The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University has announced its 2025 cohort of SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellows. The 10 artists will journey to places around the world to conduct research and find inspiration for their artistic practices.

Since 1899, the SMFA Traveling Fellowship program, one of the largest endowed art school grant programs in the United States, has provided critical early-career support for SMFA at Tufts alumni. Selected by an independent jury, SMFA Traveling Fellowship recipients receive up to $10,000 to explore locales and visit communities that will inform current or future art endeavors. This year’s fellows plan to travel to Belgium, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Scandinavia, and Spain, well as Alaska, California, Hawaii, and New Mexico. 

In 2024, in honor of his late wife, Nan Tull (1937–2023), who earned a studio diploma in 1978 and a fifth year certificate in 1980, Frank Wezniak endowed the Nan Tull Traveling Fellowship Award. “Receiving a traveling fellowship really released her … it showed her that she could be more flexible, how far she could push herself, and ultimately opened the door to the more contemporary style she used for the rest of her life,” Wezniak said. Jennie Jieun Lee is the inaugural recipient of the award.

Here are all the fellows and their destinations:

Alberto Checa, A21 (BFA), will travel to Utqiagvik, Alaska, where he will create ice-cast vinyl records and sculptural performances that explore cycles of labor, sound, and environmental transformation. Collaborating with the musician duo ESP, Checa will produce a film and soundtrack, culminating in a sculptural installation and exhibition with fellow SMFA alum Jean Chung in 2026. He describes the work as “an ongoing, futile gesture that explores labor, presence, and ephemerality within the white cube.”

Yi Cynthia Chen, Post-Bacc 2024, will conduct a research project in Dunhuang, China, on the thousand-year-old Mogao and Yulin caves and their mural paintings. The caves will provide insight on formal roots of Chinese painting and mural painting’s lineage of depicting methods of overcoming human suffering. 

Yasi Ghanbari, Post-Bacc 2008, will conduct research in medical imaging museums in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Remscheid, Germany, that will inform both a video work and a series of glass sculptures exploring illness and visibility.

Carlos Arturo González-Barrios, A17 (BFA), will travel across the Huasteca region of México to examine cultural identity shaped by neo-colonialism. He will enter in conversation with indigenous artistic traditions, exploring on-site how environments are signified by their inhabitants and symbolically re-created in their cultural image as art. He will work with native mediums such as bitumen painting to make connections between indigenous art and the ancestral landscape. The resulting visual compendium will trace the cultural footprint of the indigenous Huastec as evidence of their displacement from the “Faja de Oro”—an oil-rich land exploited by foreign robber barons whose riches developed Barrios’ hometown Tampico and birthed the Mexican oil industry.

Annelies Kamen, A11, A11 (BFA), will travel to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and Dresden, Germany, to research a historical tourism scheme and its implications for Germany and Mallorca’s current political realities. Through archival research, interviews, and fabulation she will examine “the (dys)function of tourism in statecraft, the development of anti-tourism and pro-climate movements, and the recurrent crisis of right-wing extremism in Germany.”

Jennie Jieun Lee, Studio Diploma 1999, Nan Tull Traveling Fellow, plans to visit various towns in Scandinavia and research companies making traditional Kakelugn/Kachelofen tiled stoves. Ignited by their enduring history and her own glazing techniques, she will create her own stove. She is navigating how these stoves, historically used for warmth and survival in homes, can function as sculptural and communal objects that speak to themes of transformation, very much like a modern ceramic kiln. This project continues her ongoing research into ceramics as sites of connection and shared experience, tying together personal family histories, immigrant narratives, and the symbolic power of fire and gathering.

Azita Moradkhani, AG15 (MFA), weaves together research on sixteenth-century European lacemaking, nineteenth-century lingerie design, and traditional Persian floral patterns to investigate pleasure, beauty, and sexual representation. Her travels to key collections in Belgium and France will shape new drawings, sculptures, and wearable textiles that speak of politics, identity, and the history of cultural exchange.

Daisy Patton, AG11, will road trip from her home in western Massachusetts to her birthplace in Los Angeles neighborhood colloquially known as “Tehrangeles.” She will photograph Iranian Americans in their homes and use those images to create paintings after her travels for her series Forgetting is so long. Since she did not grow up with her Iranian father and his family, Patton has always searched for Iranian photographs to include in the Forgetting series; with this series-within-a-series, she will create images that act as a kind of family photograph and/or formal portrait, a collaboration between Patton and the Iranian American diaspora members who participate.

Jamal Thorne, AG12 (MFA), will complete a four-week intensive at the Suikoushya International Craft School in Kyoto to study traditional Japanese woodworking. The practice has a philosophical emphasis on balance, patience, and hand-crafted precision, which resonate with the emotional labor of Thorne’s studio practice. The experience will support the artist’s transition into large-scale sculptural works that reflect on healing, shelter, and the architecture of Black identity through the metaphors of joinery and repair.

MiJung Yun, AG25 (MFA), will travel to Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, a volcano that she says “reveals the extraordinary rhythms of saw-tooth pattern eruption activity.” Yun will develop a new series of drawings that focuses on effusive activity—specifically Hawaiian-style lava fountaining. Through the integration of field surveys and data collection, these works will open new perspectives on the dynamics of natural phenomena, weaving together visual interpretation and scientific insight.

The review process is facilitated each year by SMFA and the Tufts University Art Galleries. The jurors for the 127th incarnation of the Traveling Fellows competition were Courtney McClellan, AG13 (MFA), an artist, writer, and educator from Greensboro, North Carolina, and a 2017-2018 SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellow; Gabrielle Niu, the assistant curator of the collection and exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; and Zora J. Murff, an artist and educator living in Oregon.