Past
Grantees

Tarek Abdelqader is a Minneapolis-based composer and musician. He has produced and performed his own work under various monikers and with myriad collaborators, and regularly supports regional and international artists and bands as a drummer. He was a 2018-19 Cedar Commissions awardee and a 2019 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund recipient, which enabled him to travel throughout Palestine for research related to his debut EP, Ramallah, 8/22. Abdelqader also works as an accompanist, composer, and sound designer for dance collectives based in the Twin Cities and New York, including Ananya Dance Theater, Paula Mann, and Limón Dance Company. Most recently, he composed the score for Palestinian-American dance collective Body Watani’s After the Last Red Sky, a dance performance and ritual gathering to hold the weight of—and imagine healing for—the Palestinian sky.

Fellowship Statement

During this fellowship period, I intend to honor my existing commitment to deep instrumental practice while expanding the edges of my artistry. I will write and create with familiar Minneapolis faces and with new collaborations forged in Beirut, Lebanon. I will begin writing with the goal of a 2026 release of my debut album, which will feature many dear collaborators and friends. More concretely, I will continue my work with Body Watani dance collective on After the Last Red Sky, which will tour within the U.S.—and hopefully beyond—in 2025/26. I look forward to continuing my support of artists within and outside of my Midwest ecosystem while giving my own work the time and attention it needs to flourish.

ỌLÁKÌÍTÁN ADÉỌLÁ is a writer and experiential artist working between the lyric, multimedia installation, and theatrical performance. Kìítán’s artistry is in flux with ÌSÈSE of the Yorùbá tradition and continually devoted to storytelling eros and wayward survival. He authored the interactive memoir, Whiskery Squid and the experiential art box, Perfekt Trans~. Kìítán’s work has been exhibited and published in The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Wrong Biennale, Five Myles, NY Art Book Fair, Swiss Art Awards, For Space, Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast Journal, amongst others, and has received support from CUE Art Foundation, Recess Art, the Toni Beauchamp Award, Lucky Risograph, and The School for Poetic Computation.

Fellowship Statement

I dwell with lived experience, poke underneath the hood of time, slice and cut things apart to unravel submerged—historical, bodily, and psychic—realities within. Survival is also laying our stories bare. I am crafting a house—a novel—honouring ancestral thrums, heat and native rhythms. For a verse novel that crawls across generations, striding through time drenched in wild love and grief, it is important to give ear and eyes abundantly to its grunts, where it breaks and desires to be stitched back with crimson and gold streaks. This Fellowship will support my time to drill more into the lyric as a form to animate history and as a poetics of being. Perhaps epics choose us. I’ve had a realtime experience of this. The lyric and I continue to have the most intricate relationship.

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work explores the cybernetic and temporal entanglements within societal dynamics. She aims to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. Aliyu is a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation. Her work has been presented internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design Week (Vienna, Austria), Film at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh, PA), Centre for Heritage, and Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.

Fellowship Statement

I draw upon my body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculptures, videos, installations, virtual environments, publications, archives, and social practice. Grounded in antiracist, decolonial, and feminist critiques of technology, my work situates personal, familial, and ancestral histories within broader sociopolitical frameworks. During the fellowship, I plan to research, conceptualize and build new works that experiment with sculptural and digital media, with an aim to expand the narrative possibilities of my practice.

Katayoun Amjadi is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator, and curator. Her work considers the sociopolitical systems that shape our perceptions of self and other, such as language, religion, gender, politics, and nationalist ideologies. Her art probes relationships: between past and present, tradition and modernity, and individual versus collective identity. Her work simultaneously seeks to spur discussion about our place in the temporal arc and the interwoven roots of our histories. Amjadi holds an MFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her work has been exhibited at Minnesota Museum of American Art, Weisman Art Museum, South Dakota Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center, Beijing Film Academy, and Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts among others. Selected awards include MCAD-Jerome Emerging Artist (2020/2021), Artist Initiative Grants (2015/2019), and Creative Individual Grant (2024) from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Fellowship Statement

My work is essentially a form of social practice based in ceramic objects and installations, with an emphasis on aesthetic clarity and public engagement. Colloquially I am the village potter, the storyteller. I want the stories I tell to resonate, illuminate, inspire or provoke: to cause one to think deeply, see differently, to feel passionately.

