NinaJohnson

Grant Czuj continually draws from his familial ties within American working-class culture. Born in Detroit, his family has been rooted in the American automotive industry for generations. At seventeen years old, Grant was sentenced to the Michigan Department of Corrections to a term of incarceration that lasted nine and a half years. During his incarceration, he routinely exhibited and published with the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, publishing fiction and poetry in the PCAP annual Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and exhibiting at the Annual Exhibit of Art by Michigan Prisoners at the University of Michigan’s Duderstadt Gallery. His art practice uses materiality and abstraction to work through an embodied experience of prison life that resists the dominant normative interpretation and visual language of incarceration. He holds a BFA in Art Practices with a minor in Critical Theory from the College for Creative Studies, and an MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking. He is the winner of the 2022 Yale Prison Education Initiative Teaching Fellowship, the 2021 Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship, the 2019 Imre J. Molnar Artistic Achievement Award, the DeSalle Scholarship and the James Banton Endowment Scholarship among others.