The Bronx Museum 2026 AIM Fellowship Cohort
The Bronx Museum’s AIM Program is a career accelerator program for the most talented underrepresented artists based in New York City. The AIM Program comprises the AIM Fellowship, the AIM Convening, and the AIM Biennial.
The Museum selected fourteen artists for the 2026 AIM Fellowship from hundreds of applicants. The 2026 AIM Fellows are: Zakariya Abdul-Qadir, Melika Abikenari, Ezra Benus, Daniel Castro, Sean Desiree, Maya Dixon, Lily Hyon, Wen Liu, Melissa Misla, Paulina Moncada, mujero, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Lamar Robillard, and Toisha Tucker.
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Zakariya Abdul-Qadir
"Cut, tear, paste, stitch: Through methods of painting, printmaking, and installation, Zakariya Abdul-Qadir collects source images (archival mining)— disassembling the narrative — to reflect a through line connecting a culture of Blackness and America..."
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Melika Abikenari
"Melika Abikenari is an Iranian-born Brooklyn-based artist who works in an array of mediums, including performance, installation, sculpture, textile, and video. Her practice investigates the enduring and evolving nature of the intergenerational inheritance of memory, matrilineality, and the body in relation to state violence and the forces and consequences of displacement..."
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Ezra Benus
"Blurring the binaries of pain and pleasure and of private and public, Ezra Benus’ practice utilizes and references formats of collaboration, knowledge from Jewish spirituality, and object explorations from disability cultures and experiences..."
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Daniel Castro
"Daniel Castro is a multi-media artist interested in exploring themes of cultural identity, displacement, and erasure within the context of the urban landscape. By way of combining painting and sculpture, his work breaks out of the traditional painting format, resulting in assemblages that propose painting as object..."
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Sean Desiree
"As a conceptual artist, Sean Desiree's work takes on many forms. Their interests include social engagement and disruptive interventions that counter biased societal structures. The subject matter spans topics such as climate change and homoeroticism in sports to white supremacy/delusion..."
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Maya Dixon
"Maya Dixon's work explores Black female autonomy, collective memory, survival, and resilience. Rooted in sculpture, video/performance, drawing, and installation, Dixon approaches making as both ritual and rebellion, referencing histories in order to imagine alternate futures..."
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Lily Hyon
Lily Hyon makes silicone props of bodies and objects that mirror the rapid, disposable nature of consumerist desire and mass-produced commodities. The bare feet and heels that appear in her work act as social agents that perform roles where private desire bleeds into public space, and audience expectations turn into something rather sinister..."
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Wen Liu
"Wen Liu's practice centers on sculpture and relief-based forms that explore absence, loss, and the limits of language. Liu works primarily through mold making and casting, processes that shape how she understands transformation, memory, and survival..."
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Melissa Misla
"Melissa Misla's mixed-media practice explores identity, memory, and belonging within the Puerto Rican diaspora, focusing on the Latinx home and New York City apartments. Through painting, collage, and installation, she layers found materials and vibrant color to evoke the culturally dualistic environments that have shaped her community, creating visual narratives that honor diasporic resilience and creativity..."
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Paulina Moncada
"Just as in petroglyphs, through her practice, Paulina Moncada uncovers subjects of landscape as containers of meaning, drawing questions about placehood and personhood while gradually reconsidering and revisiting ecosystems. Moncada works across painting, sculpture, and installation to portray fragile and inconspicuous encounters between human and non-human life..."
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mujero
"mujero’s work is his interpretation of the intersections between diasporic Caribbean life and his queerness. His video works have been explorations into different aspects of his identity. Sculpturally, he transforms personal found objects, with an emphasis on sneakers..."
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Kevin Quiles Bonilla
"Using photographic, installation, and performance-based strategies as resources for re-signification, Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s work explores contemporary representations of colonialism and the constant swaying, or “vaivén,” through unsolid grounds. He does so through the intersection of structures such as space, language, history, and politics, with a body like his transiting between Puerto Rico (the colony) and the United States (the “mainland”)..."
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Lamar Robillard
"As a conceptual artist with a didactic intent, Lamar Robillard's practice takes a multidisciplinary approach, using information as a medium. The information is pulled from research, which ultimately guides his material choice. Robillard's work combines and expands on various ideas: Sun Ra, Black material culture, literature, spirituality, resistance, assemblage, Haiti, the Unfavoured American Experience, and an obsession with flying and freeing..."
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Toisha Tucker
"Toisha Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing, illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. Their practice is process and research-based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, participatory works, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, social practice, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body and critical thinking..."
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