DISPATCHES, a 2026 Fellowships Journal

This October, our ArtsLink Fellows begin their in-person residencies.
After months of connecting from afar, these talented individuals from Palestine, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Hungary, and Uzbekistan are now with their Fellowships host organizations in the US and Europe.
Over the next five weeks they will be immersed in exchanges, collaborations, and new connections.

This year’s residencies take a new shape. To keep supporting artists affected by current US travel restrictions, we developed a new fellowship format: Fellows who cannot travel to the US (Nabila Horakhsh from Afghanistan. and Areej Ashhab from Palestine) are paired with both a US host and an international host. Their residencies take place at international locations, with the US host joining in person. The result is a three-way collaboration between artist, host country, and US partner, creating an enriched, tripartite collaboration that benefits everyone involved.

DISPATCHES is a live journal documenting their experiences firsthand: weekly notes, photos, and voices from several places at once, and a record of the connections formed along the way.

Jump to a week:

Week 1: Arrivals
Week 2: Events, workshops & more
Week 3: Fellows Everywhere!
Week 4 (Coming soon)
Week 5 (Coming soon)

2026 ArtsLink Fellows:

Areej Ashhab, Palestine, artist, architect, and researcher engaging in community land practices and material ecologies

Altynai Osmo, Kyrgyzstan, artist with a practice rooted in Central Asian nomadic heritage and politically driven by social awareness and women’s empowerment

Zumrad Mirzalieva, Uzbekistan, photographer and filmmaker focusing on the issues of agency, migration and identity

Mátyás Tóth, Hungary, a puppet and theater artist working with issues of social impact and responsibility

Nabila Horakhsh, Afghanistan/Germany, artist and curator working with the topics of oppression, religious extremism and gender discrimination

Kseniia Opria, Ukraine, curator, editor, and filmmaker specializing in documentary and experimental cinema. She explores the intersection of civilian and military realities during wartime.

Week 1 - ARRIVALS

This year’s six Fellows began their residencies in different ways. Nabila and Areej are working with European hosts, since current travel restrictions prevent them from going to the US, and Zumrad was already in New York when the program began. For Altynai, Mátyás and Kseniia, all three came through safely to the US and were soon with their hosts in Santa Fe, Chicago and New York.

NEW YORK
Kseniia received a warm welcome from the team at DCTV, who showed her around the historic converted firehouse they occupy in downtown Manhattan.

CEC ArtsLink Program Director Zhenia Stadnik joined the welcome group and shared this moment: “I had the pleasure of spending the day with Kseniia Opria here in New York, introducing her to her wonderful hosts at DCTV. I was deeply moved by Kseniia’s reaction to the warm welcome she received from DCTV’s Charlotte Mangin and Dara Messinger. After seeing the space – the historic converted firehouse in downtown Manhattan – and meeting the people there, she said it felt like being in a “temple of documentary cinema,” surrounded by the best colleagues and kindred spirits she could imagine,” Zhenia shared about this special moment.

Her first week stayed just as intense.”The cultural and artistic scene in New York is amazing, and I’m meeting dozens of fascinating people,” Kseniia said. “One evening I spent three hours talking about my film at a workshop, listening to other people’s ideas and it was such a healing experience to end the day with,” she mentionned.

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SANTA FE
Altynai arrived at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where her host, Sheila A. Rocha, welcomed her. “This week was amazing despite severe jet lag!” Altynai shared. “There’s plenty to do and see!”

She attended a performance by singer Jeremy Dutcher: “So moved to hear Jeremy Dutcher sing in his native Wolastoqiyik language. There are less than 100 speakers of it in the world. It is important to continue centuries old traditions, remember stories and wisdoms of our ancestors. With artists like Jeremy, there is hope for indigenous peoples future. The question is, what each one of of us can and will contribute?”

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CHICAGO
Further north in the Midwest, Mátyás described his first week as“turbulent” but said he “succesfully survived all the stress!”. That’s easy to understand: Matyas had just landed and been welcomed by his host at Public Media Institute in Chicago that he already had an event lined up on the Friday of his first week there, taking part in the Resurge Festival.

