The Swearer Center is pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of Guiliano Graduate Fellows. This new graduate fellowship continues Brown’s longstanding dedication to globally-engaged scholarship, made possible through the generosity of Edward Guiliano ’72. Complementing the undergraduate Guiliano Fellowship program, the Guiliano Graduate Fellowship seeks to provide graduate students with transformative opportunities to broaden their perspectives and interact with the world through artistic, academic and cultural experiences outside their current communities.
2024–2025 Guiliano Graduate Fellows:
Lucia Aremu (MFA)
Lucia’s project explores the relationship between religion and Nigerian society through playwriting. Born and partly raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Lucia was raised with knowledge of megachurches, religious extremism and their impacts on Nigerian society. Her play incorporates immersive research within local Nigerian Christian, Islamic and Traditional religious communities, examining both diaspora and home experiences through fieldwork at churches and mosques.
Yasmin Murray (PhD Hispanic Studies)
Yasmin’s research examines how contemporary Nicaraguan poets and musicians represent mental illness and disability in their work. By conducting fieldwork in San Juan del Sur and/or Ometepe Island, Yasmin will collect and analyze poetic and musical expressions reflecting mental health themes. Combining interviews with local artists and archival research, Yasmin’s work aims to illuminate how creative practices serve as tools to cope with and deconstruct societal stigmas around mental health. As a PhD student in Hispanic studies and singer-songwriter, her project brings together personal and academic interests in music and social change.
Luvuyo Nyawose (PhD Modern Culture & Media)
Luvuyo’s Guiliano Fellowship will enable his participation in the Àsìkò Art School Cairo 2025 program. Engaging practically and theoretically with African-centered methodologies, Luvuyo will build networks to support future exhibitions and scholarly endeavors aimed at critiquing dominant Eurocentric narratives in art history and new media. Luvuyo’s participation will culminate in a reflective paper, integrating Àsìkò insights into his own scholarly and curatorial approaches, to be shared with the Brown community at the Modern Culture & Media graduate colloquium.
K Yin (PhD American Studies)
K Yin’s project explores complex histories and memories of Asian American labor and exclusion, specifically through research conducted at the Manzanar National Historic Site and the Donner Summit Tunnels. Using ceramics and inspired by archival materials, K Yin will engage Manzanar’s landscapes and artifacts to examine collective remembrance, memorialization, and artmaking amidst oppressive historical contexts. This project asks: “How do we collectively remember, forget, memorialize, and make sense of?” K Yin’s research centers on how physical materials–like a jar or a vase– can hold “memory, history, language, image or land.”
Learn more about the Edward Guiliano '72 Global Graduate Fellowship here.