Visual Arts Fellowships

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.

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About the Visual Arts Fellowship

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.

2025 Visual Arts Fellowship Info

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.

ELIGIBILITY

 

WHAT IF YOU WIN AN AWARD?

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Meet the 2025 Jurors

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.

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2024 Visual Arts Fellowship Recipients

Bailey Russel of Laramie

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 of Lander

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 of Sheridan

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.

Honorable Mentions:

• Wendy Brendehoft of Laramie
• Blanche Guernsey of Gillette

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Previous Visual Arts Fellowship Recipients

Previous Recipients