Host City USA: TBD

Andrew Califf

Andrew Califf is an archaeologist, anthropologist, photographer, and storyteller focused on exploring, learning, and documenting how people live and thrive in dynamic environments, specifically mountains and high-elevation plateaus. A freelance photojournalist covering topics such as environmental conservation, Indigenous rights, and archaeology, Andrew also conducts archaeological research himself, exploring how hunter-gatherers first started using the high-elevation areas of Inner Asia.

During his training at New York University in both archaeology and journalism, Andrew split time between excavations and fieldwork during the summer, and writing, photography, and reporting during the rest of the year. For his anthropology honors thesis, he surveyed and mapped stone tool scatters in Mongolia’s northern taiga while also conducting ethnographic surveys and interviews within the Dukha communities who live there. During his graduate studies in archaeology, Andrew “shovel bummed” from caves in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to mudbrick fortresses in Uzbekistan.

Andrew has bylines from six countries and was awarded the Overseas Press Club Foundation Stan Swinton Scholarship to cover conservation and Indigenous rights in Cambodia. He aims to convey the significance of actions and a deeper worldview rooted in the Indigenous knowledge of an environment. These are the ephemeral concepts he hopes to share through both visual and written storytelling, as well as scientific research. Specifically regarding his archaeological research, the significant aspect is about better understanding how Prehistoric people navigated challenging and dynamic environments like the Western Himalaya.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Andrew is conducting a specialized survey focused on identifying Prehistoric artifacts and sites in Ladakh. The process involves combining the mapping of previously discovered stone tools with modeling geomorphological features and the topography to inform targeted surveys, thereby expanding the dataset of Prehistoric archaeology in Ladakh. This data will deepen understanding about Prehistoric peoples in one of the world’s most dynamic regions, expand India’s diverse heritage, and help researchers adopt new survey strategies for finding such sites in the mountains.

Matthew Sheridan

Mr. Matthew Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based abstract artist who is constantly learning from global philosophies while working toward animating the blind spots in the collective reality of humankind. His non-objective paintings and animations generate worlds of plug-and-play constructivist expressionism where his work’s meaning comes from its actions on paper and canvas, as well as via in situ video projections.

A BFA from New York University and an MFA from California’s ArtCenter College of Design, Mr. Sheridan has held 13 solo exhibitions to date. His video has been screened in two Olympic Games and his work has been exhibited in museums like Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume in Paris, and CICA in South Korea.

Mr. Sheridan has participated in artist residencies such as Fountainhead in Miami, Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, and La Napoule Art Foundation in France. He has also won grants and residencies, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; an audiovisual grant from the secretary of culture of Bahia, Brazil; a Paradise AIR Residency sponsored by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho); and three UCLA faculty development grants.

In the summer of 2025, Mr. Sheridan collaborated with visual artist Vishwa Shroff, architect Katsushi Goto, and philosopher Rohit Goel on a series of short, animated, live-mixed architectural video projections in Mumbai and Vadodara, India. This was followed in autumn 2025 by a solo exhibition in CDMX, Mexico, called Destino Floreciente; there, he premiered a new bespoke work for Mexico City entitled Doom In Bloom. His work is part of collections in America, France, and Australia.

Mr. Sheridan has taught at NYU/Tisch in New York and Singapore, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at UCLA’s Geffen Academy in Los Angeles.

Mr. Sheridan’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “Elephants in the Room”, is a multidisciplinary collaboration between two visual artists, an architect, and a philosopher who theorize, then visualize, about intersections between eastern, western, and global philosophies, to expand beyond the sensory limitations of contemporary “society of the spectacle”. It is employing the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) approach for the deliverables, including drawing, painting, installation-based animated architectural projections, live-mixed video, exploratory music and audio with experimental documentary, and narrative cinema. Essentially, this collaborative project is reconceiving architecture/built form as a fluid interface in an attempt to animate the blind spots in humankind’s shared reality.