ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Isabella Thorpe-Woods as 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Thorpe-Woods is a British curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist from London, based in New York.
Thorpe-Woods will present a curated series of events that explore the idea of letters as a curatorial prompt, and the ways they both fail and succeed in transmitting meaning or reaching their desired destination. She asks, "How can we smuggle critical discourse into public conversation through the act of letter writing and performance? How can we write (to/from/for/about/ourselves) home when the political environment makes our immediate surroundings feel paper thin?" Throughout 2026, she will consider how absence, distance and delayed presence might function not as obstacles, but as structure.
The Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship supports emerging curators in realizing ambitious new projects that will significantly transform their own artistic practice, move their work in new directions, and enable them to gain exposure to a broader audience. Entering its tenth year, ISSUE’s Curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. Thorpe-Woods follows Kenneth Jiménez, ISSUE's 2025 Fellow, Lina Azalea Dahbour (2024), evil dentist (2023), Theodore (ted) Kerr (2022), Sami Hopkins (2021), Leyya Mona Tawil (2020), Benedict Nguyen (2019), Queer Trash (2018), and DeForrest Brown Jr. (2017).
Named for ISSUE’s visionary founder Suzanne Fiol, the program mentors a Curatorial Fellow by providing them with financial, technical and marketing support. Through a commitment to the professional development of the selected curator, they work to cultivate, incubate and present innovative music and performance projects.
Isabella Thorpe-Woods is a British curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist from London, based in New York. Her practice spans multi-media performance art, expanded choreography, experimental writing and critical theory. Her work has most recently been presented by New Dance Alliance (Performance Mix 39 at Abrons Arts Center), Essex Flowers (Flower Festival 2025), Lagoon (NYFW 2025), and PAGEANT, where she served on the production team from 2024–2025. She also contributed to the production team for Performa (Biennale 2025). In addition, Isabella co-founded Little by little Brooklyn, a DIY arts organization that included a performance residency program at the Brooklyn Peace Center – the venue’s first series supporting emerging movement-based and performance artists in developing new work – an art gallery housed inside a cafe’s mop closet called the Alcove, and other events. Isabella holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch and a BA in English Literature and Drama Studies from the University of Sussex (UK).
