinx and Latin American studies; and visual culture, music, literature, performance and the visual arts.

For the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship project, Rodríguez-Ulloa is working on a monograph tentatively titled “Unexpected Migrants: Andean Women Against the U.S. Empire.” The book foregrounds women of Indigenous ancestry who confronted racial and gendered violence in the Andes and the United States. The book traces their activism staged in key moments of U.S. cultural and political history. An additional part of the project is a co-edited volume that brings together scholarship, thought and activism on Andean diasporas.

John Walsh

John Walsh. Submitted photo John A. Walsh is a professor of information and library science and director of the HathiTrust Research Center in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington. His research applies computational methods to the study of literary and historical documents.

Walsh is the editor of digital scholarly editions, including the “Chymistry of Isaac Newton,” and he developed Comic Book Markup Language for scholarly encoding of comics and graphic novels.

Walsh’s fellowship project, “The Global Life of Comics: Editions, Visual Narrative and Reader Communities,” examines comics as globally circulating cultural forms shaped by the interaction of creators, texts and readers. It will expand digital scholarly editions of historically significant American comics and use multimodal methods to analyze the evolution of page layout and visual narrative across 16 years of Jack Kirby’s work at Marvel and DC. The project will also involve international research in France and Belgium, focusing on the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition and its participatory cultures.