In December 2025, G.A.S. Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), announced the call for the fourth edition of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. This year, the award offered multiple fully funded residencies, including opportunities for outstanding U.S. based artists and cultural practitioners to undertake residencies at the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikiṣẹ.
The call received over 50 applications from artists and practitioners working across visual art, writing, design, food studies, and interdisciplinary practice. Following the exceptional quality of submissions received, the selection panel expanded the number of awards from three to five Fellows. A selection panel comprising G.A.S. Executive Director Moni Aisida, Y.S.F. CEO Belinda Holden, G.A.S. Communications and Events Coordinator Catherine Bardi, Re:assemblages Project Coordinator Samantha Russell, and Farm Residency Coordinator Funmilola Ogunshina carefully reviewed the applications and selected the Fellows. We thank them for their time and dedication throughout the process.
Today, we are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 G.A.S. Fellowship Award for the U.S. Based Artist category: Chelsea Odufu, a Nigerian-Guyanese American photographer and director; Kim M. Reynolds, a writer, educator, and maker; Moses Hamborg, a figurative painter; Nifemi Ogunro, a Nigerian-American designer, woodworker, and sculptor; and Ọmọlará W. McCallister, an interdisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner.
At G.A.S. Chelsea will deepen her exploration of land, lineage, and spiritual memory by working with locally sourced materials and engaging with Nigerian craft and agricultural knowledge systems to create work grounded in ecological relationships and her Igbo heritage. Kim plans to explore the relationship between literature and culinary traditions through research into the history and movement of capsicum across Black cuisines in Africa and the diaspora, developing this work into stories, recipes, and workshops. Moses will research locally sourced pigments and minerals in Nigeria, particularly kaolin, while experimenting with their use in oil painting and portraiture. Nifemi meanwhile, hopes to create ephemeral sculptures using found materials from the farm, such as discarded wood and soil, while exploring impermanence, land-based making, and a deeper connection to their Yoruba heritage. Ọmọlará plans to deepen her relationship with Yoruba fiber and textile traditions by working directly with local plants, natural materials, and land-based craft practices while exploring lineage, ecology, and cultural reconnection through hand-crafted textiles and paper-making.
We would also like to congratulate the shortlisted applicants for their exceptional proposals, which made the selection process highly competitive: Anne Adams, Ekene Ijeoma, Imani Dennison, Jamal Ademola, Masud Olufani, Nia Lee, Nyugen E. Smith, and Safiya Robison.
The G.A.S. Fellowship Award 2026 – Residency D is made possible through the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art. We look forward to seeing the remarkable contributions these Fellows will bring to the local creative landscape and wider conversations shaping contemporary art and culture across the diaspora.
About the Recipients
Chelsea Odufu
Chelsea Odufu is a photographer and director crafting Afrofuturist luxury worlds for fashion, culture, and the global Black diaspora. Her work blends celestial aesthetics with ancestral power, using photography, film, and sculptural couture to elevate Black identity as regal, expansive, and divine. Working between New York and Abidjan, Odufu builds immersive visual narratives rooted in the traditions of the African diaspora while embracing speculative futures. Her imagery invites viewers into a dimension where heritage, myth, and style collide — and where Black presence becomes cosmic.
Odufu’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Christie’s, Photo London, Los Angeles Contemporary Museum, and the Dakar Biennale. As a commercial director and image-maker, she partners with global brands including Chanel, Chase Sapphire, Bose, and Dr. Martens to bring culturally resonant storytelling to life through campaigns, films, and editorial content. She is also the founder of Astheria, a couture label merging sculptural craftsmanship with Afro-futurist aesthetics, and co-founder of Tech Afrique, a platform amplifying African innovation in art and technology.
Image of Chelsea Odufu.
Kim M. Reynolds
Kim M. Reynolds is a writer, educator, and maker. She works across the fields of arts writing, politics, and food, focusing on the histories of pan-Africanism, ritual, social justice and arts movements on the continent of Africa and its diaspora (and their pitfalls). Reynolds runs Home Spice, a culinary project about the history of capsicum in Black cuisines, utilising both literature and cooking. She holds master's degrees in Media Studies from LSE and UCT, with work published in monographs, poetry anthologies, and over 30 bylines in publications like Mail & Guardian, and ContemporaryAnd. Reynolds has lectured and convened courses widely and enjoys teaching the most. She will be in residency at the Zeitz MOCAA later this year with her publishing collective (B)andWi(d)th. Lastly, she co-leads Our Data Bodies, a collective examining how big tech and surveillance reproduce coloniality. Originally from Ohio of Jamaican heritage, she has lived in South Africa for the last 8 years.
Image of Kim M. Reynolds.
Moses Hamborg
Moses Hamborg is a figurative painter based in Los Angeles, California. Born and raised in Southern California, he moved to Italy to study drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art and Charles H. Cecil Studios. His work is held in private collections across Europe, the United States, and West Africa, as well as the permanent collections of the New Salem Museum of Art, USA, and the Manifattura Tabacchi, Italy. Hamborg was awarded a Certificate of Excellence from the Portrait Society of America in 2019 and exhibited in the BP Portrait Award 2020 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2021 he was accepted into Kehinde Wiley’s artist residency, Black Rock Senegal. Hamborg subsequently exhibited with the 14th DAK’ART Biennale in 2022, followed by the Dak’Art OFF and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture “Trade Winds” in 2024. Moses was the inaugural artist in residence at Pearl Lam’s 70 Square Metres, in Shanghai, where he presented his first solo exhibition “Taxon” and exhibited at the West Bund Art Fair.
Image of Moses Hamborg.
Nifemi Ogunro
Nifemi Ogunro is a Nigerian-American designer, woodworker, and sculptor. Ogunro draws inspiration from photography, film, movement and their lived experiences. They have exhibited work at Side Gallery, Barcelona, Spain; and Marta Gallery, Los Angeles, CA among other venues, and their work is in collections including at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado. In 2024, Ogunro was a recipient of The New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund Residency at ISCP and most recently was a WARP Fellow at the Museum for Art in Wood. Ogunro describes their work as functional sculptures and hopes to commit a life around all the lessons wood has to offer as a material and a mode of expression.
Image of Nifemi Ogunro, Tob(i), 2020. Photo: Caroline Tompkins for PIN–UP 38.
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister is a US based artist who uses fiber in various forms to hand craft works that explore systems of power, Ọmọlará’s place within these systems and how these systems shape Ọ’s social identities. Materiality is the basis for Ọmọlará’s practice, as in materials that Ọmọlará collaborates with to create and also the material conditions that shape Ọmọlará’s life. During the G.A.S. Foundation residency Ọmọlará will conduct material research on plants that are central to Yoruba culture and ecology with a focus on plants that can be used to make paper, spin twine or yarn, and create pigments and dyes.
Image of Ọmọlará Williams McCallister. Photo: Rob Ferrell.
