The Barnard Library is excited to announce the three recipients of our 2025-2026 Research Awards: A'misa Chiu, Mariame Sissoko, and Tia Smith! Each awardee will receive $3000 to help fund research projects that make use of Zine Library and Archives collections. The selection process was highly competitive. Thank you to all applicants and congratulations to our awardees.
Meet the awardees:
A’misa Chiu
A’misa Chiu (she/they) is a zine maker, artist, and community organizer who is currently the social sciences and zine librarian at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, practicing community-centered outreach and engagement, and publishing scholarship on zines as tools of empowerment and cultural identity. A'misa has organized zine fests and workshops for over 15 years. They can also be found learning how to play roller derby.
A'misa's research at the Barnard Zine Library will be situated around discovering zines and zine ephemera by Asian American feminists, in order to discover and recenter the narrative that Asian feminist zinesters have been and continue to be a vital part of DIY, queer, activist, alternative and punk spaces and media.
Mariame Sissoko
Mariame Sissoko (they/them) is an anthropologist, community organizer, and ethnographic researcher whose work explores the intersections of race, genderqueerness, and digital culture. As a Mellon Mays Fellow, they have spent the past few years examining how Black trans and genderqueer individuals navigate intersecting identities and build communities rooted in liberatory expression. Currently based in Brooklyn, they plan to pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology in the near future.
Their current research project seeks to create a visual archive of Black genderqueer—specifically non-binary—experience. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s call to queer the archive and read beyond what is immediately presented, they will use the Barnard Archives to trace the historical presence of Black gender transgression and non-binary identity in lesbian spaces while also documenting the present. By engaging with older lesbian and Black collections, their work aims to illuminate hidden narratives and expand how Black gender-bending histories are documented and understood.
Tia Smith
Tia Smith is an artist and scholar from the South Side of Chicago. She is a M.F.A candidate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and the current Robert and Jean Steele Intern at Yale University Art Gallery. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she authored an award-winning thesis on Steve Carter's Eden, which she recently worked on as a dramaturg after nominating the play for Yale Repertory Theatre's 2024–25 season. She is a recipient of the Black Theatre Network's S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Award and the Cody Renard Richard Scholarship. She holds a B.A. from Duke University.
Tia is undertaking a comprehensive examination on the choreopoem as a form of Black diasporic theater. Looking beyond for colored girls, she will examine plays and production materials in the Ntozake Shange papers to analyze how Shange uses the choreopoem to dramatize interactions between Black people in the Americas, reclaim colonial languages, and challenge Eurocentric perceptions of time and geographic boundaries.