I have always been intrigued with the fluidity of ceramics moving between art and craft, the sacred and profane. My work is in constant dialogue within this realm, exploring curios and collectibles, the lost artifact, or forgotten story, consumable goods and souvenirs. I seek to carry the many references of their original voice, and to develop a grammar of objects; to discover the narrative threads that bind local to global, personal to universal. The question always remains: how do I develop a language, and thus tell a story through gathered artifacts?

Calley N. Anderson (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright from Memphis, TN. Her work has been staged at several colleges and 10-minute play festivals around the country, including commissions by the Davidson College Theatre Department and the University of Memphis Department of Theatre and Dance. Anderson is currently a National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Resident Playwright. Her work has been supported by Page 73, SPACE on Ryder Farm/RE Endeavors, American Theatre Group PlayLab, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, MacDowell, Liberation Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, and the Dramatist Guild Foundation. Anderson holds an MFA from New School for Drama and a BA from Davidson College.

Fellowship Statement

Almost everything I do (personally, professionally, and artistically) is inspired by, in service of, and/or a reflection of Southern Black folks. My Memphian-ness is the heartbeat of my work. Even if a particular play is not set in Memphis or the South, both are woven into the work—alive and pulsing in the background because it is my frame of reference for being in this world. I believe it creates an on-ramp for other Southern Black folks: to fully see themselves as the critical part of someone’s journey, the main and supporting characters on someone’s stage, and the audience, whose opinion matters most to at least one person in the world. Like many before me, I hope to use my work not just to build new narratives for Southerners to hold, but also for those beyond our Mason-Dixon to witness, engage with, and take seriously.

Sam Aros-Mitchell (he, him, his) is an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an Indigenous art-maker and scholar, Aros-Mitchell’s work spans the disciplines of choreography, performance, sound/light/scenic design, and embodied writing.  Aros- Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theater from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego/UC Irvine, an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego, and a BFA from UC Santa Barbara. Since 2017,he has worked with Rosy Simas Danse (RSD) as a performer, teacher, and community engagement organizer. He has performed with RSD in Skins (2018), Weave (2019), Simas short film, yödoishëndahgwa’geh (2021), and she lives on the road to war (2022-2024). Aros-Mitchell is currently collaborating with Dante Puleio, Director of Limón Dance in New York City by restaging/reconstructing two original Limón pieces, the Indio solo from Danzas Mexicanas (1939) and “the Deer solo” from The Unsung (1970). This marks a new passage for Aros-Mitchell and for Limón Dance, in sharing the proud lineage of Yaqui ancestry. Aros-Mitchell is a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow.

Fellowship Statement

As a Jerome Fellow, I aim to expand my interdisciplinary practice, rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, to create immersive, contemporary performances that resonate with both ancestral traditions and present-day experiences. With the Fellowship, I plan to develop new works that bridge movement, storytelling, and soundscapes, fostering collaboration with Native and BIPOC artists. Central to my vision is exploring the performance space as a sacred, transformative realm where cultural memory and innovation intersect. The Fellowship will support the creation of a new performance series inspired by Yaqui creation stories, incorporating experimental music and movement workshops with community participants. It will also enable me to refine my technical skills in sound and lighting design, further deepening the impact of my work. By engaging with local and national audiences, I hope to amplify Indigenous excellence in the arts, cultivating a shared space for healing, resistance, and celebration through performance.

