Fiber Alumna Jayoung Yoon Named 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture
Jayoung Yoon
Congratulations to alumna Jayoung Yoon (MFA Fiber 2009), who has been named a recipient of the 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture. Administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the fellowship provides an $8,000 unrestricted cash grant and is among the most competitive artist awards in New York State. This year’s recipients and finalists were selected from 3,985 applicants across five disciplines. Since its founding in 1985, the program has awarded over $37.4 million to more than 5,700 artists.
Yoon is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, whose practice draws upon diverse spiritual traditions, Buddhist, Christian, and others, to explore the nature of mind, perception, time, and the body. Her primary material is human hair: her own, spent in countless hours of hand-knotting and weaving to create semi-transparent sculptural forms that occupy a charged territory between the intimate and the universal, the physical and the spiritual. Hair, as Yoon has described, “is intimately corporeal and focuses the viewer’s attention on the body. As it grows, hair represents the accumulation of time.”
Her sculptures, paintings, and videos have been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, among many others, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Hyperallergic.
It was at Cranbrook that Yoon first began working with human hair as an artistic medium — a discovery that has since become central to one of the most distinctive and sustained practices in contemporary fiber and sculpture.
Yoon is a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow, a recipient of the AIM Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and a Franklin Furnace Fund awardee. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design’s Artist Studios program (2025–2026) and has attended residencies at MacDowell, Skowhegan, Millay Arts, Anderson Ranch, and Sculpture Space, among others.
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