The Multidisciplinary Fellow 2026
Photo Credit: Andrew Hsieh
Project Proposal: Fictive Selves in Real Time/Real Selves in Fictive Time
This project examines the conception of the self as a process of ongoing narrativization, mythologization, and re/de/contextualization. The outcomes will be twofold: first, a novella that uses the process of historical production to examine the ways we construct narrative notions of the self alongside other people, objects, architectures, and stories; second, a series of durational performances exploring self-perception through embodied and relational phenomenologies of time.
The novella will be based partly on my experience conducting archival and ethnographic research as an historian, and the way I observed fictional tropes and predetermined storylines appear and reappear across material and social encounters. By using the process of historical production as a plot form itself, I plan to explore the way everyday life is narrativized and aestheticized into stories, and those stories in turn produce the conditions and interactions that constitute everyday life.
The series of performances will be both complementary to and independent from the fiction project, as I seek to understand in embodied terms the literary form I have developed surrounding the mutability of temporal experience: How does our experience of time shift in relationship to other people, places, objects, and activities? How can sustained attention, observation, and repetitive acts complement and confuse traditional modes of timekeeping? What does time feel like when we are (or are not) personally keeping it? How does our relationship to time alter our relationships with our bodies? This series will include solo and participatory works that seek to manipulate individual and collective experiences of time.
is an American artist and writer. Her performance and installation work has been hosted or exhibited at the List Art Center (US), Brown Arts Institute (US), 59 Rivoli (France), and Reference Point (UK). Her writing has appeared in various magazines and journals, including Granta, Bookforum, and The Paris Review Daily. A former staff member at The New Yorker, she presently teaches in the Theatre, Dance, and Media department at Harvard University and the Literary Arts department at Brown, where she is a PhD candidate in the Integrative Studies program.
Nikki holds an MA in Integrative Studies from Brown; an MPhil in American History from the University of Cambridge; and a B.A. in Economic History and English Literature from Barnard College. For her fiction, she has received the John Hawkes Prize, Feldman Prize, and Robert Coover Prize. In 2026, Nikki will be a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, in Madison, Maine, and Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, France.