Art Critic Fellowship

Launched in 2025, AICA-USA’s Art Critic Fellowship supports emerging writers by providing mentorship, professional development workshops, and publication.

About the Program

AICA-USA is excited to announce the Art Critics Fellowship Program for 2026, reflecting our ongoing commitment to supporting critical writing within a vibrant arts ecosystem. As the oldest professional organization for art critics and writers in the United States, we believe that thoughtful criticism is essential—not only for the arts community but also for enriching the experiences of individual viewers, writers, and artists alike.

While writing programs continue to shrink and many publications are reducing or eliminating their cultural coverage entirely, the central tenet of our charter — the support of art criticism as a discipline – has never felt more pressing. From January to April, fellows will engage in a pitching workshop and two lectures led by award-winning editors and writers to discuss the joys and concerns of writing and editing art criticism today, and will meet one-on-one with their assigned mentors to develop a piece of criticism for publication on the AICA-USA website. We embrace an expansive definition of art, which includes performance, dance, video art, and other transmedia practices. Each of our mentors comes with a distinct voice, area of focus, scholarly positions, sets of concerns, editorial background and mediums. From radio to small press to newspapers to academic forums, each mentor brings a rich diversity that speaks to the different avenues that artists and critics take on the way to publication in this 21st century landscape.

We particularly encourage applicants from non-traditional backgrounds to apply. To enhance accessibility, the program is hybrid, allowing for in-person meetings when fellows and mentors are in the same location, with lectures streamed online. When applying, please indicate any accessibility measures that would support your participation in the program.

Timeline & Structure

The program opens on January 12, 2026 and ends on April 3, 2026. Fellows are required to meet with their assigned mentor at least four times over the course of the program, and to attend every workshop and lecture. There is no cost to attend, and Fellows will be awarded a stipend of $750 to cover potential lost wages while participating in the Fellowship and will be compensated according to W.A.G.E. standards for their work upon publication in the amount of $250.

Timeline

Late November 2025: Finalist Notifications

January 12 - April 3, 2026: Program Dates

January 12, 2026, 7PM ET (Virtual): Orientation & Theme Discussion

January 23, 2026: Pitch Deadline

January 31, 2026, 12PM ET (Virtual): Workshop on Making a Pitch & Review with Sky Goodden

February 21, 2026, 12PM ET (Virtual): Lecture #1 with Niela Orr (Public Lecture)

March 7, 2026, 12PM ET (Virtual): Lecture #2 with Jameson Johnson (Public Lecture)

March 21, 2026, 12PM ET (Virtual): Lecture #3 with Ciarán Finlayson (Public Lecture)

March 23, 2026, 7PM ET (Virtual): Peer Review Meeting of Drafts

April 3, 2026: Final Draft & Program Evaluations Due

Eligibility

Applicants must be 24 years or older and reside in the United States or Puerto Rico.
You must be able to attend all program dates.
You must be legally eligible to complete and submit a W-9 form.
Students are welcome to apply.
Although it's not required, applicants are encouraged to have an interest in visual arts, writing, criticism, art history, and contemporary visual culture.

Lecturers

Sky Goodden
January 31, 2026

12PM ET
Virtual via Zoom

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Sky Goodden is the founding publisher of Momus, an international online art publication, podcast, and mentorship platform for art writing and criticism. With Lauren Wetmore, Goodden co-hosts Momus: The Podcast, now in its eighth season. She has published in numerous catalogues, art books, and publications including Frieze, Art in America, Modern Painters, C Magazine, and Art21. She has been awarded the J.E.H. MacDonald Award from the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto and the John Hobday Prize in Arts Management from the Canada Council for the Arts. Goodden has participated in residencies in Ireland, Argentina, Mexico, and across Canada, and from 2021-24 she was an Affiliate Professor at Concordia University. She is based in Montreal.

Niela Orr
February 21, 2026

12PM ET
Virtual via Zoom

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Niela Orr is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a member of Critical Minded's advisory board. Her criticism has appeared in The Believer, the London Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other places.

Jameson Johnson
March 7, 2026

12PM ET
Virtual via Zoom

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Jameson Johnson is a writer, curator, and community organizer based in Boston. She is the founder and executive director at Boston Art Review, an online and print publication founded in 2017 committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art across New England. She has held positions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and currently serves on the board of Catalyst Conversations and the Foundry Arts Consortium’s Advisory Committee as well as the MassArt Auction Committee. She has curated exhibitions at Boston Center for the Arts, Fountain Street Gallery, and Boston Cyberarts, as well as served on numerous juries across New England. Her writing has appeared in Artsy, Artnet, Upstate Diary, and the Boston Globe among others.

Ciarán Finlayson
March 21, 2026

12PM ET
Virtual via Zoom

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Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York. He is the author of Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera, 2023), and contributing editor at Triple Canopy. His writing has appeared in publications including Archives of American Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Blank Forms, Kunst und Politik, and PARSE, and in catalogs for museum including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin.

Mentors

Daria Simone Harper

Daria Simone Harper is a writer, editor, and cultural producer whose practice is grounded in an effort to unearth the nuanced ways that visual art can shape one's relationship to memory, spirituality, and healing on personal and universal scales, especially in relation to the experiences of Black women and femmes. She is a co-founder of Jupiter Magazine (January 2024), an art and culture publication committed to creating editorial conditions that support more viable writing lives. She is also the founder and host of The Art of It All, a podcast and digital platform for dialogue and discovery around Black and brown artists and makers.

Her work has been featured in publications including Artnet, ARTnews, Burnaway Magazine, Cultured Magazine, ESSENCE, Hyperallergic, i-D, and W Magazine, among others. She has spoken on panels about arts writing, criticism, and independent publishing at the Guggenheim Museum, The Poetry Foundation, Art Basel Miami Beach, and NADA New York.

Photo credit: Rog + Bee, Paper Monday

Sharon Mizota

Sharon Mizota is an art critic and archivist who has written for the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and other publications. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant and a coauthor of the award-winning book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. She has served as a mentor in the International Art Critics Association Art Writing Workshop, and is the founder of the Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship, which provides financial support for emerging arts writers. Sharon studied visual art at the University of California, Berkeley, received her MFA from Rutgers University and her MLIS from San Jose State University. She lives on unceded Tongva and Chumash land in Southern California.

Courtney McClellan

Courtney McClellan (she/her) is an artist, writer, editor, and educator originally from Greensboro, NC, USA. She has served as the Fountainhead Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; the Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; and the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. Now based in Atlanta, GA, she is the editor and artistic director at Burnaway, an online magazine that celebrates art in the American South and the Caribbean.

Dorothy R. Santos

Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. She is an Assistant Professor of Teaching focused on Art, Justice, and Digital Media in the Art Department and Core Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, and critical medical anthropology. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard.

Brandon Zech

Brandon Zech is the Publisher of Glasstire, the nonprofit online publication for art in Texas. He joined Glasstire in 2015 as an Assistant Editor, and in 2018 he began overseeing the publication’s reporting as its first dedicated News Editor. He was selected to succeed the site’s founding Publisher in 2019. Throughout his time with Glasstire he has produced videos and podcasts about art and artists in Texas, and has also written exhibition reviews, essays, op-eds, and other articles. He speaks at venues and universities about Glasstire's work and Texas' art scene, regularly guest lectures about art criticism in college courses, and also hosts writing workshops for students interested in developing as art writers. He is a graduate of the University of Houston's art history program, where he was a Tier One Scholar, and he is a co-founder of Regional Art Publishers, a collective of regional contemporary arts media platforms across the United States. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Photo credit: Jennifer Battaglia