Residency Program
Building Black Futures Through
Black Study
Discover the rich history, culture, and intellectual contributions of the Black community.
The Salt Roads Fellowship
Nalo Hopkinson is an award-winning writer of the “unreal, the futuristic, the unlikely, the impossible.” Hopkinson is the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, a lifetime honor from the Science Fiction Writers of America (other legendary awardees include Ursula K. Le Guin, C.J. Cherry, Peter S. Beagle, and Anne McCaffrey). While a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside, Nalo Hopkinson innovated curriculum and instituted the inter/trans/beyond disciplinary designated emphasis program, Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science. The Department of Black Study seeks to honor the legacy, brilliance, imagination, and critical existence of Hopkinson and her work through a fellowship residency for Black Queer and Black Trans artists.
The Salt Roads fellowship is named after Hopkinson’s book of the same title, which received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive representation of LGBITQ characters in speculative fiction. Additionally, close to the conceptual and spiritual center of this fellowship are the transmutative possibilities salt catalyzes, which we believe artists in Black diasporic communities uniquely activate. This Fellowship recognizes innovating and innovative Black Queer and Black Transgender artists, gifting them space and time to create their work.
Fellows
Jennifer Harge (inaugural fellow) is an artist and educator rooted in the legacies and futures of Black experimental performance and Black spiritual traditions. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity. Her work articulates the interior worlds of Black life and living through meditations on mourning, protest, femme and queer pleasure practices, and embodied liberation.
In 2023 she was the Alma Hawkins Visiting Memorial Chair in Dance at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught courses on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition.
She has been commissioned to present work at The Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, Wexner Center for Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Cranbrook Museum of Art, and several other organizations and universities across the country. Her work has also been supported in the form of arts fellowships and grant awards including a 2024 Bogliasco Study Center Fellowship, 2023 Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellowship; 2022 Flourish Fund award by Culture Source; 2021 Wexner Center Artist in Residence; the inaugural 2018 Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women+ Dance Artists by Queer| Art; and a 2017 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship.