Brooks International Fellowship Programme

The Brooks International Fellowship Programme supports two research fellows each year to work with a Tate host team in a range of disciplines across the museum, including curatorial, learning, community and partnerships, collection care, research and interpretation, digital practice and visitor communications.

At the core of the programme is the opportunity for Brooks Fellows to develop their research practice, while collaborating with Tate to provide mutual benefit to and share new perspectives with the museum.

Tate is proud to partner with the Delfina Foundation on the programme. Brooks Fellows benefit from the Foundation’s international residency programme throughout their six-month Fellowships. The Delfina Foundation Brooks International Fellowship page provides more information about past fellows and their research areas.

The Brooks International Fellowship Programme is generously funded by the Rory and Elizabeth Brooks Foundation.

About Delfina Foundation

Founded in 2007, Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering artistic talent and facilitating exchange and experimentation with international artists, curators and researchers. Located in two renovated Georgian houses in central London, Delfina Foundation is the city’s largest provider of residencies, hosting up to forty practitioners from across the world in-residence each year.

Fellows Jenna Shaw and Madhushree Kamak are hosted by Tate and the Delfina Foundation between April and September 2024, and Fellow Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz between July and December 2024.

Jenna Shaw, Collection Management Fellow

Jenna Shaw’s Fellowship is based in Tate Collection Management, hosted by Alyson Rolington (Head of Collection Management) and Christopher Higgins (Registration Manager).

Jenna’s research will focus on sustainability in touring exhibitions. Through collaboration with Tate Collection Management colleagues, and focusing primarily on Tate’s collection, she will specifically investigate methods of identifying and mitigating negative environmental impacts of exhibitions that tour to both national and international partners, and will work to develop practical frameworks for addressing sustainability goals within touring institutions.

Jenna is a collections management and museums professional specialising in registration, exhibitions and fine art transit, with an academic grounding in cultural heritage management and archaeology. She is currently Head Registrar at the American Federation of Arts, a New York-based arts non-profit focused on touring fine art exhibitions. Previously she was Registrar for Outgoing Loans at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Registrar for Exhibitions and Loans at the Minnesota Historical Society. She has extensive experience with modern and contemporary art, archaeology and history collections and large-scale outdoor sculpture, and has worked in the United States, Ireland and Turkey, with courier travel across North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

She was a founding chair of the National Collections Program Working Group on Virtual Couriers and co-author of an NCP position statement on virtual couriering released in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. She has presented on object-centred approaches to fine art shipping, courier transit and virtual couriering at the Association of Registrars and Collections Specialists and MuseWeb conferences (2021) and is a current member of the ARCS Committee for Global Partnerships.

Jenna holds a master’s degree in Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management from Koç University in Istanbul (2016), a bachelor’s degree from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA (2009) and has completed coursework in Museum Law and Administration at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St Paul, MN (2023). From 2011 to 2012 she was a Fulbright Scholar to Turkey, undertaking research focused on cultural heritage and working as a university lecturer.

Jenna was born in the United States and is currently based in St Paul, MN.

Madhushree Kamak, Visitor Communications Fellow

Madhushree Kamak‘s Fellowship is based in Tate Visitor Communications, hosted by Jayne Herringshaw (Head of Visitor Communications, Public and Internal Comms) and Renata Smialek (Head of Visitor Communications, Onsite Comms).

Madhushree will be collaborating with colleagues across Tate to conduct research on new digital tools and the role they can play in empowering and engaging visitors in Tate’s gallery spaces.

Madhushree is a maverick art-science curator and information experience designer who is currently the Head of Exhibitions and Programmes at the Science Gallery Bengaluru (SGB). Her practice focuses on curating and designing interdisciplinary exhibitions and public engagement programmes at the interface of science, technology and culture.

After completing her first master’s degree by Research in Biological Sciences from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Madhushree completed her master’s degree in Information Design from the National Institute of Design, focusing on exhibitions as a means of public engagement with science.

She has developed several contemporary art-science exhibition-seasons, learning and mentorship programmes for young adults, community, offsite and digital initiatives, and pop-up exhibitions at the Science Gallery Bengaluru, including ELEMENTS (2019), SUBMERGE (2020), PHYTOPIA (2020), CONTAGION (2021), PSYCHE (2022) and CARBON (2023). CONTAGION was one of the winners of the Falling Walls Prize for Breakthroughs in Science Engagement in 2021.

Madhushree was a part of the Berlin Biennale Curators Programme 2022, a Khoj Curatorial Intensive South Asia Fellow 2021 and a member of the Ars Electronica Creative Producers Programme 2021. She developed the ‘Xperimenter Programme’, a learning and mentorship programme at SGB that was 2022 Finalist at Falling Walls Berlin in the Future Learning category.

Madhushree was born in India and is currently based in Bengaluru.

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz, Tate Modern Curatorial Fellow

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz’s Fellowship is based in Tate Modern Curatorial, hosted by Nabila Abdel Nabi (Curator, International Art) and Bilal Akkouche (Assistant Curator, International Art).

Sheyda will engage in various curatorial activities, including undertaking research that will contribute to forthcoming exhibitions and displays, shaping future acquisition strategies, and producing written content and interpretations. They will utilise Tate’s resources to establish connections between their ongoing doctoral project and the museum’s holdings, with a particular emphasis on modernist art from the north of Africa.

Sheyda is an artist, curator, poet and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, specialising in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their doctoral dissertation, ‘Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance’, focuses on the manifold expressions of indigeneity and Indigenous philosophies in art and explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic expression and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha. The project theorises the innovative artistic forms that emerged in the region after the 1960s, particularly sign- and script-based abstraction, a form deeply rooted in ancient practices like tattooing and rock-engraving, as a mode of decolonising praxis.

Sheyda is the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), and the 2022 Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award, awarded by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). In 2023 Sheyda completed a curatorial research fellowship in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. They are a founding member of the curatorial collective and independent press Lungs Project, which has been operating since 2016 between the United Kingdom and the United States, promoting a cross-disciplinary dialogue among early-career artists and writers.

Sheyda was born in Turkey and is currently based in Austin, TX.

For further information about the fellowship programme, please contact international.fellowships@tate.org.uk.