Traveling Fellowships

Each year, the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University facilitates a review process with a panel of three independent jurors to award up to ten Traveling Fellowships to selected alumni. Fellows receive up to $10,000 to pursue travel and research related to their art practice.

The program has provided critical early-career support for many notable SMFA graduates, including Nan Goldin, Mike and Doug Starn, Ellen Gallagher, Omer Fast, and recent graduates such as Evelyn Rydz, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Daniela Rivera, Helina Metaferia, Dinorá Justice, and Che Yeh. 
 

History of the Travel Fund

In 1894, James William Paige left a bequest of $30,000 to the Museum School to establish a travel fund, among others who left bequests in the years to come. Compiled income was to be used to send SMFA students to Europe, where they would study art for a period of two years. By 1899, the first Traveling Scholar, Mary Brewster Hazelton, sailed to Europe. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, recipients typically traveled to Paris, Rome, or Florence and received $800 per year for two years. Today, SMFA Travelling Fellows journey across the globe, to places as diverse as the American West, Antarctica, and Japan, receiving grants of up to $10,000 each. Broadening the scope of travel beyond Europe is part of SMFA at Tufts commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion within artmaking practices and is an important reckoning with our institutional history.

Eligibility

• Only SMFA graduates of the BFA, Combined Degree, Diploma, Post-Baccalaureate, MFA, MAT programs, or fifth-year degree program alumni may apply.
• Alumni may be working in any contemporary visual art medium.
• Anyone who previously applied, but has not yet won a Traveling Fellowship, is encouraged to reapply.
• Those who participated in the Traveling Certificate Program are eligible to apply for a Traveling Fellowship (this is not a conflict of interest as they are different programs with similar names)

Important Dates

May 15, 2024 – Applications Opens
August 20, 2024 – Applications Close
August 20 - September 16, 2024 – Juror Review Period
September 2024 – Applicant Status Notification

2024 Jurors

A respected authority on the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary art, Dr. Leonie Bradbury has 20 years of experience creating compelling and innovative exhibitions and promoting artists as thought leaders. She currently serves as the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. At Emerson, she founded and now directs their platform for visual art “Emerson Contemporary” focused on presenting and commissioning moving image works, performance, and art engaged with new and emerging technologies. 
 
In 2022, De Gruyter published her essay “The Networked Artwork: The Grid As Dynamic Relational Form?” as part of the anthology The Arts of the Grid: Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts. Bradbury’s most recent exhibition One Day We’ll go Home, featured moving image works by Vietnamese American artists who each critique the established historical narratives of the wars in Vietnam, colonialism, dislocation, and their long-lasting aftermath. 

Noam Parness is a curator, writer, and arts administrator. They are the former Associate Curator / Exhibitions Manager at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA), where they curated various solo and group exhibitions devoted to queer art and life. Select curatorial projects include I’m a thousand different people—Everyone is real (co-curated with Stamatina Gregory and Judy Giera, 2024), Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant (co-curated with Jackson Davidow, 2023), Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection (co-curated with Ariel Goldberg, 2020), and Haptic Tactics (co-curated with Risa Puleo and Daniel J Sander, 2018). They co-edited, with Gonzalo Casals, Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (Hirmer Publishers, 2019). They currently work as a Senior Exhibitions Coordinator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) creates ceramics sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct the assumptions we have about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work. 
 
She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist in residence programs at Root Division, Bemis Center for the Arts, Recology SF, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at Chinese Culture Center SF, Jessica Silverman Gallery SF, and A-B Projects, LA. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow, and is a 2022 SFMOMA Seca Award winner.  She is currently a SMFA Professor of the Practice in Ceramics at Tufts University.