Three Minnesota visual artists win prestigious $60K Jerome Hill Foundation fellowships

When Roshan Ganu got the call about being named a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in December 2024, she was back home in Goa, India, preparing to get married. It was right before her henna day, a celebration of applying henna to the bride, her family and friends that takes place days before the wedding. Her Minneapolis Artists Exhibition Project (MAEP) solo exhibition also had opened in November 2024 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Sometimes good news comes during the best moments.

“It was just really great to find out that I’ve made it,” said Ganu, whose multimedia work explores the human condition, particularly “isolation,” through narrative storytelling. Back in 2020, she started publishing hand-drawn illustrations on her Instagram account in an attempt to break the pandemic-induced isolation.

This year, Ganu is one of three Minnesota-based visual artists to receive that grant, along with Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator and curator Katayoun Amjadi, and Minnesota-based fiber artist Amy Usdin.

The prestigious Jerome Hill Foundation Fellowship grants 45 artists in New York and Minnesota with a gift of $20,000 per year over three years. That’s a total of $60,000, along with opportunities for professional development and support. This year, the foundation received 895 applications. The fellows come from the fields of dance, film, literature, music, technology-centered arts, theater, performance, spoken word and visual arts.

“Jerome Foundation supports early career artists who take creative risks, seek innovative approaches and have a clear creative purpose and vision guided by engagement with their communities,” Jerome Foundation President and CEO Eleanor Savage said. She noted that Amjadi, Ganu and Usdin were selected “because of the strength of their creative work as it aligns with Jerome Foundation’s mission and values.”

Amjadi, whose spacious artist studio displays rows of her work, from pomegranates to oversized ceramic Bahman cigarette-brand boxes — an object that’s nostalgic and an iconic cigarette for Iranians in the diaspora — was similarly pleased to receive the grant.

Amjadi has been included in a number of group exhibitions lately, including “So Far, So Close” at Q.Arma Underground in northeast Minneapolis, “The Other Four” at the Weisman Art Museum and “Underneath Everything” at the Des Moines Art Center.

This grant will give her an opportunity to focus on expanding her recent project iObject, from the series “The Things We Bring” about how objects that people take as immigrants and while living in diaspora become signifiers of culture, ethnicity and history. These objects become ways to stay connected to a place that was left, but that one wants to keep close.

“In a sense, looking at each of us as like potential museums in that we collect different things, but I’m looking for objects that travel either through time or space or both,” Amjadi said. “And they come with stories that the holder can tell, and the ones that even like, if your house is on fire, that’s the one that you’re like, I have to get it out.”

Minnesota-based artist Amy Usdin, who “weaves physical and psychological landscapes onto worn nets in work that speaks to loss, longing, and the dissonance of nostalgia,” according to her website, took home two Jerome Foundation fellowships. She won the 2024-2025 MCAD-Jerome Fellowship and the 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

“I’m beyond grateful,” she said. “A three-year fellowship is a remarkable gift that will allow me to dream a little bigger in all aspects of my practice. Such sustained support will encourage evolution within and beyond my current methods and materials — primarily needle-woven and knotted sculpture on worn nets.”