Noelle Awadallah نوال )she/her) is a Palestinian-American choreographer, dancer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance alongside Leila Awadallah. For six years (and counting), Awadallah has also been dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre. She holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).  Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. Sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multi-directional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. She has presented work at multiple venues such as Red Eye, University of Minnesota, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, and The Southern Theater. She is the recipient of the 2020 Hinge Arts Residency, a 2023 MOVO Residency, New Works Isolated Acts through Red Eye Theater, and the 2024 Creative Individuals Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Fellowship Statement

Over the next three years, I will be in embodied research concerning the connections between Palestine and South Dakota. I am planning to research Palestinian stories of land, exile, erasure, and displacement to the stolen land I grew up on in South Dakota to where I currently reside in Mni Sota Makoce. I am questioning how these three versions of home converse in birthplace, living place, and roots of origin, while examining principles of Land Back and the Right of Return. My multidisciplinary approach includes site-specific improvisation, writing, dance, and farming explorations. This fellowship will begin my research into farming and dancing side by side, as both laborious and ancestral practices held in the container of Body Watani, with my sister and creative collaborator Leila Awadallah.

Coleen Baik is a Korean American artist and writer based in NYC. Her short films have screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Everyman Cinema in London, and in domestic and international festivals. Her latest film, 엄마 나라 | MOTHER LAND, premiered at Brooklyn Film Festival and is a meditation on loss through animations on a turntable. Her time in North Korea, during a 2015 peace mission now documented in the award-winning Crossings by Mu Films, was a pivotal experience that continues to influence her work through themes of absence, longing, memory, and myth. Baik shares progress from her art studio every two weeks on the-line-between.com, a Substack-featured publication. Her essays have appeared in various serials, including Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. She received a BA in French from Wellesley College; she has no formal training in filmmaking or animation. She is a member of the Korean American Artist Collective.

Fellowship Statement

I currently work in animation, painting, and prose. Visual mediums facilitate connection through ambiguity; verbal mediums do so through clarity. I’m excited to plumb these mechanics in a unified practice during the Fellowship. In storytelling, I've been interested in connecting dots between micros and macros (familial, national; individual, cultural) in the context of my various identities—as Korean, American, and cis-gender woman. I make films because, for one, I believe they make it possible to engage with a general audience, even through such a specific lens. During this Fellowship, I’ll begin working on my next animated short film. I‘m investing in tools such as a downshooter animation stand to explore new filmmaking techniques. I plan to travel for research, and hope to spark collaborations. I look forward to growing in both knowledge and craft with the help of this award.

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist. Her poetry has been published and anthologized in wildness, Interim, and New Letters as the 2023 Winner of the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. She is a 2024 Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). Additionally, she has received fellowships and generous support from New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Kolaj Institute, MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists, Salzburg Summer Academy, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Poets & Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among other honors. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage—a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. Her collages have appeared in Create! Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Southern Cultures, and The BOOOOOOOM Care Art & Photo Book. She has exhibited at LA Zine Fest, Black Zine Fair NYC, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies Ordinary Survival Inaugural Film Festival.

Fellowship Statement

I do Black women’s work. My poetry and collage projects center the lives and experiences of Black women, matrilineage, and ancestors. My practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and I am influenced by beauty, the desert and the cosmos, migration, divination and astrology, archives, Americana, and what remains. My work examines freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Much of my work relies on history as a primary source. My mother, a dark skinned daughter of Texas Juneteenth folk, was born the same week the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Education, and my father was a descendant from one of the original Louisiana Creole families. As a result, I inherited and carry the South with all of its blood, glory, and contradiction. I am grateful that the Fellowship will allow me to work towards my first full length poetry collection, Hoard, and to expand my experimentation and ongoing work with the archive.

