Paris-based international cultural network AFIELD has named six recipients for its 2026 Fellowships, doubling its annual cohort from three to six in response to intensifying resource pressures on grassroots cultural organizations. Through individual benefactors and a new partnership with New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, each fellow will receive a USD 10,000 grant and permanent membership in AFIELD’s global peer-support network.

This year’s winners include three Asia-Pacific practitioners. Chinese contemporary artist Hu Yinping was recognized for Xiaofang, an ongoing social initiative she launched in 2015. Originating as a fabricated French knitwear label established to purchase her mother’s hand-crocheted hats at fair market prices in rural Sichuan, the company has since expanded into a network of cooperatives providing equitable income and creative communities for older rural women.

Indonesian cultural activist and producer Eka Putra Nggalu received the fellowship for Komunitas KAHE, an interdisciplinary collective he spearheaded in 2015 in Maumere on the island of Flores. The group utilizes community-based research, participatory workshops, and experimental programming to build shared platforms for local knowledge, decolonial methodologies, and regional narratives from eastern Indonesia.

Multidisciplinary artist Dakota Camacho was selected for Gi Matan Guma’, a platform he co-founded in 2020 with CHamoru educator Jeremy Cepeda. Operating across Guam and the wider Mariånas archipelago, the initiative activates ancestral lineages—including kantan CHamurita call-and-response verse and traditional Micronesian voyaging techniques (Etåki/Etak)—to assert Indigenous sovereignty amid expanding US militarization and cultural displacement.

The remaining fellows span Africa and Latin America: Zimbabwean sculptor Moffat Takadiwa for Mbare Art Space, which repurposed a colonial-era Harare beer hall into a cultural hub; Rwandan writer and director Dorcy Rugamba for the Kigali-based Rwanda Arts Initiative; and Argentinian artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández for Silät, an Indigenous Wichí women’s weaving guild.

Yixuan Zhang is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.