McCormack Artist-Scholar Fund
The McCormack Artist-Scholar Fund, established in 2024, has enriched Skidmore College's cultural landscape by bringing distinguished artist-scholars to our campus. Below is a comprehensive list of the creative visionaries who have shared their expertise and inspiration with our community through this initiative.
Are you a faculty member with a vision for bringing exceptional artist-scholars to our campus? The McCormack Artist-Scholar Fund welcomes your proposals for innovative residencies that will enrich Skidmore's academic and creative landscape. Access the submission portal here using your Skidmore credentials. Past residencies have fostered transformative interdisciplinary collaborations across departments—we invite you to help shape the next chapter of this distinguished program.
Fall 2026
- Geraldine Brooks and Jarod Koopman
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist whose work spans historical fiction, memoir, and international reporting. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks began her career as a journalist and later served as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, covering conflicts and crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Her acclaimed novels include Year of Wonders, People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord, Horse, and March, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction works include Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence, and her recent memoir, Memorial Days. Brooks is also the author of “The Cyber Sleuth,” her profile of IRS investigator Jarod Koopman included in Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service.Jarod Koopman is chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division, where his career has focused on financial crime, cybercrime, digital assets, and the use of emerging technologies in complex criminal investigations. He began his IRS career as an intern in 2001 and has gone on to play a leading role in the agency’s efforts to trace cryptocurrency and other digital financial transactions connected to crimes ranging from fraud and money laundering to child exploitation and terrorism financing.
Suleika Jaouad
Suleika Jaouad, New York Times best-selling author of the 2024 First-Year Experience summer reading selection “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Jaouad is also the author of the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” and founded her weekly newsletter, “The Isolation Journals,” at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to help people transform life’s interruptions into creative grist and community. A vocal advocate for prison and healthcare reform, she has served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and was the recipient of the inaugural Inspire Award from NMDP (formerly Be the Match) for her work to expand and diversify the national bone marrow registry.
Alash Ensemble
The three multi-instrumentalists who make up Alash – Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan-ool Sam and Ayan Shirizhik – have won numerous awards for their performances of Tuvan sygyt, kargyraa, and xöömei (known collectively as “throat singing”), techniques that involve producing multiple pitches at one time.
Robert Battle
Robert Battle, selected by Judith Jamison, became only the third Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in July 2011, a position he held for 12 years until stepping down in 2023. His journey began in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood, progressing through arts education at New World School of the Arts and The Juilliard School, where he met his mentor Carolyn Adams. Before leading the Company, Battle had a long association with the Ailey organization as a choreographer and artist-in-residence since 1999, setting many works including "Ella," "Mass," and "Unfold" on the Company. Throughout his tenure, Battle expanded the Ailey repertory with diverse choreographers and established the New Directions Choreography Lab to develop emerging talent, earning numerous accolades including the Kennedy Center's "Masters of African American Choreography" honor and the Princess Grace Foundation-USA Statue Award.
Melanie Charles/Make Jazz Trill Again
Melanie Charles is a Brooklyn-based composer, singer, flutist, and multi-instrumentalist known for her innovative fusion of jazz, soul, and Haitian roots music. Her work reimagines jazz for contemporary audiences while uplifting marginalized voices. A graduate of LaGuardia High School and The New School for Jazz, she has worked with artists such as Wynton Marsalis and SZA, and made a standout appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. Her 2021 album Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women under Verve/Universal reflects her dedication to community and innovation in music. Melanie is also a mentor at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and a board member for The House Foundation for the Arts, the organization of her mentor, Meredith Monk.
Hua Hsu
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and Stay True (2022), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hsu publishes Suspended in Time, a zine about music and life, and serves on the governance board of Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics and writers. He previously taught at Vassar College and Harvard University and was formerly a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Professor Hsu’s research and teaching interests include Asian American studies, transpacific studies, American and Indigenous Studies, narratives of place and space, popular culture and subculture, and literary nonfiction.
Tuvergen Band
An emerging act at world music festivals across the U.S., Tuvergen Band (“galloping” in Mongolian) is a Chicago-based folk-fusion trio founded by Tamir Hargana (lead vocals, folklutes, morin khuur), Naizal Hargana (morin khuur, vocals), and Brent Roman (percussion, didgeridoo, vocals) in 2020. Hailing from Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, Tamir and Naizal bring some of the country’s most distinctive sounds to Tuvergen Band, including the cello-like horsehead fiddle (morin khuur), various folk lutes (the Tuvan doshpuluur and West Mongolian tovshuur), and khoomii throat singing. An ethnomusicologist and Asian percussion specialist, Roman augments these sounds with a custom hybrid drum kit of twenty global percussion instruments and didgeridoo. The trio uses this rich instrumental palette to perform what they call “modern nomadic music,” incorporating bluegrass, blues, rock, and more into their repertoire of Mongolian and Tuvan folk songs and originals.