Jessica Beshir is a Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker. She is interested in cinema that responds to an intuitive process and the forms that emerge from this journey. Her feature debut, Faya Dayi, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and screened around the world garnering multiple awards including the Truer Than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirits (2022), the Grand Jury Prize & Fipresci Awards at Visions du Reel (2021), the Grand Jury Prize at the Full Frame Film Festival (2021), best Cinematography awards at the ASC (2022), IDA (2021), DOC NYC (2021) and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards (2022). Faya Dayi was released theatrically in North America by Janus Films, broadcast nationally on POV’s 35th season on PBS (2022) and was released in Europe and Latin America by Mubi. Jessica is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow and has been honored with grant support from the Jerome Foundation, Sundance Institute, the Doha Film Institute and NYSCA.

Fellowship Statement

As a filmmaker, I am interested in cinema that is nomadic in nature, a cinema that is liberated from the confines of genre/narrative expectations to create an aesthetic that fluidly moves amidst temporal and sonic spaces, between the physical and the spiritual worlds, invoking the mythical while grounded in socio-political concerns. I am interested in the unique cinematic forms that emerge when intuition is a guiding compass and process is trusted in the creation of stories that look and feel as free and fragmentary as Memory.

During the Fellowship, I will travel to Ethiopia to do archival research and to record oral histories of elders who lived through the Cold War. The vision is to create a poetic work whose aesthetics and thematics are rooted in the historical realities of the present to uncover past histories and the cycles of war that continue to provoke massive exiles.

Anooj Bhandari is an artist creating experimental performance and theater. He believes deeply in art as a process to ask quiet questions publicly. He is an alumnus of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric Institute’s Fellowship for Emerging Political Performance Artists, the Lighthouse Residency at the BEAM Center, and The Bandung Residency with the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts. Bhandari is a 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipient in the Theater Arts. He is also an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, where he writes, performs, and directs in their weekly show, The Infinite Wrench.

Fellowship Statement

During the Fellowship, I intend to expand on a larger body of work titled A Geometric Proof for Changing the Shape of a Dollar, exploring the intersections between grief, migration, and spirit through the counterfeit dollar. The work will utilize puppetry and multi-media installation to weave together narratives of global end-of-life ritual, mutualism within nature, and histories of geometric tiling, to explore two central questions of counterfeit practice: How will we replicate the shapes we make? And where does the impact of our work begin? I also intend to develop an immersive, mobile puppetry unit that will build site-specific performance around New York City in the aesthetics of a mystical chai stall. I am interested in creating art that extends the future of theater as a significant cultural tool, rather than a future of the “great American theater.”

Born and raised in North Dakota and now residing in Northern Minnesota, Elizabeth Chatelain is an award-winning documentary and narrative filmmaker. Her work focuses on women's perspectives from the rural Midwest. Her documentary short My Sister Sarah won the International Documentary Association’s Award for Best Student Documentary and was a Student Academy Award Finalist. Her films have screened at festivals across the country and the world, including Interfilm Berlin and SXSW. Chatelain’s feature projects have participated in the Berlinale Script Station, the Sundance Institute’s Financing Intensive, the Blacklist/Women in Film Writer's Residency and the Stowe Story Labs. She is an Academy Nicholl Fellowship Semi-Finalist and a Showtime Tony Cox Screenplay Competition Winner. She was awarded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Climate Storytelling Fellowship in 2024. Chatelain holds an MFA in Film and Video Production from University of Texas, Austin and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU-Tisch.

Fellowship Statement

As a filmmaker born in North Dakota and residing in rural Minnesota, I am passionate about telling stories from the rural Midwest, particularly from a woman’s perspective, with nuance and sensitivity. From the effects of the oil industry in Western North Dakota to the psychological and social intricacies of Minnesota’s farming culture, it is my vision to present the stories of the north—and ultimately other underrepresented areas—to the rest of the country and the world. I am also deeply committed to engaging rural communities in all of my work, collaborating with local artists and performers. I will shoot my debut feature film, Løvset's Manoeuvre, in Hibbing, Minnesota, in collaboration with the communities of the Iron Range. My aim is to tell thought-provoking, relatable stories from these unique areas that will resonate with people everywhere.

