Movement Lab Fellowship

The Movement Lab Fellowship offers post-graduate artists and scholars the opportunity to focus on independent creative research that advances the study of movement into uncharted territory. The fellowship enables recipients to embark on projects involving animation, filmmaking, immersive arts, performance, game arts, dance, puppetry, robotics, kinetic sculpture and more.

Advancing movement research

The Movement Lab Fellowship application for 2025–26 is now open. Follow the link below to apply. We will hold an info session via Zoom on November 15, 2024 at 11:30 am eastern time. To register, email us at movementlab@risd.edu.

The Movement Lab Fellowship brings research affiliates to RISD each year to explore movement from many vantage points and by using a wide range of methods and media. A research affiliate’s work may address such topics as:

the incorporation of gesture into social interaction.
the way people mimic gestures or adapt their breathing in the presence of others.
the effect of visualized movement on the bodies of people who are unable to move.
movement patterns in sign language.
the social generalization and adaptation of dance movement.

What fellowship recipients discover in the lab may make its way into many forms of animated work, from the representational and figurative to the most abstract forms of animation. Movement Lab research affiliates may use computing technology to augment how we see movement and interpret it both consciously and unconsciously—leading to a richer understanding of our senses and perceptions, and how we bring them to bear on myriad art forms.

Apply for the 2025–26 Movement Lab Fellowship

2024–25 Fellows

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Kameron Neal is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer working across video, installation and performance. As a Public Artist in Residence in New York City’s Department of Records he created Down the Barrel (of a Lens), an archival film installation interrogating NYPD surveillance that has been exhibited at Lincoln Center, Museum of the City of New York and Brooklyn Army Terminal.

As a projection designer, Neal has worked on numerous productions including Dark Disabled Stories at The Public Theater, for which he received Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Design Awards. He is also the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, an Opera America Award for his collaborations with composer Paul Pinto, and an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. His work has been featured in music videos by Billy Porter and Rufus Wainwright and seen at a variety of institutions including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Under the Radar, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Sound Scene at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.

Neal’s fellowship project Camera/Work is a continuation of the research he began with Down the Barrel (of a Lens), using movement to creatively exploit the NYPD’s omnipresent surveillance infrastructure.

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LA Samuelson is an artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture and media. Their work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence, and attachments to living and to one another.

Samuelson’s projects have been presented by MCA Denver, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Understudy, Black Cube Nomadic Museum and the Denver Art Museum. They hold an MFA in Dance from Colorado University-Boulder (CU-Boulder), with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics, and a graduate certification in emergent technologies and media arts practices. They have taught interdisciplinary performance and artmaking at Hamilton College, CU-Boulder and Naropa University.

Samuelson’s fellowship project, Telegraph Valley, is a performance and installation work that centers the friction at the heart of two overlapping ideas: that humans “have” physical bodies while also somehow “being” physical bodies. Assembled from roofing material, multiplayer cassette tape loops, rotating light sources, (de)constructed liquid transmitters (an early ancestor of the landline telephone), plywood, house frames, rudimentary electricity experiments and a dancer, Telegraph Valley uses this friction to reverse-engineer the feeling of having sent out and/or received a message through the medium of one’s body, vibrate memory through matter, recirculate human intimacy through connection with analog and digital technologies, and communicate with the dead. During their fellowship, Samuelson will investigate how experimental approaches to image frame rate and motion capture can be used to animate the queerness that lives inside this friction.

In addition to support from the Movement Lab Fellowship, Telegraph Valley is made in conjunction with the National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project, co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and in partnership with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), square product theatre and NPN.

2023–24 Fellows

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Azadeh Ahmadi is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose documentary and fiction films explore relations between the individual and the social context represented in memory and absence. In her films, human gestures and movements are substantial visual and psychological elements, revealing neglected and suppressed individual and collective narratives.

Ahmadi’s work has screened at festivals and venues including Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Blow-Up Arthouse Film Fest, Lulea International Film Festival, Boden International Film Festival, 2220 Arts and Archives, and Murmurs Gallery among others. She holds an MFA in film directing from CalArts and a BFA in theater from the University of Tehran.

Reading the Waves—Ahmadi’s interdisciplinary practice-based research project—conjoins theory and cinematic form to investigate the inner qualities of everyday human movements and gestures in private and public domains. Through this work she explores the interrelations between the body and the sociocultural structures placed upon, and how these interrelations create affect in art practice.

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Melisa Achoko Allela is a Nairobi-based creative technologist, lecturer and researcher. She merges her background in interactive media, graphic design and animation in artistic and research projects that explore the affordances of new and emerging technologies to position how they can be used to digitize storytelling experiences imbued with elements of traditional African oral storytelling.

Allela is a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya and cofounder of the interactive media studio LESOStories. Her main motivation is to preserve and celebrate the rich cultural heritage of African storytelling while also using innovative methods to share it with a new and wider audience. She holds a PhD in design from the Technical University, and an MA and BA in design from the University of Nairobi.

Among other achievements, Allela is winner of Digital Lab Africa 2020 Award (Immersive Realities category), is an Electric South 2019 Fellow, a recipient of the 2019 HEVA Cultural Heritage Seed Fund and a 2018 Mawazo PhD scholar. She looks forward to the tipping point moment for African women in tech and their increased participation in the fields of animation and interactive media.

Allela’s fellowship project—Songa, from the Swahili word “move”—explores the digital mediation of performance and non-verbal communication that plays a key role in narrative development in traditional African oral storytelling. This project gives prominence to physically embodied experiences that cannot be adequately conveyed in linear media. It entails the creation of a database of movement forms drawn from curated storytelling performances.

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Maxime Cavajani (b. 1988, Martinique, France) is a multimedia artist working across video, photography, sculpture, performance and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time in between queer bodies, living and dead, to interrogate the “seen” and “legible”.

Thinking through mnemonic functions, Cavajani’s work uses the slippages between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, space and phenomena, performance and gesture, sound and noise. Rather than capturing what is in motion, the work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces and reflections. A practice inviting publics to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss and love.

Cavajani’s project grounds (chapter 2) is a video, performance and sculpture installation reflecting on queer deaths. A pilgrimage towards disappearance, it revisits the life and death of artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977). This project explores how body and landscape are devices recording both a struggle with absence and a desire for the unseen.