Announcing CAL/DSL Graduate Arts Fellows

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 College of Arts and Letters/Digital Scholarship Lab Graduate Arts Fellowship: Shelby Freehling and Jameson Reid. 

We had such a strong response to the call for proposals that the Libraries was able to identify endowment funding to support a second fellowship this year to complement the funding from CAL. Beginning in May, the fellows will begin working on their projects in DSL. 

Shelby Freehling 

Shelby Freehling is enrolled in the MFA program in Studio Arts.  She has exhibited in galleries across Lincoln, NE, including Kiechel Fine Art, Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, and a solo show at Tugboat Gallery. Her current work focuses on recording and collecting videos and objects that are placed in small built rooms, as a way to preserve and process memories. She is curious how individuals archive the moments of their lives and what causes a person to neglect or care for their personal histories, and furthermore how those histories overlap with our natural worlds and green spaces. 

In the fellowship, Shelby will be traveling along trails and waterways to capture the video and soundscapes of nature. By capturing these images and bringing them to the 360 Room, she will offer a pause from daily life, to sit, mediate, and reflect on one’s memories and connections with nature. Brief moments and videos from urban settings will be lightly interspersed, fading in and out, during the experience, for individuals to ponder and contemplate their soundscapes, and relationships between their urban and natural environments. 

Jameson Reid 

Jameson is a PhD student in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures program and a First-Year Writing Instructor at MSU. He is also an artist that has been long engaged with creative writing and film-making. He is constantly seeking ways for his art and multi-modal storytelling to play a role in his scholarship and teaching. 

In this fellowship, he will be creating an interactive VR narrative that combines a collection of multi-media stories titled “The Exact Dream” that he has been writing for a few years. These stories have explored the potentials of multi-modal digital composition to create complex relationships between author and audience. Through VR, he will create a virtual world as a culmination of these stories that brings the audience deep into the narrative and my mind.

Image credit: Photo in graphic by Kseniya Lapteva on Unsplash