Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2025 Fellows
OSGF
The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is pleased to announce our 2025 Fellows. These fellowships are designed to support early-career practitioners in the arts, sciences, and humanities whose work explores areas related to plants, landscapes, the environment, conservation, and humankind’s connection to the natural world.
Since 2018, we have offered our annual Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study and our Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, named in honor of OSGF founder Bunny Mellon’s children, to outstanding scholars and artists. Our Fellowship in Plant Science Research and our Fellowship in Plant Conservation Biology and have been awarded annually since 2021. For 2025, we have awarded two fellowships for each discipline.
2025 Stacy Lloyd Fellowship for Bibliographic Studies
Marlis Hinckley
Marlis Hinckley (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her present research focuses on gardens in the early years of the Spanish Empire, especially on how the Hispano-Arab gardening tradition interacted with indigenous plants, people, and customs in and around the Valley of Mexico.
Carole Nataf (Not Pictured)
Carole Nataf is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her dissertation, ‘Knowing Nature: French Savant Artists and Ecological Awareness in the Global Eighteenth Century,’ argues that the empirical sciences and the decorative arts were deeply interconnected theoretically, institutionally and in practice at that time, and examines artworks in a select range of media through the lens of emerging scientific disciplines.
2025 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence
Ashia S. Ajani
Ashia S. Ajani (they/she) is a multidisciplinary writer based in Oakland, CA and a UC Berkeley Lecturer in African American Studies. Their work examines the use of storytelling to connect climate education with memory preservation, and are currently developing a collection of lyric essays that interrogates the relationship between ecologically deemed nonhuman "pests'' and undesirable human populations.
Brien Beidler
Brien Beidler (he/him) is a book artist and toolmaker based in Saint Paul, MN, whose work celebrates the structure and aesthetics of pre-industrial book bindings in a 21st century context. His custom hand-engraved leather working tools draw from the plants of his local environs to explore decorative, symbolic, and personal meaning.
2025 Plant Science Research Fellows
Samantha Rosa
Samantha Rosa (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Biological Sciences and Ecology at the University of Maryland. With a background as a classroom teacher, her current work focuses on community-driven plant biology and conservation with the goal to develop curricula and programming that increase the accessibility of plant science research.
Cade N. Kane
Cade N. Kane (he/him) is a plant physiologist with a PhD from Purdue University. His current research interest is on the water dynamics of woody plant buds as they expand and burst during the spring. He uses recently-developed time-lapse imaging technology to capture the diurnal and seasonal changes in bud size, gathering data on how plants respond to changes in water status even before they have leaves.
2025 Plant Conservation Biology Fellows
Kinsey Reed
Kinsey Reed (she/her) is a Plant & Soil Science PhD candidate at West Virginia University whose main research interest is the impact of grassland plant diversity, and its interaction with livestock grazing, on soil health in Appalachia.
Rafael Urbina-Casanova
Rafael Urbina-Casanova (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Plant Biology and Conservation program at Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden. His research explores the potential of new genomic techniques to inform large-scale restoration in the western United States and the recovery plan of a threatened species endemic to the Great Lakes region.