SUMMARY: MFA in Art candidate Jeremy Starn has been granted the prestigious 2026-2027 Photography Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. VMFA fellowships come with a $6000 award and an opportunity to be showcased within the museum and other public venues.
MFA in Art candidate Jeremy Starn has been granted the prestigious 2026-2027 Photography Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. VMFA fellowships come with a $6000 award and an opportunity to be showcased within the museum and other public venues.
Applicants to the VMFA fellowships, which include professional, graduate, and undergraduate categories, must be living in Virginia at the time of submission. For his entry, Starn chose pieces that were large and immediately impressive. Starn says, “All of my work concerns the tension created by failed representation of human/non-human relations. There’s everything from false color satellite images, alternative process photography on metal, large plastic bag sculptures, fabrics, immersive installations and mural-scale photo works. I’m interested in how photography works, where it fails, where it succeeds with its intent, how we use it in culture, and how it uses us.”
Starn believes that artists are not very different from scientists or philosophers, “We all want to understand how the world, and everything in it, works.”
The VMFA award will be pivotal in the upcoming year. “What this award does is grant me peace of mind so that I can focus on more intensive projects. I won’t have to get another job. I have a lot of large installations in the works and now I will have the time to materialize them.”
In addition to Starn’s fellowship, JMU is represented in the fellowship list by recent MFA in Art graduate Michelle Smith. Smith, who is studying and teaching at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was granted a sculpture fellowship in this year’s competition. Her work delves into ceramic forms and emotional expression through clay.
