NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces the 2024–25 cohort of the MoMA Scholars in Residence program, supported by the Ford Foundation: Nathalie Joachim, Saloni Mathur, and Joseph M. Pierce. The program invites three acclaimed, inspiring thinkers to join the Museum for a one-year term to pursue projects and research initiatives that contribute to new understandings of modern and contemporary art. This is the third class of MoMA Scholars, following the 2023–24 cohort, which included C. Ondine Chavoya, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Sherrilyn Ifill. Along with work on independent projects, Chavoya, Cheng, and Ifill have hosted conversations, collaborated on displays, and incubated new projects and publications while at the Museum.

The MoMA Scholars in Residence program includes both scholars and makers who offer fresh perspectives on the history of modern and contemporary art. This unique residency supports the work of three thought leaders with demonstrated records of achievement to pursue research with access to the Museum’s collections, archives, and library, and in dialogue with our staff.

The 2024–25 cohort was selected with the guidance of a review committee comprising external and internal members: Huey Copeland (University of Pennsylvania), Leah Dickerman (MoMA), Ines Katzenstein (MoMA), Michelle Kuo (MoMA), Dylan Robinson (University of British Columbia), and Crystal Williams (Rhode Island School of Design).

Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated performer and composer who is regularly commissioned to write for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, dance, and interdisciplinary theater. She is also an assistant professor of composition at Princeton University. The Haitian-American artist has been called “a fresh and invigorating cross- cultural voice” (The Nation), and “powerful and unpretentious” (The New York Times). In her practice, Joachim is committed to storytelling as a form of human connection and cultural awareness. Recent and upcoming highlights include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Grant Park Music Festival, and more. Her album Fanm d’Ayiti, based on an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet, and electronics, celebrates and explores her Haitian heritage, and received a Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album. Joachim’s sophomore album, Ki moun ou ye, an intimate examination of ancestral connection and self, was co-released by Nonesuch Records and New Amsterdam Records in early 2024, and deemed “one of the year’s most creatively and personally ambitious albums” (SPIN). Joachim is a United States Artist Fellow and cofounder of the critically acclaimed duo Flutronix. She is an alumnus of the Juilliard School and the New School.

Saloni Mathur received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York, and is currently a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her areas of interest include modern and contemporary South Asian art, focusing in particular on issues of migration, diaspora, and postcolonial criticism. She has been a pioneering leader in her field over decades and her work has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Bard Graduate Center, and the Yale Center for British Art. She is author and editor/co-editor of five books, including India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (2007); The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (2011); No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (with Kavita Singh, 2015); and A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (2019).

Joseph M. Pierce is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University and is the inaugural director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative there. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910 (2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025), and is co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (2018) and the 2021 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Along with SJ Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.