Pamela Council is an interdisciplinary artist creating works of veneration and playful catharsis. These multi-sensory dedications to the unsung, including their series Fountains for Black Joy, meticulously process history using dark humor, bright colors, nostalgic smells, and a campy Afro Americana aesthetic. They have created commissions for The Studio Museum in Harlem and VOLTA NY and exhibited at the Aldrich Art Museum, New-York Historical Society, and The New Museum for Contemporary Art. Council has been awarded numerous residencies including MacDowell Colony and ISCP. Council is an alumnus of Columbia University (MFA), and Williams College (BA), which awarded them the 2022 Bicentennial Medal as a distinguished alumna. They are a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Fellowship Statement

During my Fellowship, I will continue to create works ranging in scale from miniature to monumental, designing playful art that engages architectural history and supports public and private catharsis. I envision the Fellowship duration as a time when I can both get organized and feel free to experiment, tell stories that may not be the most commercially viable, and build a team to support my vision. I want people to meet at my fountains for reflection, sit on my benches and share gossip, and enjoy interiors filled with freedom-inspiring objects.

Zola Dee is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer whose works are deeply invested in exploring Black Americana, African diasporic religions, and imagining freer worlds for the Black collective body. Her plays include GUNSHOT MEDLEY, Smile, Goddamnit, and Father, Father. Other accomplishments include: 2023 I Am Soul National Black Theater Resident Playwright, Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow 2022-2023, Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellow 2021-2022, Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop 2019-2020. Dee is a graduate from California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in acting and a minor in creative writing. She is currently represented by WME and Management 360.

Fellowship Statement

I am currently developing a trilogy of plays set in the South Carolina Lowcountry, exploring the journey of a Black family from Reconstruction to the present day. The story centers a young girl named Presence who witnesses her mother's, already fragile mental health deteriorate after her grandmother dies and the family home is sold. Presence embarks on a literal journey through her family's past. She's determined to unearth the roots of the "sadness" that has plagued this family for generations and put an end to its cycle. This project is deeply intertwined with field research within the Gullah Geechee community. The Fellowship will provide invaluable support in continuing this research and expanding it to Bahia, Brazil, for a different set of plays I am developing. By connecting these narratives across port cities like Salvador and Charleston—spanning continents and time—I aim to showcase not only the resilience and complexities of the diaspora, but also our ever-enduring joy.

Melanie Dyer is a composer, violinist, and trans-disciplinary musician working in creative-improvised music. She is the recipient of awards including the 2024 New York Council on the Arts Support for Artists, the 2023 Herb Alpert Foundation Ragdale Prize, the 2022 Jazz Road/South Arts, and a 2022 and 2019 Chamber Music America award, among many others. Current projects include Incalculable Likelihood, an operetta for 12-piece ensemble (Vision Festival 2024), Siren Xypher Trio, and collaborations with several NY-based musicians. She convenes the improvising string/rhythm collective WeFreeStrings, Dyer has performed and recorded with the Sun Ra Arkestra under Marshall Allen; Tomeka Reid's Stringtet; and on William Parker’s projects. Her appearances include Vision Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Festival Sons d’hiver, and Lincoln Center Outdoors, and many more.

Fellowship Statement

Creative risk and expanding my vocabulary as a violist, composer, and trans-disciplinary musician will feed me over the next three years. My immediate project is to expand and stage Incalculable Likelihood at Mabou Mines black box experimental theater in December 2025. Over the next two years, I envision studying approaches to composition marginally familiar to me (privately), composing for new and existing ensembles, becoming a better improviser and violist, co-producing two trio recordings, and pursuing a sound project involving mass spectrometry. I live for new ideas. The Fellowship will support plans, purposes, and pursuits that inhabit and excite me. The Fellowship also represents the tangible possibility of generating new work, and being in conversation with creative thinkers and the participating public. 

