Knight Foundation Announces 2026 Arts + Tech Fellows
- Apr 8
- 2 min read
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has officially announced the awardees of the 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship. This annual initiative supports five pioneering media artists with unrestricted grants of $50,000 each, recognizing their innovative approaches to technology and new media.
Work samples of 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows
The 2026 cohort represents a diverse range of practices—from computational media and performance to sound and immersive installation. These artists are united by a commitment to reimagining technology as a social, cultural, and embodied system. Notably, this year’s fellows include the Miami-based artist duo LIZN'BOW, further highlighting South Florida's growing influence in the digital arts space.
The 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows
LIZN'BOW (Miami, FL): LIZN’BOW (Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty) are a collaborative duo whose practice spans performance, video, music, immersive installation, and new media. Rooted in pop aesthetics and cultural critique, their work constructs environments that operate simultaneously as installations, performances, and digital interfaces.
Miguel Novelo (San Jose, CA): Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work combines computational media with philosophical inquiry. Novelo’s artistic expressions include sculptures, interactive moving images, and immersive installations that make use of computer vision, custom software, photogrammetry, and game engines.
Rhonda Holberton (San Jose, CA): Rhonda Holberton is a new media artist whose multimedia installations integrate digital and interactive technologies with traditional methods of art production. Through these works, Holberton uses materials and platforms that physically connect human bodies via technology, revealing how the signals of digitally engineered worlds have tangible, destabilizing effects on our planet.
Taeyoon Choi (Detroit, MI): Taeyoon Choi is an artist, writer, and educator who explores the poetics of technology and human relations. He works with images, text, and code, oftentimes in collaboration with fellow artists, experts, and community members.
Wesley Taylor (Detroit, MI): Wesley Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice combines installation, video art, and sound to make a world. His decades-long practice hones the lessons and sharpens sensibilities learned from Detroit artists who came before him, shaping his craft of sampling, referencing and recontextualizing to demonstrate themes of placemaking, histories of entanglement with the present and the future, and the necessity of Black imagination.
The 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows (Left to Right): LIZN'BOW, Miguel Novelo, Rhonda Holberton, Taeyoon Choi, and Wesley Taylor. Photos courtesy of the artists.
Since its launch in 2021, the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship has supported 25 artists. The program remains grounded in storytelling, speculative thinking, and community engagement, providing creators with the resources needed to further their disciplines and explore the capacity of technology to shape human environments.