MELLON COLLABORATIVE FELLOWSHIP
For more than a decade, the Mellon Collaborative Fellowships program has been instrumental in shaping the Gray Center’s approach to experimental collaboration.
Previous and current fellows include: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Fadi Baki, Kyle Beachy, Alison Bechdel, Sara Black, Bill Brown & Ted Brown (STUDIO R-A), Leslie Buxbaum, James Carpenter, Hillary Chute, Romi Crawford, Meredith Dincolo, Marc Downie, Samantha Frost, Theaster Gates, vanessa german, Amber Ginsburg, Sean Griffin, Ghenwa Hayek, Hannah B Higgins, Patrick Jagoda, Paul Kaiser, Omar Khouri, Julia Kuo, David Levin George E. Lewis, Erin McKeown, Antoni Miralda, W.J.T. Mitchell, Sidney Nagel, Stephan Palmié, Monica Peek, Pope.L, Tina Post, Dieter Roelstraete, Alexis Sablone, Cauleen Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Catherine Sullivan, Garland Martin Taylor, Augusta Read Thomas, Elizabeth Tung, Anne M. Wagner, Yao Chen, Tara Zahra, and Judith Zeitlin.
Current
The Useless Tool
The Useless Tool is a collaborative fellowship between writer Kyle Beachy, UChicago professor Tina Post, and professional skateboarder Alexis Sablone that explores the reciprocal influence between skateboarding and the humanities. Rooted in shared expertise across narrative, performance, movement, and architecture, the project uses embodied experiments to investigate how skateboarding’s ethics, style, and communal values can inform fields like pedagogy, art, and identity formation—and vice versa. Sparked by a 2022 symposium of the same name, the project formally launched with a 2023 co-taught course on skateboard poetics and will culminate in a collaborative performance.
Tina Post, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, explores racial performativity through affect and performance studies, with a particular focus on how embodied expression—or its strategic absence—shapes identity. Kyle Beachy is a novelist and essayist living in New Mexico. His memoir-in-essays, The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central, 2021), was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Electric Lit. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, The Point, Portable Gray, Southwest Review, Thrasher Magazine, and elsewhere. Alexis Sablone is an artist, architect, and professional skateboarder whose interdisciplinary practice spans animation, sculpture, and architecture, and who represented the U.S. in Women’s Street Skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics.