SUNY Purchase Faculty and MFA Alumna Win 2026 NYFA Artist Fellowships
SUNY Purchase professors Hakan Topal and Rob Swainston and MFA alumna Kakyoung Lee ’03 won 2026 NYFA Artist Fellowships selected from 3,985 applicants statewide.
SUNY Purchase is proudly represented among the 132 artists selected from 3,985 applicants for the 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship — one of the most competitive artist recognition programs in New York State. Two School of Art+Design faculty members, Professor of New Media and Graphic Design Hakan Topal and Associate Professor of Printmaking Rob Swainston, earned recognition alongside Kakyoung Lee MFA ’03, now an assistant professor of art at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Topal was named a Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts, and Swainston a Finalist in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts alongside his collaborator Zorawar Sidhu. Lee was named a Fellow in the Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts category.
The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship
The NYSCA/NYFA program is one of the longest-running and most respected artist awards in New York State. Since its founding in 1985, NYFA has awarded more than $37.4 million to more than 5,700 artists. Each year, it recognizes artists in five of 15 rotating disciplines. This cycle included Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts.
Fellow vs. Finalist
The same rigorous, discipline-specific review process results in two levels of recognition: Fellows receive $8,000, and Finalists receive $1,000, both unrestricted cash grants.
Meet the Honorees
The work of Professor of New Media and Graphic Design Hakan Topal lives at the intersection of technology, geography, and politics, and uses digital and installation-based media to probe questions of surveillance, urban space, and social systems.
Kakyoung Lee MFA ’03 builds moving-image animations out of hundreds of individually hand-pulled prints and drawings, turning a famously slow, physical medium into something that flickers and moves, often in service of stories about migration, memory, and identity.
Associate Professor of Printmaking Rob Swainston, in collaboration with artist Zorawar Sidhu, creates large-scale, sculptural printmaking that stretches the discipline beyond the flat page, part of a broader wave of Fellows and Finalists this year who are reinventing what printmaking can be.
Purchase in Practice
Our NYFA recipients’ work aligns perfectly with the “blurred boundaries between traditional discipline categories” noted by the panelists, who responded to interdisciplinary approaches and “work that demonstrated a clear artistic voice and conceptual rigor.”
Through their own award-winning professional practices, our faculty demonstrate to students what it means to push past boundaries and experiment, encouraging them to find their own distinct voices and use them.
