Ujima Announces 2025-27 Arts Fellow, Siena Miller

The Boston Ujima Project, Inc. is pleased to announce our 2025–27 Arts & Cultural Organizing Fellow, Siena Smith.

The Arts & Cultural Organizing Fellowship supports emerging artists and cultural organizers who demonstrate a strong commitment both to their artistic practice and to the principles of Ujima. Each fellowship spans two years and is designed as an emergent, self-determined program, allowing the fellow to shape the experience in alignment with their creative vision.  

This fellowship centers critical inquiry and creative exploration, encouraging participants to engage with interdisciplinary approaches, cultural organizing strategies, and collective artistic practices. Rather than focusing on the development of a singular project, fellows will have the opportunity to investigate ideas, experiment with new methodologies, and refine their creative practice in a supportive environment.

Through this fellowship, Siena will join Ujima’s Arts & Cultural Organizing community, contributing to and drawing from a network of artists, organizers, and cultural workers who are advancing new models of creativity, investment, and care.

About Siena Miller

Siena Smith is an artist who works with drawing, painting, Jacquard weaving and collage to process the complexities of everyday emotions, memories and struggles centering Black life, culture and womanhood. She earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Textiles and MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies. She is interested in how repetition, tactility, material and rhythm of 2-D and textile mediums carry the essence of Black Diasporic personal, collective and spiritual histories and futures. 

Her work has been exhibited at MASS Gallery, NADA Miami, Martha’s Contemporary, George Washington Carver Museum, RISD Museum and White Cube. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Curated Spotlight at NADA Miami (2022, curated by Joanna Bellorado-Samuels), Heartstrings at MASS Gallery (2025, curated by Taylor Danielle Davis) and Art & Design from 1900s to Now at RISD Museum (2025). Her work is held in public and private collections, including TD Bank and RISD Museum. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Sotheby’s, BmoreArt and The New York Times. See her work here.

About the Arts & Cultural Organizing Fellowship

Arts and Cultural Organizing are pillars of Boston Ujima Project, Inc’s ecosystem. Ujima believes that artists and cultural workers are an integral part of building the new world; the knowledge, poetic imagination and inventiveness of artists has always helped the world find new, more liberatory, pathways forward.

The Arts and Cultural Organizing Fellowship will be awarded to a member of Ujima’s Arts and Cultural Organizing community who demonstrates a commitment to their artistic practice and a commitment to the principles of Ujima. The fellowship is an exploratory program designed to support artists, cultural organizers, and creative practitioners in deepening their engagement with experimental and socially engaged artistic practices.