New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts awarded six fellowships and welcomes two visiting scholars who will develop new work and experiment with multidisciplinary projects during the 2026-27 academic year.
An international research institute for scholars and artists of dance and related arts and sciences, the Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) works as a hub within NYU and the broader city to inspire new ideas and new dances and to expand thinking and research about dance’s history, practice, and performance.
This year’s fellows and scholars represent a variety of disciplines, including ballet, choreography, visual art, animation, and lighting and projection design. They will collaborate across the university and with CBA’s network of artists and scholars.
“It’s a privilege to welcome our brilliant fellows, who together embody the vibrant, interdisciplinary world of dance and its generative ties to other visual and performing arts,” says Meredith Martin, CBA interim director. “I look forward to working with them and with our CBA team to continue developing programs and initiatives across the university, with dance and art as vital connecting threads.”
Martin, a professor of art history at NYU and a 2021 CBA Fellow, is leading the center while its founder Jennifer Homans is on sabbatical. Martin will work with Andrea Salvatore, the center’s executive director.
“In the year ahead, the Center for Ballet and the Arts will extend our reach by bringing dance closer to the student body through collaborations with the Human Connection Club at NYU, the NYU Production Lab, and the Skirball Center,” says Salvatore. “We look forward to folding the 2026-27 fellows into the intellectual fabric of the university.”
CBA exists to inspire fresh ideas and new dances to deepen the understanding of dance. Rooted in ballet yet inherently multidisciplinary, its aim is to open the worlds of academia and dance to each other by fostering collaboration.
Since its founding in 2014, CBA has hosted 206 fellows from 19 countries. The center provides time, space, and support for fellows and scholars to work on projects and a community that allows them to learn from and collaborate with each other.
Resident Fellows
Aszure Barton is an acclaimed choreographer and director whose work spans dance, film, opera, and theater and has been performed on stages and in museums worldwide. Founder of the interdisciplinary collaborative platform Aszure Barton & Artists (AB&A), Barton has been commissioned by leading companies and artists, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Misty Copeland, Cyndi Lauper, Nederlands Dans Theater, Paris Opera Ballet, and Teatro alla Scala. In addition to her decades-long work with AB&A, she is House Choreographer at Gauthier Dance | Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart and maintains a longtime relationship with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. During the fellowship, Barton will further her practice with AB&A and work on the New York premiere of BEND, her enduring collaboration with composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.
Sara Mearns has been a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet since 2008. She has originated roles with choreographers including Justin Peck, Jamar Roberts, Kyle Abraham, Alexei Ratmansky, Pam Tanowitz, Christopher Wheeldon, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Or Schraiber. Mearns curated and starred in Artists at the Center at New York City Center, and performed in Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes, I Married An Angel, and Twyla Now. She appeared in multiple Fall for Dance festivals and Dances of Isadora Duncan at Lincoln Center, and performed a full evening titled A Piece of Work at the Joyce Theatre. She has received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer, the Dance Magazine Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Carolina. Mearns will use her fellowship to develop multiple projects and immerse herself in the movements of Trisha Brown, Crystal Pite, and Pina Bausch. In addition, she will work with director/choreographer Warren Carlyle and NYU faculty in sound technology to curate a project surrounding her work in sound and hearing loss, informed by her own experiences and her role as an ambassador for Phonak.
Kevork Mourad was born in Kameshli, Syria, earned a degree from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Art, and now lives in New York. A painter and video artist, he has performed his animated and live visuals at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Dutch Royal Palace for the Prince Claus Foundation in Amsterdam, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. His work is in the permanent collections of Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, the Spurlock Museum at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. A longtime member of the Silkroad Ensemble, he received the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize in 2016 for his short film Four Acts for Syria and a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 2023. His residency will support a multidisciplinary piece based on the Persian mystical poem, Conference of the Birds, featuring dance, live painting and animation.
Jeanette Yew is an award-winning designer specializing in lighting and projection for theater, dance, opera, and immersive experiences. Her work was praised by the New York Times as “clever” and “inventive,” and has been showcased in Havana, Prague, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris. A professor of drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Yew is a 2026 United States Artists Fellow, and the recipient of the 2022 Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Lighting Design. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jim Henson Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Yew will work on Luminous Awakening, a dance and lighting performance that investigates the tension between illumination and obscurity—both literal and metaphorical—through the integration of choreography, lighting, projection, and mythology.
CBA-Julliard Fellow
Paige Caldarella joined the dance faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022 after teaching for 15 years at Columbia College Chicago. Prior to her academic career, she performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Chicago-based dance company The Seldoms, and is currently performing Cynthia Oliver’s Turn. Turning. TURNT. Caldarella’s choreography blends contemporary ballet and modern dance, emphasizing discomfort, risk-taking, and conflict as catalysts for growth. She earned a BFA from the Juilliard School and an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She will research and create a new work that engages Merce Cunningham’s seminal 1958 dance, Summerspace, as both a historical anchor and a contemporary provocation. Having performed Summerspace and been coached by Carolyn Brown, a founding member of the company and one of Cunningham’s foremost collaborators, Caldarella will draw on her embodied knowledge of the work to structure her investigation.
CBA-L’Alliance New York Fellow
sweat variant is the collective practice of partners Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Since 1996, they have worked at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to create work that reaffirms the marginal as the true center through an exploration of Black interiority. Building gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks concerned with memory and the instability of persona, they aim to construct a space of radical intimacy between performers and audience and to activate a space of wonderment, uncertainty, and mystery in which to see each other anew. The fellowship supports the pair’s program, the Threading residency, established to honor the late Georgiana Pickett, a pioneering figure in New York’s performing arts community. Supporting multidisciplinary artists Marcelline Mandeng Nken and Thuthuka Sibisi, it recognizes artists who push the boundaries of live performance.
Visiting Scholars
Kimberly Bartosik is a choreographer, performer, educator, and writer whose work has been commissioned by BAM Next Wave, New York Live Arts, and American Dance Festival and performed at MCA Chicago, the Walker Art Center, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, and festivals in France, Italy, and Australia. Bartosik received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, the CBA’s Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellowship, and grants from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Harkness Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is a 2020 Bessie Award Honoree for Outstanding Production, and also received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry as a dancer in the Merce Cunningham Company. As a visiting scholar, Bartosik will focus on two choreographic projects: a collaboration with writer Violaine Huisman on a theatrical adaptation of Huisman’s novel The Book of Mother, and blood anchor, a work exploring the complexity of blood relations amid a decade of familial and political fracture.
Hope Boykin is a two-time Bessie Award winner who was an original member of Complexions, danced with Philadanco, and retired after 20 years with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She has choreographed for companies including Ailey, ABT Studio Company, Ballet Black of London, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Martha Graham Dance Company, and Paul Taylor Dance Company, and was featured in the New York Times and on the cover of Dance Magazine. Her recent work includes The Other Side, an adaptation of Jacqueline Woodson’s children’s book, An Evening of Hope, at 92NY, and the short film Beauty Size & Color. She is the founder of HBArts Collective Inc., a nonprofit supporting emerging artists in the dance field. Boykin will work on Trouble No More, a collaboration with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago that celebrates the musical legacy of Pastor Shirley Caesar, known as the First Lady of Gospel.
Descriptions of the projects and associated public programs can be found on CBA’s website.
