Majid Naficy a recipient of 2025 Santa Monica City artist fellowship

The city of Santa Monica is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 Artist Fellowship, which honors outstanding local artists for their artistic excellence and creative contributions to our community. Now in its 14th year, the program has honored nearly 70 artists across a wide range of disciplines including visual arts, writing, choreography, performance and music.

This year’s fellows are:

Frances Anderton, a writer focused on Los Angeles architecture and housing

Jona Frank, a photographic and film artist exploring youth culture through narrative portraiture

Nicola Goode, whose work blends photography, film, mixed and digital media to document urban life and social change

Majid Naficy, an Iranian American poet and human rights advocate with an extensive body of published work in English and Persian

Throughout 2025, each artist will present a public program that offers Santa Monicans a chance to connect with the arts. To kick off, Majid Naficy will read selections from his poetry at the Santa Monica Public Library, Pico Branch Annex Room, on Thursday, July 24 at 6 p.m., with a public reception to follow. Stay tuned for more Artist Fellow events to come.

ABOUT THE ARTIST FELLOWS

Frances Anderton focuses on Los Angeles design and architecture in print, broadcast media and public events. She authored the award-winning “Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles” and co-authored “Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now,” a multimedia project produced by FORT: LA. Anderton also lectures on urban housing typologies at USC School of Architecture and has made short films for the nonprofit housing developers Community Corporation of Santa Monica and Venice Community Housing. Anderton previously produced KCRW’s current affairs show “Which Way, LA?” and “To the Point,” and hosted “DnA: Design and Architecture”. She now writes a regular DnA newsletter. Her other honors include the Esther McCoy Award from the USC Architectural Guild for her work educating the public about architecture and urbanism.

Jona Frank is a photographic and film artist specializing in narrative portraiture and youth culture. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in prominent collections at the Getty Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Her most recent book, “Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined,” set in the 1970s, chronicles the life of a young photographer navigating the constraints of suburbia. Frank’s earlier works include “The Modern Kids,” a series that fuses fine-art portraiture with the intimacy and intrigue of the boxing world; “High School,” which examines the social hierarchy of American public high schools; and “RIGHT,” a look at religious youth aspiring to become Republican political leaders.

Nicola Goode, recipient of the Kate Johnson Digital Arts Fellowship*, is a visual artist and educator specializing in digital and analogue photography, filmmaking and mixed-media installations. A Los Angeles native and longtime Santa Monica resident, her work explores public and personal archives, revealing contemporary culture and underrepresented histories. A member of the International Cinematographer’s Guild and the Society of Motion Picture Still Photographers, Goode has shot stills for numerous film productions. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is part of various public and private collections, and she holds a master’s in fine arts from Otis College of Art and Design and a bachelor’s in fine arts from Yale University.

Majid Naficy, an Iranian American poet, has published five collections of poetry in English: “Muddy Shoes,” “Father and Son,” “My American Love: Thirty-Two Poems for Wendy,” “Mother and Father: Thirty-six poems” and “A Witness for Ezzat: Thirty Poems” as well as his doctoral dissertation, “Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature: A Return to Nature in the Poetry of Nima Yushij.” Naficy has also published more than 25 books of poetry and essays in Persian. He holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages and cultures from University of California, Los Angeles. Naficy is actively engaged in human rights advocacy, focusing on issues in Iran and the United States.

* The city’s Arts Commission created the Kate Johnson Digital Arts Fellowship in honor of the beloved local filmmaker and digital media artist who passed in 2020. This award supports artists in the electronic and/or digital disciplines, including digital film, video, internet- and gaming-based work and interactive fine art.