𝑹𝒆𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒈𝒆 is a gathering of queer performance artists from across Chicago, presenting bold, risk-taking work. The festival honors queer ancestors, amplifies queer futures, and sparks new possibilities for live art. Taking place at Co-Prosperity, a non-profit art gallery in downtown Chicago, Matyas brought one of his recent performances to a new audience.

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Save the Date!

If you are in New York, on Sunday October 18, Kseniia and her hosts, Charlotte Mangin and Dara Messinger of DCTV will present “Deconstructions: Right to the Truth“, a retrospective of Ukrainian documentary films of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Read our conversation with Kseniia about the project.

Sunday October 18, 2026 | 12PM (TRT 88min)

Firehouse DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film | 87 Lafayette Street, NYC 10013

🎟 BOOK YOUR TICKETS | Use 20% Discount Code: “docudays”

Week 2: Events, workshops & more

HAMBURG
Upon arriving in the German city, the US-based host Lila Nazemian of ArteEast quickly established a connection with the Fellow Nabila Horakhsh. During the first days of Week 1, their introduction to the local artistic community was facilitated by Silva Jährling of HFBK, their local host, who welcomed them into a network of artists-in-residence from Benin, the UK, and Nigeria. These early encounters laid the groundwork for an exchange shaped by diverse cultural perspectives and artistic practices.

The semester’s opening event offered a further opportunity to expand this network, allowing Nabila and Lila to engage with professors from various departments and to begin situating their conversations within the broader academic and artistic landscape of HFBK.

The residency unfolds between meetings and exchanges at HFBK, visits to local exhibitions, and Nabila’s ongoing work on Under Construction. Moving between these different spaces of encounter, observation, and production, the residency becomes a setting in which dialogue with fellow artists and engagement with the local art scene intersect with the evolving development of her own practice.

Under construction is a group exhibition curated by Anne Meerpohl that explores the body as a space of experience and a site of social influences. As part of the exhibition which opened on October 9 and will be running until November 15 at HFBK, Nabila is presenting A Piece of Me.
A Piece of Me is a participatory, conceptual, and experimental installation that brings together pieces of fabric from diverse cultures, geographies, and personal stories. Through collecting, stitching, documenting, and connecting these fragments, the project reimagines the concept of unity: each individual is a unique piece of a larger collective body.
Last weekend saw a first step in this project with a textile workshop where children and families brought pieces of old clothes or fabric and create pieces that are part of Nabila’s installation.

emiThis initial workshop is leading the way to a larger A Piece of Me event on October 23, as part of Under Construction at HFBK, with a participatory textile art workshop exploring identity, memory, connection, and collective belonging. The pieces created during the workshops will be collected, documented, connected, and assembled into a large-scale textile installation. Each fragment tells an individual story; together, they form a shared body that celebrates diversity, connection, and belonging.
The workshop, starting at 3pm, will be followed at 6pm by an artist talk between Nabila and Lila for a conversation around the project, artistic practice, and the connections between personal narratives and collective experience. (Details to attend)

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AMSTERDAM
Framer Framed, the Dutch host of the residency, recently introduced the programme and its participants in an article featuring Areej and Mariela Acuña of Hyde Park Art Center. The residency got off to a promising start, with the two coming together to get to know one another, exchange ideas, and share their plans and perspectives.

What began as an initial encounter has since developed into a fruitful dialogue, culminating in an upcoming public event organised by Framer Framed.

Titled Notes on a Returning Landscape, the event will bring Areej and Mariela into conversation around walking as an embodied method of research. Their discussion will trace the evolution of Areej’s artistic practice, paying particular attention to the ways in which walking has shaped her work, informed her modes of observation, and influenced her relationship with the landscapes she encounters.

Taking place on October 23, the event offers an opportunity to explore how movement through space can become a means of artistic inquiry, reflection, and knowledge production.

Registration for Notes on a Returning Landscape is available here.

