The American Academy in Rome continues to celebrate excellence, this time congratulating Garrett Bradley (2020 Fellow in Visual Arts) on being named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, one of the most prestigious honors for creative innovation and artistic achievement. Bradley joins a growing number of AAR Fellows and Residents who have received the award in recent years, affirming the Academy’s enduring commitment to supporting artists whose work expands the boundaries of cultural and artistic discourse.
An artist and filmmaker based in New Orleans, Bradley works between documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema. Her films blend historical research with poetic visual language to explore questions of race, place, and collective memory.
Bradley first came to Rome as the inaugural Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow in 2019. Her project focused on the city’s “talking sculptures”—public monuments historically used as tools of civic expression—and considered their relationship to recently removed Confederate-era statues in New Orleans. Through this lens, she explored how monuments can embody multiple, even contradictory, narratives, and how new forms of iconography might emerge in the contemporary landscape. “Much of my work is rooted in thinking about the American experience from multiple perspectives,” Bradley said at the time. “The culmination of it, ideally, will offer a blended way of seeing. Being in Rome will, I think, offer space to reflect and re-see what is both familiar and unknown to me.”
Her time in Rome also included participation in Cinque Mostre 2020, a part of a series of exhibitions held at the Academy, curated by Ilaria Gianni and former AAR Director Elizabeth Rodini, where she joined a selection of Fellows and Italian artists in exploring shared and divergent experiences through sound, projection, and text.
Although her initial residency was interrupted by the pandemic, Bradley returned to the Academy in 2024 to complete her Fellowship. That year, she presented her short film Alone (2017) at CONTROLUCE: Stories of Beauty—a program presented in the frame of Lo Schermo dell’Arte in Florence in collaboration with Palazzo Gucci. The series examined beauty as a spontaneous and vital force across generations, disciplines, and forms of expression.
Her wider body of work includes America (2019), a series of black-and-white vignettes inspired by early Black cinema; and Time (2020), a feature-length documentary that interweaves home movies with contemporary footage to create a moving portrait of resilience and love. Her films have been exhibited and collected by major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Bradley’s MacArthur recognition follows other significant honors, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art (2022) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024). She is the fourth artist affiliated with the Academy to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in the past three years, following Courtney Bryan (2020 Fellow), Tony Cokes (2023 Fellow and incoming 2026 Resident), and Gala Porras-Kim (2025 Resident), who joins Bradley in this year’s cohort. This growing group of MacArthur honorees underscores a meaningful pattern, one that speaks to the Academy’s vital role in nurturing creative excellence that resonates globally.
Peter N. Miller, President and CEO of the American Academy in Rome and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, shared: “We are thrilled to congratulate Garrett Bradley, a 2020 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, on this extraordinary and richly deserved recognition. Garrett’s work continues to expand the language of cinema, transforming how we see history, memory, and community. It is deeply gratifying to see an artist whose vision grew in part during her time at the Academy now honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.”
Garrett Bradley’s MacArthur Fellowship marks both a milestone in her artistic journey and a reflection of the Academy’s mission to provide space and time for transformative work. Her trajectory embodies the kind of sustained inquiry that thrives in the Academy’s atmosphere of reflection and exchange. Her achievement is not only a personal triumph but also a collective testament to the Academy’s continuing role as a catalyst for creative vision and enduring impact.