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.
Roshan Ganu’s moving image collage “Where the Banyan Tree Meets the Nile, 2023-2024,” was made during her time at the Out of the Circle Residency in Cairo. (Roshan Ganu)
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.
Katayoun Amjadi used actual birds as forms for “Nightingale and Rose,” a lineup of rotisserie chickens rendered in porcelain. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)