Malik Gaines and Fred Moten, two faculty members who teach at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, were among the honorees when the United States Artists (USA) announced their 2018 USA Fellows.
This year, 45 artists and collectives across nine creative disciplines will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. The Fellowships honor their creative accomplishments and support their ongoing artistic and professional development. Moten was honored for his contributions to writing, while Gaines’ performance group My Barbarian was awarded for their contributions to theater and performance.
Malik Gaines, PhD, assistant professor of performance studies at NYU Tisch, is a writer and artist whose work deals with performance practice and theory, black representation, and queer social tactics. Since 2000, Gaines has performed and exhibited with collaborators Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade as the group My Barbarian. Their work uses musical/theatrical and critical techniques to playfully act out social difficulties. The trio has presented work and has had solo exhibitions all over the world and has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Bomb, and various international newspapers.
Fred Moten, PhD, professor of performance studies at NYU Tisch, teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014); The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015); The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); and a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly, and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.
USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers, and from every corner of the United States, through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Spread across all creative disciplines including Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing, the Fellows represent a broad cross-section of the best of American arts and letters. To date, USA has distributed over $22 million to a diverse group of more than 500 artists and collaboratives.