Kresge Arts in Detroit names 2026 Fellows and Gilda Award winners

Kresge Arts in Detroit has named its 2026 class of Artist Fellows and Gilda Award recipients, sending money with no strings attached to twenty metro Detroit artists working in dance, film, and music.

Ten artists will receive $50,000 Kresge Artist Fellowships. Ten more, earlier in their careers, will receive $5,000 Gilda Awards. Both prizes span two tracks, Live Arts and Film & Music, with awards proportional to the number of applications received in each category, and both come from the Kresge Foundation through a program the College for Creative Studies has run for eighteen years.

This year's fellows include musician and producer Maurice "Pirahnahead" Herd, interdisciplinary artist Mitch McCabe, vocalist Shahida Nurullah, composer Salar Ansari, and filmmaker Jeremy Brockman, alongside Frisly Soberanis, Karen Prall, Ed Miller, Ackeem Salmon, and Galaxy. Gilda Award recipients this cycle include choreographers Ayman "Mino" Aboutaleb and Chris Woolfolk and interdisciplinary artist Levon Kafafian in Live Arts, plus Nico Swan, Ashley Sorrell, Kashira Dowridge, Vaughn Taormina, RAEDY LEX, Kasan Belgrave, and Ifayomi Christine in Film & Music.

Katie McGowan, director of Kresge Arts in Detroit, has talked about the fellowship as a direct answer to what artists are up against right now. "The cost of living keeps rising, and artists feel that pressure like everyone else," McGowan has said. She's described the award as intentionally not prescriptive: the money and the year of support that comes with it are meant to give an artist room to take a risk, or to slow down long enough to finish something that lasts.

Fellows also get a commissioned short film about their work, along with legal and accounting referrals and ongoing promotion through the Kresge network. Applications for the next cycle open in December to artists living in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, with a jury of local and national arts professionals making the selections.

The fellowship is one of several Kresge arts prizes centered on Detroit. The foundation also hands out the Kresge Eminent Artist Award each winter, a career-achievement honor that most recently went to Tyree Guyton, the creator of the Heidelberg Project. Together the programs put Kresge among the more consistent sources of direct, unrestricted arts money in the region, at a time when public arts funding has gotten harder to count on.

For a city where working artists routinely get priced out by rent and gig-economy instability, a no-strings check large enough to cover a year of overhead, or a film shoot, or a season without a second job, is not a small gesture. It is also a bet, twenty times over, that the next round of Detroit dance, film, and music is worth backing without conditions attached.