AICA-USA Announces 2026 Art Critic Fellowship Cohort
January 12, 2026
AICA-USA is proud to announce the 2026 cohort of the Art Critic Fellowship Program, a six-week initiative designed to support emerging art critics and writers in the United States. Fellows will engage in four 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. The program, rooted in our longstanding commitment to critical writing, aims to provide both educational and professional development opportunities for participants within the dynamic landscape of contemporary art criticism. This fellowship is particularly focused on strengthening the visibility and reach of diverse voices, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds.
2026 Art Critic Fellows
Annette An-Jen Liu is a Taiwanese arts writer and early-career curator based in New York. Liu’s writings have appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly Australasia, Art Basel Stories, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Photos, MOLD Magazine, among other places. She has authored cover features in Mandarin for the award-winning Taiwanese magazine Voices of Photography and curatorial essays for exhibitions at PhotoAccess in Canberra. Liu has contributed research to the exhibition catalog, Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022), and translated essays for the artist Cai Guo-Qiang. She served as Guest Editor for two issues of 4N Magazine, and was a 2020 Critic-in-Residence with Art Monthly Australasia. Liu received an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the University of Sydney and holds a double Bachelors from the Australian National University, majoring in Photography and Anthropology. In 2023, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant in Short-Form Writing.
Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections including This Elegance, forthcoming from Boa Editions in May 2026, Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, The Brick (formerly LAXART), The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He lives in Chicago.
Caitlin Chavez is a writer, educator, and non-profit consultant working in Southern California and the Texas Gulf Coast. In her art writing practice, she strives to spotlight underrepresented artists and institutional critique. Chavez currently serves as Full Time instructor of Art History at Imperial Valley College, adjunct instructor of Art Appreciation at Cuyamaca College, and Grant and Development Lead at the Imperial Valley Food Bank. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Houston and an MA in Modern French Studies from the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK and Paris, FR. Her writing has appeared in Glasstire, Southwest Contemporary, and regional publications in California and Texas.
Luke Urbain is a scholar and writer who works on aesthetic responses to social and economic precarity in the Caribbean and its diasporas, with particular attention to the folds of race, queerness, and coloniality. Their criticism asks what aesthetics can offer to the elaboration of alternative political forms and modes of care. Their writing has appeared in the US Latinx Art Forum as part of the Latinx Unsettling collection from the series “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art” as well as Cuban Studies and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.
Alex Feliciano Mejía is a writer, filmmaker, and educator whose practice centers on the relationship between archives, displacement, and cultural memory. His current projects involve working with 16mm film archives in Guatemala and collaborating with Central American diasporic communities in the Bay Area through participatory and essayistic filmmaking. He teaches courses on media arts pedagogy and multilingual pedagogy at San Francisco State University, where he’s also an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction (writing/filmmaking).