Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Art MFA 04
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, multidisciplinary artist, 2025 MacArthur Fellow, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In its announcement, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Nguyen as “a multidisciplinary artist giving aesthetic form to histories of war, displacement, resistance, and resilience.” His work draws on histories of communities facing intergenerational traumas of violence and displacement, using moving images and material objects as repositories of memory. Nguyen’s projects often involve community collaboration, incorporating testimonies, artifacts, music, and folklore to consider storytelling as a tool for healing and resistance against colonial erasure.
Notable works include The Island (2017), filmed on Pulau Bidong, site of the longest-running refugee camp after the Vietnam War; The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), a 4-channel installation focused on the Vietnamese-Senegalese community in Dakar; and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), which reimagines remnants of war in Quang Tri, Vietnam, as instruments and sculptures for healing.
A co-founder of Sàn Art and The Propeller Group, Nguyen has exhibited internationally at the New Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art; Fondació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa.
Gala Porras-Kim
Art MFA 09
Gala Porras-Kim, interdisciplinary artist, 2025 MacArthur Fellow, Los Angeles / London. Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The Foundation celebrates Porras-Kim as an “interdisciplinary artist proposing new ways to recognize the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections.”
Through nuance, empathy, and playfulness, Porras-Kim investigates how objects removed from their original contexts are classified, conserved, and interpreted. Her practice has included Reconstructions (2016), an installation at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles featuring fragmented artifacts from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fowler Museum; a 2019 series on La Mojarra Stela 1, an undeciphered Mesoamerican monument; and Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021–23), which reconnects Maya offerings from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá—which are now housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum—with their spiritual and ecological origins.
More recently, in A Hand in Nature (2024), she released molecules trapped in 8,000-year-old glacial ice cores deaccessioned from the National Science Foundation, intermingling ancient air with that of the present day. Across projects, Porras-Kim raises powerful questions about the lives of objects, who shapes their preservation, and how their stories are told.
She is currently a visiting critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art, and her work has been exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Leeum Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
“We are proud to have two ‘CalArtians’ recognized this year by the MacArthur Foundation for their contributions to society,” said CalArts President Ravi Rajan. “Congrats to Tuan and Gala in joining a long list of CalArtians so honored over the 41 years of the MacArthur Fellowship.”
CalArts alumni who previously received MacArthur Fellowships include composer and artist Raven Chacon (2023), poet and translator Don Mee Choi (2021), artist Carrie Mae Weems (2013), artist Mark Bradford (2009), artist and curator David Wilson (2001), writer and interdisciplinary artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1991), and writer and performance artist Bill Irwin (1984).
Former faculty recipients of the Fellowship include writer Maggie Nelson (2016), artist Vija Celmins (1997), and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (2001). CalArts trustee Joan Abrahamson was named a 1985 Fellow for her work in community development.
Since 1981, there have been more than 1,100 MacArthur Fellows named. Three criteria determine the selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments which could be enabled by Foundation support; and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
View more information about Nguyen, Porras-Kim and the rest of this year’s Fellows.
California Institute of the Arts has set the pace for educating professional artists since 1970. Offering rigorous undergraduate and graduate degree programs through six schools—Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater—CalArts champions creative excellence, critical reflection, and the development of new forms and expressions. As successive generations of faculty and alumni have helped shape the landscape of contemporary arts, the Institute first envisioned and founded by Walt Disney encompasses a vibrant, eclectic community with global reach, inviting experimentation, independent inquiry, and active collaboration and exchange among artists, artistic disciplines, and cultural traditions.