The Wyoming Arts Council’s Visual Arts Fellowships were created in 1986 and are based on the artist’s portfolio, honoring the work of Wyoming visual artists whose work reflects serious and exceptional aesthetic investigation.
The Wyoming Arts Council’s Visual Arts Fellowships are $5,000 unrestricted awards of merit, based on the artist’s portfolio, honoring the work of Wyoming visual artists whose work reflects serious and exceptional aesthetic investigation. Artists working in any media, including film and video, may apply. Applications are juried by noted artists, curators, and others in the visual arts from outside the state. Up to three fellowships may be given each year, and jurors may also select honorable mentions.
Recipients of the Visual Arts fellowships exhibit their work in the Wyoming Arts Council Biennial Exhibit, held every two years at a major visual arts institution or museum in the state.
We have made the difficult decision to place the Fellowships on hiatus for this year. This includes the Performing Arts (theatre & dance and music), Creative Writing (Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction), and Visual Arts Fellowships.
The winners of this year’s fellowship will exhibit in 2027. The exhibition is curated by one of the jurors, who serves on the panel for two years. Applicants must be Wyoming residents.
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Matthew Villar Miranda is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where they curated solo exhibitions featuring artists Stephanie Syjuco and Sky Hopinka. Previously as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they contributed to exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Paul Chan, Pao Houa Her, and Pacita Abad. Matthew serves on the Board of Stakeholders for Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative comprised of a cross-institutional coalition dedicated to advancing equity within art museums. In 2021, they co-curated “Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration,” an exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum supported by the Art for Justice Fund. Matthew earned their BA in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and their MA as a Los Angeles County Museum of Art-ASU Fellow. Currently, they are pursuing a PhD in Art History at Stanford University, where they research queer intimacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics, especially within the Austronesian Pacific and its diaspora.
Terri Porta is a multidisciplinary artist, place-maker, activist, and community advocate for the arts. Across her oeuvre of placemaking projects, there are two distinct connective tissues. These concepts weave through the kaleidoscope of expressionist color, centering her work around a better, more engaged community through activism and beauty. An engaged community is a window to the past and the future, which she highlighted in her historical timeline portraits at the City Hall Mural in Downtown Billings, using famous and local figures who have impacted the world through their art and lives. This work led to her selection as the first Artist in Residence for Billings through the Mobilize the Magic City project, which received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Through generous donor support and enthusiasm, Billings is adopting new policies and improving communication with local artists to streamline collaborative efforts with Billings city officials. Terri’s work to communicate public art’s impact in encouraging creativity and mental health awareness is still ongoing. Terri received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Montana State University Billings.
Bailey Russel is a Professor of Photography at the University of Wyoming. Originally from New Jersey, Bailey received a BA from Princeton University and an MA in Photography from NYU before moving to Laramie, Wyoming in 2011. His photographic work mostly deals with issues of land usage and how this relates to photographic processes. He has worked with digital photography, traditional film processes, room sized camera obscuras, wet plate collodion and other early, alternative methods of image making, pairing them with subjects ranging from the Colorado River expedition of John Wesley Powell to the iconic monuments of the west. Currently Bailey is working on a photo project about extraction and energy development in Wyoming.
Sophie Barksdale is a twice Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Lander, Wyoming. With an extensive background in film and the arts, Sophie worked for Screen Ireland, numerous film festivals in the USA, Australia & Ireland, and spent several years at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s premier cultural institutions. She served on the Board of Directors for the Lander Art Center for 6 years and is Co-Founder of the Bossert Collective, a local public art initiative.
In 2022 she completed the film ‘Who She Is’ – a humanizing insight into the lives and legacies of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Wyoming with co-director and co-producing partner Northern Arapaho Filmmaker Jordan Dresser. The film was awarded Best Documentary at Flagstaff Film Festival, Best Social Justice Film at the Latino and Native American Film Fest, Best Animated Doc at Oregon Documentary Film festival, Best Animated Documentary at the World Wide Women’s Film Festival, and was awarded a “Special Jury Award” at Frozen River International Film Festival. The film was broadcast Nationally across America on PBS after premiering on WORLD CHANNEL in May 2024.