Tommy Franklin is a filmmaker, writer, producer, and creator of Weapon of Choice Podcast. He was a founding board member of All Square, is a founding board member of Ostara Initiative, and is a communications consultant at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. His documentary You Don’t Know My Name (in production) has received support from Sundance, ITVS, Firelight Media, The Marshall Project, The Just Trust, Jerome Foundation, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Vital Projects Fund, and others. As of late, Franklin has developed his artistic practice during fellowships with Film Independent, CNN, Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, and others. Franklin’s one hour drama pilot Intrepid was a finalist for 2021’s Sundance Episodic Lab, and he was a 2022 Sundance BIPOC Mentorship Program Mentee. A double survivor of incarceration (born in prison and formerly incarcerated), he creatively reimagines power structures, focusing on Black liberation. He’s sure he wants to do this.

Fellowship Statement

My artistic growth requires ongoing self-reflection, as well as interrogating society and my role in it. I’m rooted in principles of creativity that come from lived experience, and I look forward to engaging and collaborating with artists who don’t run away from challenging realities we face in the world. The way formerly incarcerated people are stigmatized in society extends to the Hollywood ecosystem. We are seen as one-dimensional, “broken” with blatant character flaws and therefore not considered to be integral and valued in the storytelling process from the ground up, as if with our lived experience we aren’t the experts on the nuances within the justice-impacted universe. I spent three years in prison, locked away in five different correctional facilities. I have suffered deep pain and loss having lived through barriers connected to mass incarceration; the only journey toward healing for me is unfolding layers of truth through creative endeavors.

Roshan Ganu is a multimedia artist originally from Goa-India, currently based in Minneapolis. She works at the intersection of moving image collage, projection, and non-linear notions of space and time. Ganu is an awardee of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) by the Minneapolis Institute of Art for her exhibition titled रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine. She received the MCAD-Jerome Early Career Award in 2022 and was an artist in residence at Out of the Circle residency in Cairo, Egypt in 2023. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Medrar For Contemporary Art in Cairo- Egypt, MdW Art Fair in Chicago, Rochester Art Center, and Soo Visual Art Center in Minnesota, among others. Publications such as Brooklyn Rail, Star Tribune, Minnpost, MNArtists-Walker Art Center, and Minnesota Public Radio have written about her work with features, articles, and interviews. Ganu currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at Hamline University.

Fellowship Statement

During the Fellowship, I intend to use the video medium to explore a familiar place: the Konkan region which lies along the west coast of India. This is where I grew up, as did the past few generations of my family. As a foreigner in Minneapolis and a local in the Konkan belt, I am curious about the aesthetic that will emerge from this relationship. My work plays with narrative in visual layers that reappear from one body of work to another. I am pursuing an archive of this unique visual vocabulary via the myriad languages and places that build my identity, especially the Marathi language. As a moving image artist, my transdisciplinary installations invoke each aspect of our consciousness: the sensorial, emotional, physical, spiritual, the awake, as well as the sleeping. An immersive space activates this multi-modal engagement, wherein intricately layered video, narrative, sound, color, light, and texture makes the work accessible to a broad spectrum of audiences.

Caroline Garcia is a transpacific, interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She works across performance, moving image, and installation through a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research, and new media. Her practice weaves together ethnotraditional forms of knowledge including botany, poetry, dance, and ceramics with digital technologies such as green screening, robotics, motion capture, extended realities (AR/VR), and 3D processes. Garcia is a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow: Digital/Electronic Arts, New York Artadia Awardee, Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, and the American Australian Association’s AUSART Fellow. She has presented work at The SHED, Lincoln Center, Creative Time Summit X and HQ, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney Opera House, Manila Biennale, among others. Caroline is currently an A.I.R. Gallery Fellow and was formerly in residence at the EMPAC, MASS MoCA, ISCP, Pioneer Works, Recess, Alfred IEA, and LMCC’s Workspace program.

