AICAD announces New & Returning Post-Graduate Teaching Fellows for 2025/26

El Instante (The Moment)
Acrylic, airbrush, and charcoal on canvas, 54” x 60” x 1.5”
2025, Erick Antonio Benitez

The Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) is pleased to announce the Fellows selected for the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship for the 2025/26 academic year. Additionally, 13 previous fellows will continue their positions for a second year.

The Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship provides significant professional practice opportunities to high-achieving Graduate alumni. In contributing to the goal of increasing the diversity of faculty and curriculum across AICAD institutions, we aspire to create a climate that recognizes and values diversity as central to excellence.

Fellowships include mentoring and professional development opportunities, teaching experience, health benefits, and other monetary support.

First Year Post-Grad Teaching Fellows:

Ariadne Manuel (MFA, Printmaking, Pratt Institute ’25) placed at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Ariadne is a New York City printmaker and sculptor focused on deterioration, preservation, and discovery in ecological and museological systems. Using scientific, artistic, and pedagogical aesthetics, their practice critiques the power of venerated institutions in our cultural narrative. Influenced by artists at the intersection of science and fine art, Ari’s work blends research, mold-making experiments, printmaking, and the ready-made to create installations that question what we choose to preserve and why.

Trisha Bhattacharya (MFA, Film & Video, California Institute of the Arts ’25) placed at Kansas City Art Institute. Trisha is a film and video artist from India, based in Los Angeles. She is deeply invested in the politics of sound, the inheritance of oral storytelling traditions, and ecology at the intersection of borders.

Erik Antonio Benitez (MFA, Art & Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts ’23) placed at Yale School of Art. Erick is a Salvadoran-American artist, curator, organizer, and musician in Los Angeles, CA. Benitez explores hybrid identities and cultural fluidity across digital and physical realms. They address poetics of migration, decolonization, memory, and mythology, using spherical time—a non-linear framework merging past, present, and future. Their work builds spaces for reflecting on alternate futures and understanding cultural narratives and identity.

Xi Li (MFA, Photography, Yale School of Art ‘23) placed at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Li is an artist using photography, video, and installation to explore image-making and alternative narratives in contemporary media. She examines how images shape, circulate, and decay through culture and history. To understand their influence on perception, Li restores images from archives and personal collections before reconstructing them three-dimensionally, creating works that blur actual and fictive boundaries.

Second Year Fellows:

Ariel Wills (MFA, 2024, Rhode Island School of Design) placed at Cleveland Institute of Art

Yuxiao Mu (MFA, Photography, 2023, Massachusetts College of Art and Design) placed at Kansas City Art Institute

Denisse Beltrán (MFA, Illustration Practice, 2024, Maryland Institute College of Art) placed at Kansas City Art Institute

Miguel Lastra (MFA, Ceramics, 2022, Rhode Island School of Design) placed at Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Antoinette Myers Perry (MFA, Painting, 2024, Maryland Institute College of Art) placed at Moore College of Art and Design

Minsoub (Peter) Sim (MFA, Industrial Design, 2023, Parsons School of Design) placed at Pratt Institute

Yusef Ferguson (MFA, Film & Video, 2024, California Institute of the Arts) placed at Columbus College of Art and Design

Qianqian Liu (MFA, 2024, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) placed at Columbus College of Art and Design

Laura Medina (MFA, Painting & Printmaking, 2024, Yale University) placed at Cleveland Institute of Art

Yuanyuan Zhou (MFA, Illustration, 2023, Maryland Institute College of Art) placed at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Jacob Boatman (M.Arch, Rhode Island School of Design ‘24) placed at Parsons School of Design

Anique Jordan (MFA, Photography,, Rhode Island School of Design ’23), placed at Parsons School of Design

Charles Lee (MFA, Fine Arts, California College of the Arts ’23), placed at Cleveland Institute of Art