NEW YORK
Kseniia’s second week culminated in a screening of Deconstructions: Right to the Truth, followed by a discussion at DCTV’s Firehouse, hosted by Charlotte Mangin and Dara Messinger. Bringing together thought-provoking Ukrainian documentary films from the late 1980s and 1990s, the retrospective offered a renewed perspective on pivotal historical events, inviting audiences to revisit the past through the lens of documentary cinema.

The screening and the conversation that followed marked a powerful moment of collective reflection, underscoring the enduring relevance of these films and their capacity to engage with questions of historical memory, truth, and representation. In response to this experience, Razom for Ukraine, our partner for Kseniia’s Fellowship, is organising an additional screening to bring these films to a wider audience.

Taking place on October 23 at Quad Cinema in New York City, the event offers another opportunity to encounter these compelling works on the big screen.

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Week 3: Fellows everywhere!

CHICAGO
“Chicago has been treating me well, especially the weather! “
Mátyás’s words say it all about how his time in Illinois is going, and the pictures speak for themselves too.

Making connections around town and discussing upcoming opportunities with the local art and puppetry scene, Mátyás is making the most of his residency with Public Media Institute. This week he attended Puppets in Progress, a feedback event where he met local puppeteers and saw their work in progress. PiP is an informal gathering for testing new puppet and object-based performances, organized by Chicago-based Rough House Theater. “It was a lovely way to connect with the local community, and Rough House Puppet Company also put on a wonderful show!” Mátyás shared.

Next week will be another busy one, with a workshop on October 27 at Co-Prosperity, the venue that hosted the performance festival he took part in during his first week. “I’m soo excited about it,” he said. “The workshop invites participants to experiment with puppetry, materials, and movement through hands-on creative exploration, while recontextualizing puppetry traditions and questioning the boundaries between reality and puppetry.”

Mátyás also met another ArtsLink Fellow, Yulia Krivich. Yulia, a 2024 Fellow hosted by The Luminary in St. Louis, is now in Chicago on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Chicago. These are the kinds of connections that keep the ArtsLink community thriving.

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SANTA FE
Altynai’s residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) took an unexpected turn this week when the campus closed following a major IT breach that affected several US universities.
She shares her experience in her own words: “Sheila was great in accommodating me even though everything was shut, she would invite me to various events in town, or just spending time together and I was lucky that she couldn’t leave to Nebraska the same week that the school was shut. Sheila is great, very generous and knowledgeable. I’m learning a lot about the history, of inter generational traumas and women’s tragedies. It’s heavy, but also hopeful when seeing people persevere with life regardless of pain through centuries.

Whilst school was off, I’ve managed to make a small collaboration project with my host who happened to be a ceramics artist and has a studio in her garage. We might get these works into a local gallery up in Taos.“

Altynai continues: “I am doing well here and making some connections. I am lucky to experience this land for a longer period of time. Very grateful. The landscape here is so expansive and magnificent. I take long walks and observe the changing shades of the horizon. I feel this land absorbs pain and is healing.”

An upcoming private event held by IAIA Performing Arts Department will allow Altynai to present her practice to students and supporters.

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HAMBURG
Nabila’s A Piece of Me event took place on October 23, as part of the Under Construction group exhibition at HFBK. The workshop was a participatory textile art exploration of identity, memory, connection, and collective belonging – the workshop was followed with a conversation beteen Nabila and Lila Nazemian of ArteEast on the connections between personal narratives and collective experience.

Some photos of the event and the work created:

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AMSTERDAM
The event Notes on a Returning Landscape that took place on October 23 at Framer Framed brought Areej and Mariela Acuña of Hyde Park Art Center into conversation around walking as an embodied method of research. Additionally, the afternoon addressed the political nature of walking in Palestine amid accelerating settler colonial violence.

This conversation marks the culmination of Areej and Mariela’s residency together at Framer Framed – some photos of the event and opening:

Bookmark and stay tuned for more updates from the Fellows each week.

Fellowships