Introducing our 2024 Research Fellows

Avik Sarkar will study the life and work of San Francisco-based visual and performance artist Miss Kitty Litter (1962–1995), a self-described “traveling hermaphrodite story-teller.” This project is part of Sarkar’s ongoing research on the erasure of trans feminine bodies from AIDS archives and histories.

Isabella Marie Garcia will research and braid together the lives, work, and legacies of three Cuban artists: Carlos Alfonzo (1950–1991), Ernesto Briel (1943–1992) and Fernando Garcia (1945–1989). She will investigate Miami as the landscape and arts community that informed Alfonzo and Garcia’s respective visual languages and their personal copings with mortality, along with Briel’s trajectory and entrypoint into creating calculated compositions in New York.

Jorge Bordello will work to illuminate the biography and artistic interests of the late Mexican filmmaker Sergio Hernandez, an influential figure in Mexico’s countercultural scene of the 1980s.

Timothy E. Bradley will write a critical essay about performance artist Frank Green (1957–2013), focusing on his work The Scarlet Letters, while situating the artist’s practice in the broader context of theater and performance art that responded to the AIDS crisis.

Vanessa Fleet will explore the life and work of legendary aerosol writer and artist Dondi White (1961–1998), known for the subway masterpieces he painted in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on personal and archival interviews, artworks, and photographs, she will re-examine Dondi’s work and story through the lens of AIDS cultural histories, attending to themes of visibility, exclusion, and ephemerality.

About the Fellows

Avik Sarkar investigates the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of transsexual life. Her interdisciplinary research draws from cultural criticism and the legal humanities. She has presented her work at the Hunter Museum of American Art, Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, and Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium. Avik graduated with distinction in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Yale, where her thesis was supported by the Bruce L. Cohen LGBT Studies Research Award. This year she will pursue her master’s at Oxford, funded by the Clarendon Scholarship, and next year she will begin legal studies at Harvard.

Isabella “Isa” Marie Garcia is an independent arts professional, writer, and photographer living in her native Miami, Florida. Garcia is a 2024 WOPHA Research Fellowship Recipient for "The Photography Care Matrix: Teaching Traditional and Experimental Photo Techniques within Prison Environments, Residential Rehabs, and Alternative Schools" and a 2023 Locust Projects Wavemaker Research Grant Recipient for "What Happens When the Dust Settles?." Her writing has appeared in publications such as On / Off-Shore: Poets of the Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora, Burnaway, The Art Newspaper, and Miami New Times. Garcia graduated summa cum laude with her Bachelor of Arts in English from Florida International University.

Jorge Bordello is a visual artist living with HIV. His artistic production interacts with film and television archives at the national and domestic levels. He studied library and archival sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and he has done research on film reclaim, queer cinema, and AIDS iconography in Mexico for forums such as the National Archivists Colloquium, the International Forum of Critical Image Studies and the University Colloquium of Cinematographic Analysis. He is a founding member of CEPA, a group of peers gathered around art and living with HIV in Tlaxcala, Mexico.

Timothy E. Bradley is a New York City-based fiction writer, playwright, and educator whose work explores queer aging and memory, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and music and visual art. His fiction has appeared in Foglifter Journal and his art writing has been published by Galleria Poggiali. He has received residences and awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Good Hart Artist Residency. Timothy is a graduate of Yale and the MFA program at Hunter College, where he was a Hertog Fellow. He teaches writing at Queens College.

Vanessa Fleet is a queer and disability-identified researcher, writer, and educator. Specializing in photographic collections and archives, she has completed curatorial projects at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her writing on contemporary art, photography, and performance appears in C Magazine, Prefix Photo, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, and Facing Black Star. Her PhD project on the documentary photographer Martha Cooper was awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a doctoral research fellowship from the Image Centre. She lectures at Toronto Metropolitan University.