Heidi Nitze Art × Environment Fellowship
The Heidi Nitze Art × Environment Fellowship is an innovative new program at Brooklyn Botanic Garden made possible through the generous leadership support of the Heidi Nitze Foundation. This fellowship invites visionary artists and environmental thinkers to work in partnership to create site-specific installations at BBG that inspire environmental stewardship and spark public engagement with pressing environmental challenges. Fellowship projects will explore themes such as climate change, biodiversity, scientific discovery, and cultural connections to nature. Applications for this biennial fellowship are by invitation only.
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2025–26 Fellows: Olalekan Jeyifous and AD—WO
During their fellowship, Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan Jeyifous and the environmental art and architecture practice AD—WO will explore how Latinx and African Diasporic beliefs and rituals around the intelligence of the natural world can inform current ecological knowledge and environmental stewardship. Learn More
Heidi Nitze
Heidi Nitze is an artist and passionate philanthropist who has prioritized supporting both the arts and environmental preservation throughout her lifetime. She has long championed wildlife and nature conservancies as well as many arts and cultural institutions.
As an artist herself, Nitze‘s works are deeply rooted in the natural world, which she sees as both fleeting and intensely alive. Of her landscape paintings, drawings and botanicals, her sense of purpose can best be described in her own words: "The intensity of life and its fragility are what I care about, the vitality of the moment before it disappears. This is why I make art: Maybe it will outlast the vanishing moment.”
Nitze earned a BA in Art History from Wellesley College and received diplomas from Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religion, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with a concentration in Painting and Drawing. She studied extensively at American University in Washington, D.C., with a focus in studio art, art history, and botany; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; and the National Academy of Design in New York with a focus on watercolor studies.
Her artwork is held in public and private collections in the United States and the UK including National Museum of Women in the Arts, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, New Bingham Area Health Center, Maine, Old Croton Aqueduct Visitor Center, Dobbs Ferry, and American Friends of Blérancourt.
Nitze is committed to the arts community—Pratt Institute as a Trustee Emerita; Boston Museum of Fine Arts as a Benefactor and Textile and Fashion Arts Visiting Committee member; and American Society of Botanical Artists member.
Learn more at topstoreystudio.net.
