Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2021 Fellows
OSGF
The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is very pleased to announce our four Fellows for 2021. These fellowships, which include a $10,000 individual grant, are our most prestigious awards, designed to support emerging leaders working in areas related to plants, gardens, and landscapes and the arts and culture of them.
Since 2018, we have offered our annual Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study and our Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, named in honor of OSGF founder Bunny Mellon’s children, to talented artists and scholars who are working on creative projects that relate to plants, gardens, and landscapes. In 2021, we are very excited to offer two new fellowships for those working in scientific fields: our Fellowship in Plant Science Research and our Fellowship in Plant Conservation Biology.
Congratulations to our 2021 Fellows:
Fidencio Martinez-Perez, 2021 Eliza Moore Fellow
Artist and educator Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico and raised in the U.S. after his family migrated. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. His current work examines borders, edges, and the people who must traverse them. In his work, he uses cutting paper and other discarded surfaces because it evokes the crafts and customs he learned as a child in Oaxaca, where those skills are still used to celebrate festivals and to mourn the dead. At Oak Spring, he plans to continue work on his Dacament series, in which he paints his personal plants on the envelopes he used to correspond with the U.S. government to maintain his DACA (Deferred Action Childhood Arrival) status as a way to map correspondence and relationships with loved ones, lawyers and the government. You can see his work at http://fidenciofperez.com/.
Brittany Carson, 2021 Stacy Lloyd III Fellow
Artist and scholar Brittany Carson holds a master’s degree in Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology from North Carolina State University. She has worked as horticulturist and researcher in Madagascar, Botswana, and throughout the U.S. Her research explores a botanical sense of place from an Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) perspective. At Oak Spring, she plans to do a bibliography study exploring plant uses through documented ILK and sense of place theory, research that can ultimately be integrated into horticultural practices for future land stewardship.
Aleca Borsuk, 2021 Plant Science Research Fellow
Aleca Borsuk is a Ph.D. candidate in Plant Ecophysiology at Yale University. Her research interests are plant morphology, plant physiology, and bio-inspired technology. Her work aims to improve carbon assimilation models based on a new, spatially resolved understanding of leaf internal anatomy. At Oak Spring, her planned work includes furthering this research by collecting leaf specimens from the gardens and landscape for X-ray imaging, which will be used to create digital 3D models of leaf microanatomy.
Eve Allen, 2021 Plant Conservation Biology Fellow
Eve Allen is a master’s in City Planning Candidate, Environmental Policy and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on developing strategies to weave plant genetic diversity into the fabric of cities and suburbs. Her research experience includes working with Quechua communities in Peru to establish a genetic reserve to maintain and utilize wild potato diversity. At Oak Spring, her planned research will include studying the site’s native trees and herbaceous species that are commonly used in urban greening projects, in order to identify in situ and ex situ conservation gaps for these species.
We are excited to welcome Fidencio, Carson, Aleca, and Eve to Oak Spring in 2021. Visit our Fellowships Page to learn more about our fellowship opportunities. We will open applications for our 2022 Fellowships in the spring of 2021. To learn about our 2020 Fellows, click here.