Multimedia artist Lisa Banta (Art MFA 23) has been named as the 2025–26 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellow. The fellowship, which is awarded annually, provides one year of financial support to an early-career painter or sculptor.
Banta, who is based in Los Angeles, is an enrolled descendant of the Karuk Tribe, one of the largest Native American tribes in California, with ancestral lands along the Klamath River. Her work explores how historical legacies shape contemporary social and ecological injustices. She draws from postcolonial theory, her own lived experience, and ancestral knowledge.
Banta works with sculpture, installation, drawing, writing, and archival research, using both traditional and experimental media—such as bioplastics and gel—to engage on themes of justice, decolonization, memory, grief, ecological loss, and inherited trauma.
A recent multimedia project, Guardians, used bronze, aluminum, steel and charred wood, as well as light, video, sound and accompanying text. Banta described the work as “a grieving and protective space created for those impacted by the prison-industrial complex, especially as seen through the lens of indigenous communities.”
According to her artist profile, her goal is “to create expansions that break existing patterns and challenge hierarchies.”
Banta received her BFA in Art Practice from Portland State University in 2021.
Cole Fellowships are based on nominations from members of the national arts community. The fellowship is made possible by Alice C. Cole, an alumna of Wellesley College. “What I hope is to provide a ‘breathing space’ early in an individual’s career that will stimulate creativity and allow time to focus on career objectives, freeing the individual from concentration on purely monetary achievements,” Cole said about why she began the fellowship.