Fellowship Statement

My artistic research inquiries create unique constellations that intersect the past, present, and future. Using found footage, archives, and artifacts, I digitally sample popular culture and colonial imagery to critically re-appropriate problematic narratives of cultural representation. I am committed to centering Indigenous protocol and addressing diasporic ontologies and its privileges. I experiment with new media in order to outmaneuver forces of oppression. I utilize digital technologies as tools to transmit gestures and rituals into disembodied landscapes. I welcome the transgressive potency of rage and refusal to render critical awareness for communities confronting the status quo in politics, culture, history, and other areas of life. By initiating my own recuperation of violence, I (co)generate gateways for both the self and collective to engage with systemic themes of identity, immigration, and safety.

Wendell Gray II is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer, and educator. Raised in Atlanta, GA, in an immersive, multidisciplinary arts environment, he studied dance, music, and theater. Since relocating to New York, Gray’s choreographic works have been showcased at venues such as Danspace Project, PAGEANT, Coffey Street Studios, Kinosaito Arts Center, Gibney Dance, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. Gray is a 2024-2025 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and has additionally been supported by residency programs, including the Sightlines Dance Festival (2023), STUFFED Artist-in-Residence at Judson Church (2021), Work Up 6.0 Artist at Gibney (2020), and Chez Bushwick (2017). His artistic journey has led him to work with choreographers/ artists such as Miguel Gutierrez, Tere O’Connor, Juliana May, Joanna Kotze, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Pavel Zustiak, and Kevin Beasley, among others. He graduated from the University of the Arts with a BFA in Dance under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield.

Fellowship Statement

I make dances that are episodic and rhythmic, and that juggle various performative and qualitative intentions. I look to highlight both the public nature of performance and the private essence of being human. I focus on movement, organizing it into different choreographic structures while layering this with theatrical elements such as props and texts. I find it radical to be many things at once, both absorbing and transcending my identity. I use my formal dance training as a springboard for experimentation, both poking at the western throughlines while also navigating the tropes and signifiers within it. My work asks you to listen and form curiosities, to move into the unknown, the unanswerable, and the felt. I’m in the early stages of a new group work. It is a continuation of my most previous piece in the port’s mouth which dealt with the fantasies around the unknown parts of my lineage.

Dickie Drew Hearts is a Deaf, gay, multiracial actor and filmmaker dedicated to amplifying representation for Deaf, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC communities by showcasing American Sign Language onscreen. He recently created, wrote, directed, and co-starred in the Deaf/disabled-centric, LGBTQ+ romcom mini-series Passengers: New York City, which is now entering post-production. This series evolved from his short film Passengers, which won the 2015 Best Filmmaker award at the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, earning him mentorship with Oscar-winning Director Peter Farrelly. In 2016, he won Project Greenlight’s LGBTQ "See Yourself" contest with his pitch Save The World, leading to a development deal with Adaptive Studios and GLAAD. Hearts also won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the 2017 AT&T Create-A-Thon for The Deaf vs The Dead, before Deaf characters first appeared on AMC’s The Walking Dead. Hearts also is a television and stage actor, and he received an Obie Award in 2024 and a Lucille Lortel nomination for The Public Theater’s Dark Disabled Stories. Hearts is the recipient of the 2021 Sundance Institute’s Uprise Grant and the 2022 Ford and Mellon Foundations Disability Futures Fellows Grant.

Fellowship Statement

I am passionate about bringing more visibility to Deaf, LGBTQ, and American Sign Language stories in scripted narratives. I believe these stories deserve to be told and am committed to creating content that entertains while highlighting Deaf and disabled experiences. With this Fellowship, I plan to produce a mini-series, with the goal of expanding it into bigger projects or having it picked up as a network TV show. I am ready to push boundaries and tell more cinematic stories that amplify disabled, queer, and BIPOC voices.