Charisse Pearlina Weston, M.F.A. ’19, named a 2025 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grantee

The Department of Art alumna is among 20 artists selected nationwide for the expanded two-year Stepping Stone grants program

UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts alumna Charisse Pearlina Weston, M.F.A. ’19, has been named one of the 2025 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grantees, receiving an unrestricted $20,000 grant in support of her artistic practice.

The Trellis Art Fund, a New York-based nonprofit that launched in February 2024 with a $15.8 million endowment, recently announced the expansion of its Stepping Stone grants into a two-year program. Twenty artists in the 2025 cohort and twenty-one artists in the 2024 group will each receive unrestricted $20,000 grants this year, with the 2025 artists receiving the same amount next year. 

Based in Harlem, New York, Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose work explores the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy through strategies of repetition, enfoldment and concealment. Her recent exhibitions include group and solo presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, SITE Santa Fe and the Queens Museum, among other venues.

Weston’s recent fellowships and residencies include the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence program (2022–23), a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellowship, a 2023 Hodder Fellowship at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.

To learn more about Charisse Pearlina Weston, visit her website at charisseweston.com. For more information about Trellis Art Fund’s 2025 Stepping Stone Grantees, visit the organization’s website at trellisartfund.org. To learn more about the Department of Art, visit art.arts.uci.edu.