AICAD celebrates New & Returning Post-Graduate Teaching Fellows for 26-27

Quebradillana, Wenmimareba Collins Klobah, 2026, acrylic paint and oil pastel on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

The Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) is pleased to announce the Fellows selected for or continuing their AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship for the 2026/2027 academic 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 Fellow:

Wenmimareba Collins Klobah (MA/MFA, Critical Visual Studies & Poetry, California College of the Arts ‘23) placed at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Wenmi is an artist, performer, writer, and cultural critic from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is passionate about cultivating curiosity, hands-on learning, and ecological stewardship. Her research background includes projects within queer/feminist theory, ecopoetics, post-colonial theory, literature, contemporary art, film, performance, ethnic studies, and music or music video studies. She’s interested in bookmaking, lyrical & concrete poetry, studies of regional linguistics, speculative reimagination, textiles, and urban music—with particular emphasis on the Caribbean. Through both her academic and creative work, Wenmi seeks to engage multiple forms of resistance-making that serve as a model for creating paths into the future.

Second Year Fellows:

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.

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.

Mei Kazama (MFA, Painting and Printmaking, Yale University ‘24) placed at Cleveland Institute of Art. Mei Kazama is an artist from New York City who investigates the spectral as a realm of simultaneous grief and possibility, with a focus in drawing as a critical medium and framework in relation to trans studies. As an educator, they practice pedagogy that brings together art and critical thinking to cultivate long-term self efficacy.

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.