Scholars in Residence

The Scholars in Residence program is for emerging artists, writers and curators. This one to two-year residency as a teaching fellow is for post-graduate artists and scholars either in the School of Art, Moores School of Music, School of Theatre & Dance, Creative Writing Program or Blaffer Art Museum. This program provides experience and connections to launch artistic and academic careers to the next level. Calls are annual or bi-annual and are posted on the Human Resources careers page under “Faculty & Librarian Employment.” If available, it will be listed as “Scholar in Residence, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center.”

2024-25 Season

Bradley Atuba

Bradley Atuba, a native of Dallas, is an actor, director, educator, and certified SoulWork Embodied Teaching Assistant. SoulWork is a comprehensive theatre-making methodology and pedagogy based in African American performance traditions, developed by Dr. Cristal Chanelle Truscott. It is an embodied practice centering on ancestral knowledge that is rooted in social change and social justice.

The method invites artists to decolonize artistic practices and curricula through community conversation and embodied exploration. Atuba holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in performance from University of Texas at Arlington, a Master of Fine Arts in acting from Southern Methodist University and is thrilled to be a Mitchell Center Scholar in Residence at the University of Houston. During his residency, Atuba will teach a course called Performance + Identities as well as devise a show based on his research on the Black LGBTQIA experience.

Chelsea de Souza

Indian pianist Chelsea de Souza is a Steinway Young Artist internationally acclaimed for her dynamic artistry and thought-provoking recital programming. A captivating performer with “an alluring stage presence” (The Hindu), the four-time All-India Piano Competition winner weaves together Western and Indian musical influences with personal anecdotes, historical context and musical improvisation to create immersive concert experiences that are universally appealing. Recent highlights include appearances for DACAMERA’s Beethoven for All series at the Menil Collection and Minnesota Orchestra’s summer season, and a live improvisation recital-experiment with the UH IUCRC BRAIN Center.

Chelsea is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Houston Music Festival, which will present classical music in fresh and inventive ways to new audiences around the city in its inaugural season this fall. Her doctoral work at Rice University explores issues of identity and culture in music, most recently in her lecture-recital project ‘The Silk Road: Musical Exchange between East and West’, which received high praise on tour across the US and India.

Nathaniel Donnett

Nathaniel Donnett (b. in Houston, Texas). He received his MFA from Yale University and BA from Texas Southern University. He is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner whose work shapes and holds philosophical and psychological significance. His work is rooted in Black cultural expression, everyday aesthetic theory, vernacular architecture, material exploration, and the lived experience. Donnett disrupts linear timeline narratives by reframing materials and objects through various coded and visual languages to highlight space, time, the poetics of the in-between, and the cosmology of Black American phenomena known as Dark Imaginarence.

Nathaniel Donnett's work has been exhibited nationally at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kemper Contemporary Arts Museum, and The University Museum, among others. Donnett founded and published "What's the New News," a newspaper and project that reframed the narratives of historical neighborhoods from 2010 - 2018. Awards include the American Academy of Rome Affiliate Fellowship (2024), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2022), Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship from Yale University (2020 -2021), Harpo Foundation New Work Project Grant Award (2014), and Artadia Award (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include To Know a Veil, MCLA Gallery 51 (2022), and Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Imaginarence at the University Museum (2023).

Connor Greer

Connor Greer (b. 1995) is a fiction writer from Rochester, NY. He is 28 years old, about 73 inches tall, and weighs around 170 pounds. He completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where he was a Zell Fellow and received a Hopwood Award for Graduate Short Fiction as well as the Akin Bird Thesis Award. He tends to think of his work as an investigation of subjecthood within the imperial core and the mutually-reinforcing relationship between capitalism, technology, and knowledge which quantifies and objectifies it—but he is often wrong. In 2023, he was a finalist for the BOMB Fiction Contest. He has been in residence at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, Japan, Dar Meso in Tunis, Tunisia, and NES Listamiðstöð in Skagaströnd, Iceland.

Past Scholars in Residence

2023-24 Season
John Chae, School of Art

Sam Wu, Moores School of Music
2022-23 Season
Josie Mitchell, Creative Writing Program

Key’Aira Lockett, School of Theatre and Dance

FEATURED WORKS

Bradley Atuba
Chelsea de Souza
Nathaniel Donnett
Connor Greer