Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn. Her videos, installations, and performances center on the formation of political ideology, historical mythologies, and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Through poetic intervention into archival sources and legal documents, her work seeks to unsettle foundational national myths. Her practice is grounded in collaboration, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, as a way to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries.

Keren’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Eyebeam, New York; The James Gallery, New York (forthcoming); The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv; Goethe Institute, New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park among others. Her projects received support through fellowships and awards from Artadia, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Artis, Socrates Sculpture Park, A-Z West, ISCP, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

In this ongoing moment of crisis, I ask myself what it means to be a cultural producer? How can re-telling of history and collaborative artmaking counter hegemonic narratives while having a transformative potential?

I often think about these questions from a comparative, transnational lens. I moved to New York from Jerusalem in 2014 at moment of rising populism and ethnonationalism in the world. This geographical shift allowed me to look at the overlapping messianic political power structures and settler-colonial imaginaries which connect Israel and the United States. Through immersive and participatory environments, I try to render how state-violence is often disguised under a veil of beauty and mythology. Each project sends me on years of archival research and filming, resulting in an exhibition that becomes a space of collective inquiry, counter-narratives, resistance, and an investigation of political imagination.

Thailand-born, NYC-based composer Tidtaya Sinutoke (ฑิตยา สินุธก) and Filipina-American librettist Isabella Dawis are the co-recipients of the Fred Ebb Award for musical theatre songwriting and the Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award. Their other awards include the Jonathan Larson Grant, the Billie Burke Ziegfield Award, the Playwrights Realm International Theatremakers Award, and the Kleban Prize for Librettists. Their musicals and operas include HALF THE SKY (The 5th Avenue Theatre’s First Draft Commission and Radio Play, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Theater Mu, Theater Latté Da, the O’Neill Center), SUNWATCHER (Weston Theater Company, Ancram Opera House, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Civilians, Goodspeed Musicals, Tofte Lake Center), and LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG (American Opera Project).

Isabella and Tidtaya’s work has been supported by the American Theatre Wing, Musical Theatre Factory, the Kurt Weill Foundation, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and many more. More at tidtayasinutoke.com and isabelladawis.com.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a team of two Asian female writers, we create new music-theatrical narratives with bold, unconventional Asian women at the center. We blend musical idioms and storytelling traditions from around the globe, bringing together performers, creatives, and audiences from underrepresented communities. By uplifting Asian, female, and immigrant voices, we work to reinvent the American musical theater and opera landscape.

We look forward to spending our fellowship developing the following pieces, in collaboration with the Twin Cities and NYC theatermaking communities. HALF THE SKY tells the story of an Asian American woman climbing Mount Everest – a contemporary American musical on a global scale, infused with Thai and Himalayan folk music. Our chamber musical SUNWATCHER brings to light the story of Japanese female astronomer and “hidden figure” Hisako Koyama – by mixing elements of Noh theater, electronic live looping, and taiko drumming. LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG is an opera for kids about sea creatures – using Southern Thai folk music and shadow puppetry to educate about climate change.

Photo on left by Wanwanat Saengthong. Photo on right by Sarah Morreim.

Sam Kebede is a first-generation Ethiopian/Eritrean-American writer/actor/comedian. He's performed at/had his works presented at venues including The Public, Ars Nova, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the Venice International Film Festival. His award-winning play ETHIOPIANAMERICA premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago (produced by Definition Theater Company), and he currently writes for the show Tough Bobas, an anti-CCP series shot and produced in Taiwan. Sam also loves to perform stand up, and has an hour long set titled I’m Ostracized because I'm Ostrich-Sized. You can also stream his solo show Lack History through Ars Nova Supra, or catch a production at Caveat on the LES.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The goal of my fellowship period is to further develop my show Lack History, which is a comedy variety game show about the history we ignore and ramifications of that ignorance. Through a combination of games and stand up, I bring the audience on a journey to confront the ills of our past through comedy. They are asked to complete tasks/answer questions to earn money for non-profits that attempt to address those ills. The long-term goal for this development is to make three tiers of shows. The first form would be a complete non-profit model that creates a set production that can be performed continuously. The second is a form of the show that is freshly made on a regular basis that examines our current historical moment for schools or communities throughout NYC/the tri-state area. The third form would be a for-profit version of the show that markets itself to corporations as a DEI event. Companies could pay for an in-office show that would include a talk-back afterward to unpack how their company can do more to benefit their immediate communities.

Photo by Sub/urban photography.

