We are so pleased to announce that the 2026 Dan Lewis Fellow is Worcester County’s own Michelle Koza!
Michelle Koza is a Brazilian and American Worcester-based artist, writer, and educator working under the name Michelle de Celia Lucia e Genevieve (aka Koza). Her art practice spans performance, poetry, and visual art, examining power, identity, and femininity. She is a co-founder of the Council of Radiants Artist Collective and serve on the board of the Worcester Artist Group. My visual and mixed-media work has been exhibited widely in Worcester-area galleries, including Arts Worcester, Hunchback Gallery, and JMAC. She is a recipient of the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building Grant (2025) and a NEFA Professional Development Grant (2026). She is also the 2026 Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA) Dan Lewis Fellow, and winner of a Worcester Arts Council (WAC) project grant (2026).
Her work uses mixed-media assemblage and embroidery to explore femininity, ritual, and liberation through craft-based processes and ornamental excess. She incorporates materials such as toys, fake flowers, rhinestones, washi tape, handmade paper, and fabric to create exuberant, decadent compositions that collapse the sacred and the everyday. Influenced by Brazilian visual culture and Catholic iconography, she employs radial forms, mirrors, and fragmentation to honor joy, suffering, and repair. Across series and scale, her work invites viewers to see themselves reflected in beauty, resilience, and what she calls Joyful Liberation.
Alongside her artistic practice, she has an extensive career in education. She has taught English and creative writing for over fifteen years and served as English Department Chair and Director of the Young Writers Conference at The Bancroft School.
About the Fellowship:
After his death, Dan Lewis’s family created an endowment with the Worcester County Poetry Association to support an annual fellowship bequest in his name to provide an aspiring Worcester County poet the means to fulfill a need in that poet’s development that might otherwise go unmet. The 2025 Fellowship award will be $2,500.