Sophie co-produced the Emmy Nominated documentary ‘Home From School: The Children of Carlisle’ (2021) with Caldera Productions, which aired nationally on Independent Lens, garnering festival awards including Best Documentary at Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, and the Western Heritage Awards. Also with Caldera Productions (in partnership with WYPBS), Sophie produced the Emmy Nominated ‘The State of Equality (2019) chronicling Wyoming’s role in the Women’s Suffrage movement.
Brittney Denham Whisonant is a multidisciplinary artist, born in California and raised in Wyoming. She earned an MFA at The Ohio State University in 2012. Currently she a Professor of Photography and Printmaking, as well as Gallery Director of Edward Whitney Gallery at Sheridan College in Wyoming.
Denham Whisonant has a background in traditional photography and printmaking but has allowed her research and affinity for process to stretch into other areas such as textiles, natural dyeing, and installation.
She primarily focuses her work on motherhood identity, body as environment, domestic labor, traditions/history of women’s work, and the dissections of maternal material. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including most recently in The Arrivals, at the Danforth Museum in Livingston, Montana, and an upcoming exhibition at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. She was nominated for the USA Artist Fellowship in 2023, received the Vermont Studio Center Windgate Fellowship in 2023, and most recently was invited to Arrowmont School of Arts & Craft PENTACULUM residency in 2024.
2024: Bailey Russel, Sophie Barksdale, Brittney Denham
2023: Aubrey Edwards, Wendell Field, Adrianna Hinds
2022: Marcus Dewey, Susan Moldenhauer, Eileen Nistler
2021: Al Hubbard, DaleRae Green, Kyle Reed
2020: Diana Baumbach, Shawn Bush, Rachel Hawkinson
2019: Wendy Bredehoft, Garrett Cruzan, Favian Hernandez
2018: Elaine Olafson Henry Joe Arnold, Andy Kincaid
2017: Margaret K. Hayden, Patrick Kikut, Robert Martinez
2016: Bailey Russel, Florence Alfano McEwin, Shelby Shadwell
2015: Susan Moldenhauer, Jennifer Rife, Georgia Rowswell
2014: Diana Baumbach, June Glasson, Thomas Macker
2013: Suzanne Morlock, Do Palma, Aaron Wallis
2012: Abbie Miller, Susan Thulin, John Haberman
2011: Joe Arnold, Chuck Kimmerle, Jenny Wuerker
2010: Jenny Dowd, David Klaren, Adrienne Vetter
2009: David Jones, Shelby Shadwell, Penelope Caldwell
2008: Florence Alfano McEwin, David Henderson, Leah Hardy
2007: Matt Flint, Doug Russell, Ricki Klages
2006: Ashley Hope Carlisle, Zane Lancaster, Jim Laybourne, Ginnie Madsen, Mark Ritchie, Jon Madsen
2004-05: Penelope Caldwell, Lorre Hoffman, Mike McClure, Connie Norman, Curtis Olson, Bronwyn Minton
2002-03: Elijah Cobb, Kaidi Morgan Dunston, Pat Jeffers, Melissa Malm, Laurie Thal, Adam Jahiel, Marta Amundson
2000-01: Leah Hardy, Ken Kidder, Ricki Klages, Bronwyn Minton, Jon Madsen, Linda Ryan
1998-99: Duane Brant, Francis Fox, Laura Guinan, Mark Ritchie, Steve Schrepferman, Sue Sommers
1997: Frederic Joy, Phyllis Kloda, Scott Torkelson
1996: Marta Amundson, Cindy Warnock, Laura Lacy
1995: Raphael Di Luzio, Adam Jahiel, Christine Karkow
1994: Mary-Alice Huemoeller, Sava Malachowski, Maurice Mayer, Devendra Shrikhande
1993: Pip Brant, Bettina Demetz, Jessica Holt, Susan Stone
1992: Christy Love, Kathy Gaye Shiroki, John Giarrizzo, Dean Johnson
1991: Jerry Rodriguez, Craig Satterlee, Deborah Throop, Sharon Waldron
1990: Patrick Christensen, Gregory Charles Gaylor, Lynne Hull, Linda Ryan
1989: Stan Dolega, Larry Friedman, Robert Seabeck, Laurie Thal
1988: Sandra Chupka, Richard Evans, Carl Niederer, Gary Poush
1987: John Giarrizzo, John Haberman, Elizabeth C. Howell, Dean Johnson
1986: Val Brinkerhoff, Bruce Dehnert, Laura Lacy, Sylvia Long