The Lower East Side (LES) Young Artists of Color Fellowship supports early career artists in exploring creative practices centered on community engagement and cross-sector collaboration.
The fellowship aims to help these artists build a peer network of mutual support, meet with experienced artists & producers of color to help shape strategies for furthering their work in the field, and participate in a culminating public showcase of original projects.
We developed the Fellowship in recognition of the diversity of the Lower East Side community and its many cultures, and the need for FAB to play a role in the development of a generation of artists who reflect that diversity.
The Fellowship was developed particularly to support POC artists who live in the Lower East Side, although we accept applications for any young artist who is a NYC resident. We define the Lower East Side as including the area from 14th Street to Canal, Bowery to the East River, as well as Chinatown. This includes Loisaida, the East Village, and all of Community District 3.
2026 cohort
Benjy Hsu
Coralis Rivera
Coralis Rivera (b. 2003, NY) is a Brooklyn born and based artist grappling with identity, belonging, and popular culture through the process of creating multimedia installations. Their process includes working with drawing, photo, video, and sound to deconstruct their NuyoRican upbringing and investigate their affinity towards engulfing emotion in the intimacy of installation. Their work has been included in group shows including Yale Norfolk’s Making Light (2024), FIT’s The Space In Between (2025), and ArtStart’s See Me Because (2025). Having worked and been around the Lower East Side for various fundamental years of their life, Rivera hopes to make work about the area during their fellowship with Fabnyc!
Daniel Marte
Daniel Marte (he/him) is a Dominican hip-hop artists born and raised in the Lower East Side. He has a love for revolutionary songwriting and a hate for conformity. He represents the underdogs of his community who feel they’ve been dealt a bad hand, and his hope is to empower them and let them know they’re not an alone. He’s performed music at the Spotify office, exhibited his photography at the Apple Store, and he is an active NYCHA resident board member in his neighborhood.
Jewel Champbell
Jewel Champbell (she/her) is a multimedia artist and archivist from Brooklyn, NY, whose practice explores Black memory and community-centered storytelling. Working across photography, archival research, and print, she reimagines the archive as an active site of engagement that invites reflection and collective authorship. Through her press initiative, Blkground Press, she produces zines and postcards that expand archival access and strengthen collective memory.Jewel holds a B.S. in Multiplatform Production from Morgan State University, where she received the President’s Second Mile Award in 2023. She currently serves as the 2025–2026 Archives Research Fellow for The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously served as the 2024–2025 Archives Research Fellow for Howard University’s Black Press Archives and was a 2024 Osborne Fellow at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.
Kendall Greene
Kendall Greene (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based Black artist, exploring interpersonal, communal, and interspecies connections. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia surrounded by trees, vegetable and herb gardens, and springtime flowers. Kendall received a Bachelor of Arts in Art and the History of Art from Amherst College in 2024. Here she furthered her interest in creative engagement and ecology. During her summers, she lived in the Lower East Side and interned for the The Dark Laboratory creative collective and Madison Square Park Conservancy. She continues to frequent the community gardens of the Lower East Side for reprieve. Kendall’s practice consists of digital and analog photography as well as sculpture, allowing her to utilize tactile processes in a world becoming increasingly virtual and disconnected. She works to remedy these rifts and inspire others to do the same.
Mei Bock
Mei Bock (she/her) is a writer and visual artist from NYC. Her work examines the barriers people, cities, and nations construct to feel safe. This includes the coastal resiliency projects being built along Lower Manhattan. She is also interested in the formation of Asian and Jewish identities. Through her poems, paintings, sculptures and stories, she seeks to erode the boundaries between humans, nature, and urban environments.
Natalia Boumatar
Natalia received her B.Arch from Cooper Union. Born in Beirut, she lives in Chinatown, NYC. Her current work explores bodies of water and their fugitive nature.
Nia Blue
Nia Blue is a mixed-media painter living in Brooklyn, NY with a focus in creating storied landscapes with paint and cold wax on large surfaces. Blue has earned her B.S. in Health Sciences with a minor in Studio Art from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA. Blue’s work focuses on documentation of social determinants of health in the U.S. with a focus in portrayal of African-American experiences. Previously she has exhibited in North Carolina, Virginia, and several NYC galleries. Blue has been awarded scholarships from The Art Students League, Rhode Island School of Design, and Americorp. In Spring’26, she is excited to participate in FAB NYC’s Artists of Colors Fellowship!
All Previous Fellowship Cohorts
This project is supported in part through funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.