AFVS congratulates Assistant Professor Kianja Strobert on being named a recipient of the 2026-2027 Rome Prize Fellowship

AFVS congratulates Assistant Professor Kianja Strobert on being named a recipient of the 2026-2027 Rome Prize Fellowship for her dynamic work in The Visual Arts.

Strobert will use her time at the fellowship to study the network of Madonnelle shrines that protect, watch and illuminate the city of Rome’s intersections. She will explore these assemblage sculptures as sites of invisible theaters whose boundaries appear and disappear in tandem with each viewer’s entrance and exit from the temporary psychic states they encourage. This research expands her ongoing investment in the vignette as an arena to entangle the tactile, the ephemeral, the image and the object. 

The American Academy of Rome, Rome Prize Fellow announcement can be found at this link. 

Kianja Strobert received her MFA from Yale University. Reviews of her latest exhibition Pennies From Heaven, New York, NY, can be found at The Brooklyn Rail & The New York Times. 

Photo: Pennies From Heaven, Marinaro Gallery, New York, NY