The American Academy in Rome has announced the winners of the 2021–22 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the gift of “time and space to think and work” was awarded to thirty-five American and five Italian artists and scholars. They will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting in September 2021.

The Rome Prize winners in the category of visual arts include several representatives with Caribbean roots. Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez received the Phillip Guston Rome Prize; William Villalongo, a Florida-born and raised artist (Puerto Rican father and African-American mother) received the Jules Guerin/Harold M. English Rome Prize; and the Puerto Rican artistic collective Las Nietas de Nonó—Mapenzi Chibale Nonó and Mulowayi Iyaye Nonó—won the Rome Prize in Visual Art. As El Nuevo Día reports, the Nonó sisters [shown above] will carry out an artistic residency in Italy in 2022 to work on the multimedia project “Foodtopia: después de todo territorio.” With this work they will explore the relationship between memory, food, spirituality, and healing.

A full list of the 2021–22 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows, as well as the international jurors who selected them, can be downloaded here.

For more information, see https://www.aarome.org/news/features/announcing-2021-22-rome-prize-winners-italian-fellows and https://www.elnuevodia.com/entretenimiento/cultura/notas/las-nietas-de-nono-gana-prestigioso-premio-de-la-academia-americana-en-roma