ZOHRA SAED RECOGNIZED AS A 2026 NYSCA/NYFA ARTIST FELLOWSHIP FINALIST IN NONFICTION LITERATURE
Finalists Selected from Highly Competitive Pool and Receive Unrestricted Cash Grants of $1,000
Brooklyn, NY– Zohra Saed, a writer, poet, and scholar, is recognized for her work that delves into memory, migration, and the histories of the Turkestan diaspora. She is one of 16 New York State artists to be honored as a 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Finalist.
Born in Afghanistan and part of the historic Turkestan diaspora, Saed is the co-editor of One Story,Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and the editor of Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos, and Notebooks from Turkestan. She serves as a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, and is a Faculty Editor and Mentor at Lost & Found, CUNY Graduate Center.
Saed received this recognition for her nonfiction project titled “An Other Afghanistan: Indigeneity, Migration, and Belonging in Andkhoy (1973).” This essay reconstructs her family’s history in northern Afghanistan through an oral history interview with her father, who traveled to the town of Andkhoy as a young dentist.
Her extensive body of work explores the Turkestan diaspora through literary nonfiction, poetry, and archival scholarship, tracing the movement of families across generations. Saed’s writing preserves stories of language, foodways, labor, family memories, and cultural inheritance, while also examining how displaced communities maintained cultural continuity through successive migrations.
The fellowship will support ongoing oral history interviews, archival research, and the preservation of family photographs and recordings, paving the way for more essays through the lived experiences of one family across four generations.
The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Program, administered by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), makes unrestricted cash grants of $8,000 to artists working in 15 disciplines, recognizing five disciplines per year on a triennial basis. This year, NYFA awarded a total of $903,000 to 132 Fellows and Finalists (including 6 collaborations) throughout New York State. Finalists are recognized with unrestricted cash grants of $1,000.
The program is highly competitive, and this year’s recipients and finalists were selected from 3,985 applicants in discipline-specific peer-review panels for the following disciplines:
Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts.The full lists of recipients, finalists, and industry panelists who made the selections can be found here:
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Since it was launched in 1985, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program has awarded over $37.4 million to 5,726 artists. Esteemed alumni from this year’s recognized disciplines include Elia Alba (Crafts ’01), Xenobia Bailey (Crafts ’93, ’99, ’00), Suzanne Bocanegra (Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books ’89, ’93, ’05; Sculpture ’01), Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Poetry ‘20), Billy Collins (Poetry ’86), Mark Dion (Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books ‘17), Marylyn Dintenfass (Crafts ‘87), Coco Fusco (Nonfiction ’91, ’14), Simone Leigh (Sculpture ’09), Tony Matelli (Sculpture ‘99), Mary Mattingly (Sculpture ’11), Gregory Pardlo (Poetry ’05), Dread Scott (Sculpture ’01), Stephanie H. Shih (Crafts/Sculpture ‘23), Jean Shin (Crafts/Sculpture ’03), Arthur Simms (Sculpture ‘03), and Fred Wilson (Sculpture ’87, ’91).
Each year, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship provides a lens for contemporary artistic expression. The themes, ideas, and materials used by the 2026 Fellows and Finalists are grounded in lived experience, personal perspectives, and cultural specificity–from identity and community to immigration and the diaspora; artificial intelligence; and a broad range of social, political, and economic issues. Panelists noted the increasingly blurred boundaries between traditional discipline categories and responded to work that demonstrated a clear artistic voice and conceptual rigor.
In addition to no-strings-attached financial support, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship provides encouragement for artists at all career stages and creative disciplines to continue making work.
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The New York Foundation for the Arts: The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) was established in 1971 to empower artists at critical stages in their creative lives. Today, the nonprofit organization’s programs and services are far-reaching and are rooted in a wealth of physical and online resources. Each year, NYFA awards more than $4 million in cash grants to individual visual, performing, and literary artists throughout the United States. NYFA’s Fiscal Sponsorship program, one of the oldest and most reputable in the country, helps national artists and arts organizations raise and manage an average of $4 million annually. NYFA’s Learning programs, including its Artist as Entrepreneur and Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, provide thousands of artists, creatives, and arts administrators with professional development training and support. NYFA’s website, NYFA.org, is used by more than 1 million people and features more than 20,000 opportunities and resources available to artists in all disciplines.
About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture and creativity for all. For FY 2026, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million, serving organizations and artists across all 10 of the state’s regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York’s creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of
Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit arts.ny.gov/SOAfellow, and follow
NYSCA’s Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.
Zohra Saed 
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