The Department of Art is proud to announce that recent MFA graduate daniela del mar is the recipient of a 2026 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.
The Dedalus Foundation awards four fellowships annually to graduating MFA students in the United States whose work demonstrates exceptional achievement in painting and sculpture. Each fellowship includes a $15,000 stipend and is awarded through a national nomination and review process led by a committee of artists, curators, and critics.
daniela del mar (they/ellx) is a queer, Kiltre transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator working between Tiwa, Tewa, and Pueblo Territory (New Mexico, USA) and Diaguita Territory/Wallmapú (Central and Northern Chile).
Grounded in poetics, reciprocity, abolition, and public intervention, their practice merges weaving, sculpture, and book arts with cultural and land-based practices, often through collaborative publishing and collective process. Growing up in diaspora, poetry became another native language for daniela. One that expanded into haptic, material, and communal forms acting as shared shelter.
Their work centers sculptural poems as intersections of text, textile, translation, and ecological kinship. Through installation and community collaboration, daniela explores anti-colonial language practices, intergenerational knowledge, memory, and embodied epistemologies while imagining Native Presents and Native Futurisms across hemispheres.
daniela has also co-founded several collaborative initiatives, including the Poetry Salon Broadside Project, a printed series supporting QT/BIPOC writers; letra chueca press, a Spanglish press focused on transborder identity and Latiné printmaking; and Seed & Bloom, an ongoing annual poetry publication created with incarcerated students at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally across galleries, museums, universities, and community spaces.
We congratulate daniela on this well deserved recognition!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
EXPLORE the work of daniela del mar by following on Instagram @arroyo_chueco.
LEARN MORE at https://dedalusfoundation.org/programs/fellows-recipients/fellow/daniela-del-mar/
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