Fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate Zoe Weldon-Yochim was recently awarded Smithsonian and Luce/ ACLS Predoctoral Fellowships. Zoe will hold the 2022-2023 Douglass Foundation Fellowship in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). She is the first Visual Studies student at UCSC to hold a SAAM fellowship. Zoe also received the Luce/ ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation, which she will use during the 2023-2024 academic year.
The full-time support offered by both fellowships will allow Zoe to complete her dissertation, Atomic Afterlives: Visualizing Nuclear Toxicity in Art of the United States, 1979-2011, which examines a selection of American artists whose work grapples with U.S. militarism and the ongoing ecological costs of nuclear energy, armaments, and wastes.