Individual Artist Fellowships

Congratulations to the 2023-2024 Artist Fellows from San Luis Obispo County!


  • Established Artist

    Shell Beach artist, Colleen Gnos, is best known for for her ocean and agriculture inspired murals, gold-scaled mermaids painted on surfboards, and her idyllic scenes of surfers and breaking waves. In the last few decades, Colleen has completed public art projects, created art for dozens of wine labels, and has shown her paintings across the USA and Italy.


  • Emerging Artist

    Born in Rome, Anna Fusco is an artist and a writer. One of ten stewards living in an intentional community on California's central coast, her recent work explores the idea of manifest destiny in the American west and its natural friction with the current sentimental and fleeting possibility of modern home ownership. “Unsupervised” is the Substack newsletter where she writes that comes out three times a month, it is also a 2023 featured publication.

Individual Artist Fellowship Program grants support individual artistic practice through unrestricted funding and state-wide recognition to artists at key moments in their careers, elevating their capacity for continued contribution to the field and our state. This program is intended to support a broad spectrum of artists working in all disciplines, from diverse geographies and communities of all sizes across California.

Meet Colleen and Anna

71 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Grants Awarded in Central California.

2023 California Arts Council (CAC) Individual Artist Fellowships totaling $660,000 have been awarded to 71 artists in the seventeen county central California region, ranging from Fresno through Santa Clara to Santa Barbara and nearly everywhere in between. The program is designed to recognize, uplift, and celebrate the excellence of California artists practicing any art form. In doing so, the CAC is showcasing the centrality of artists’ leadership in guiding the evolution of our traditional and contemporary cultures. The fellows were selected from 512 artists that applied within the region.

Fellowships will support artists of all disciplines at key career stages: Emerging, Established, and Legacy.