The American Academy in Rome announced today the winners of the 2024–25 Rome Prize. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the Rome Prize—the gift of “time and space to think and work”—was awarded to thirty-one American artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for five to ten months at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting this September.
The Rome Prize winners will be presented in person during the Janet & Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony and Concert, taking place this evening at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. The program, comprising a selection of innovative works by Rome Prize Fellows in musical composition and an arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, will be performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble under the artistic direction of George E. Lewis (2010 Resident).
“The Rome Prize is one of the most storied fellowship programs in the United States,” said AAR President Peter N. Miller. “Over a thousand people compete for the chance to live and work in Rome, inspired by the city and one another. The Rome Prize winners represent a bridge between the United States and Italy, but also between a present of potential and a future of achievement.”
Rome Prize winners are selected annually by juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. This year’s competition received 1,106 applications—a record high—from applicants in 46 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. The acceptance rate was 2.9 percent. This group of Rome Prize winners has approximately 39 percent who identify as persons of color. Thirteen percent were born outside the United States. The incoming class ranges from 26 to 70 years old, with an average age of 42.
In addition to the Rome Prize winners, the Academy announced three Italian Fellowships, through which Italian artists and scholars live and work in the Academy community, pursuing their own projects in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment with their American counterparts. Also named was the recipient of the Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellowship for a Chicago-Based Visual Artist.
A complete list of the 2024–25 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows is below. To read the names of the jurors who selected them, please download the press release.
Ancient Studies
Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Donald and Maria Cox Rome Prize
Brigitte A. Keslinke
PhD Candidate, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania
The Making of a Meal: Commensality in the Cult of Mithras
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize
Emily C. Mitchell
PhD Candidate in Classical Philology, Department of the Classics, Harvard University
Voices in Stone: Remembering the Enslaved and the Emancipated in Latin Verse Epitaphs
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize
Vassiliki Panoussi
Chancellor Professor of Classical Studies, College of William and Mary
The Goddess Isis in Roman Literature: Gender, Ethnicity, and Identity
Arthur Ross Rome Prize
Crystal Rosenthal
PhD Candidate, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
Agents on the Shore: Harbor Arches in Roman Port Cities
Andrew Heiskell/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize
Dennis E. Trout
Professor, Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion, University of Missouri, Columbia
Reimagining Rome: Emperors, Popes, and the Cult of the Saints
ARCHITECTURE
Arnold W. Brunner/Frances Barker Tracy/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize
Michelle JaJa Chang
Assistant Professor of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Material Resistance to Symbolic Form
Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize
David Costanza
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Cornell University
Bending Stone
DESIGN
Rolland Rome Prize and
Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize
Amy Revier
Owner/Director, Amy Revier, Austin, Texas
Woven Narratives of Rome
HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION
Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize
Katherine L. Beaty
Book Conservator for Special Collections, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library
A Technical Study of Italian Archival Bookbindings
Adele Chatfield-Taylor Rome Prize
Krupali Krusche
Associate Professor, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame
The Roman Forum – Learning Grounds for the Renaissance – What Did They Truly Learn?
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize
Anthony Acciavatti
Diana Balmori Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Yale University
Groundwater Earth: The World before and after the Tubewell
Garden Club of America/Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize
Megumi Aihara and Dan Spiegel
Principals, Spiegel Aihara Workshop, San Francisco; Continuing Lecturer, Department of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley (Spiegel)
Landscapes after the Fire
LITERATURE
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a Gift of the Drue Heinz Trust
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Writer, San Francisco
The Small Sea
John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize, a Gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
Jacob Shores-Argüello
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Baylor University
River Citizen
MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Paul Mellon Rome Prize
Claire Dillon
PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Constructing the Histories of Medieval Sicily: Production, Power, and Fragmentation in the Textile Industry and Beyond
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize
Craig Perry
Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory University
Towards a Documentary History of Medieval Africa
MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES
Millicent Mercer Johnsen/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize
Carol E. Harrison
Professor, Department of History, University of South Carolina
A Women’s History of Vatican I
Jesse Howard, Jr. Rome Prize
Lucas R. Ramos
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Columbia University
Queer, Catholic, Communist: Forging a Sexual Revolution in the Italian Republic, 1958–1989
Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies
Giancarlo Tursi
Assistant Professor of Translation Studies, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dialectal Dante: The Politics of Translation in Risorgimento Italy
MUSICAL COMPOSITION
Luciano Berio Rome Prize
Jonah Nuoja Luo Haven
PhD Candidate in Composition, Department of Music, Harvard University
A Prone and Useful Nothingness: Music-Making within the Sixth Mass Extinction
Elliott Carter Rome Prize
Jen Shyu
Composer, Vocalist, Multi-Instrumentalist, Dancer, and Producer; Cofounder, Copresident, and Co-CEO of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³), Brooklyn
Fertile Land, Fertile Body
RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES
Anthony M. Clark Rome Prize
Julia Rose Katz
PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Rutgers University
Circe’s Wand: Reimagining Antiquities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800
Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize
Shannah Rose
PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Codex Ríos and the Reception of Mesoamerican Pictography in Early Modern Italy
TSAO FAMILY ROME PRIZE
Jenny Lin
Associate Professor of Critical Studies, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California
The Global Art-Fashion System: New Silk Roads through China, Italy, and the United States
VISUAL ARTS
Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize
Lex Brown
Lecturer in Visual Arts, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University
Soap Operetta
Abigail Cohen Rome Prize
Matthew Connors
Professor, Photography Department, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Shadows and the Silent Majority
Jules Guerin Rome Prize
Devon Dikeou
Artist, Editor, and Publisher, zingmagazine; Curator and Cofounder, Dikeou Collection
The Inconspicouses
Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize
Nona Faustine
Artist, Brooklyn
AfroPhantazein
Philip Guston Rome Prize
Richard Mosse
Artist, New York
Late fascism and fantasy fiction in contemporary Italy
Henry W. and Marian T. Mitchell Rome Prize
Sheila Pepe
Artist, Brooklyn
It’s all public
TERRA FOUNDATION AFFILIATED FELLOWSHIP FOR A CHICAGO-BASED VISUAL ARTIST
Kimmah M. Dennis
Artist and Visiting Artist Coordinator, Department of Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Interwoven
ITALIAN FELLOWS
Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture
Giuseppe Grant
Architect, Rome; Cofounder, orizzontale
Roma Ludica: City as Playground
Marcello Lotti Italian Fellow in Music
Daria Scia
Composer, Forio, Italy
lines of spiritual motion, composing in dialogue with the works of Flannery O’Connor
Franco Zeffirelli Italian Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
Eugenio Villa
Postdoctoral Researcher, Università di Udine
Bessarion’s Encyclica ad Graecos (1463) in the Framework of the First Ottoman-Venetian War (1463–1479)