Lea Kalisch is a Swiss Jewish singer, actor, entertainer and creative producer. Lea makes multi-cultural, multilingual art that brings together music, dance, drama, and comedy, on stage and on screen, always leading with Yiddishkayt (Jewishness). Some know her as the Eshet Chayil of Hip Hop, others as Rebbetzin Lea with her Yiddish comedy skits.

Lea had multiple appearances in the US and Switzerland with her one woman show In love with a dream! Lea released her first solo album of the same name in 2022. She’s performed solo concerts in NYC, Boston, Munich, Zurich and Vienna and has played leading roles in various Off-Broadway productions and regional theaters such as The New Yiddish Rep, The Six Points Theater, National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, HERE Arts Center. Lea is also the 2020 recipient of the Omanut-Zwillenberg prize which awards Swiss Jewish artists.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

It is my mission to share the rich Jewish culture with ALL people by creating new, deep and entertaining Jewish content that CLASHES with other cultural traditions. As a Swiss polyglot living in the US for many years, I see myself as a citizen of the world, building bridges across different groups of people connecting Europeans and Americans, Jews and non-Jews.

The stories I tell are rooted in reality. I focus on Judaism, women, sexuality, the female body, the roles of men and women. My work often questions beliefs, religion, identity, sexuality, and dreams.

I will dive into my project Tango- A Prayer For Two, a film and/or a stage play, that brings together Yiddish and Tango. Through music, dance, and dialogue I will tell the incredible, tragic, and true story about Zwi Migdal, a Jewish mafia who brought women from Eastern Europe to brothels in South America. Where do I fit in the story? You will see…

Photo by Sy Chounchaisit.

Founder & Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks, Tish Jones is a writer, educator, organizer and cultural producer from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people, arts & culture, youth development, and civic engagement. As a performance artist her work has been shared in venues throughout the United States. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center, 2020), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015) and more.

Jones has been awarded fellowships from the Arts Matters Foundation, Springboard for the Arts, The Intercultural Leadership Institute, and more. She is grateful for the grants & awards that have allowed her the space to continue her creative and community practices, respectively. For more on her personal praxis, see Jones’ TEDxMinneapolis Talk on “Spoken Word as a Radical Practice of Freedom.”

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will utilize my time as a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow to research, write, produce and publish my first poetry manuscript.

Photo by Roosevelt Mansfield.

Nazareth Hassan is a writer, director, and musician. They work interdisciplinarily in writing, performance, sound, music, and image-making. Their performances and plays have been performed and workshopped at The Royal Court Theatre, Theatertreffen Stuckemarkt, The Shed, The Vineyard Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, MINT Gallery, Jermyn St. Theatre, and Museo Universario del Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC CDMX). Their performance score Untitled (1-5) was published by 3 Hole Press. Sound composition work includes A Song of Songs at The Bushwick Starr, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Everything I Will Be at JACK, and This House is Not a Home at Substance Skatepark. He has released three singles. They are the resident dramaturg at The Royal Court Theatre.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I make work about ambivalence and juxtaposition: the experience of having two or more great and contradictory feelings, identities, and beliefs in one body; the moment an hour feels like a year and a second; the worst consequences of an ecstatic high. In between the various sensations I make work about what I think is the essential experience of being a person. I make work about the in-betweenness itself. I am deeply compelled by the social experiment of theatre. Text, movement, and aesthetics are deeply intertwined versions of each other. The text is a hypothesis: a manifesto on gathering and assembly. The room, the rehearsal, is the proof and complication of the hypothesis, the manifesto in action. This involves facilitating self-recognition, vulnerable self-disclosure, groupthink, and hyper individuation.

I am currently working on my plays Bowl EP, about two lovestruck skater boys, VANTABLACK, a performative exploration of the hopelessness of reparations, and Untitled (1-5), a choral text performance that turns sensation into language.

Sxr OM Dxtchxss-Davis is a playwright from Minneapolis. The rhythms and cultures of North Minneapolis and Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions are infused in the worlds of their plays, which aim to redefine blackness in terms of love, family, community and the magic that comes along with not knowing where one truly came from. They received a 2016-2017 Many Voices Fellowship from the Playwrights’ Center and have since presented their work locally at Pillsbury House + Theatre. Dxtchxss-Davis has also recently received the I Am Soul National Black Theater (2019) and the Apothetae and Lark Playwriting Fellowship. They studied playwrighting and sociology at Augsburg College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My goal in life is to create stories that reflect black life in America. I went to college for sociology, so I could understand how the system works, so I could destroy it. During my time studying, I took a few playwriting classes. As a kid I always wanted to be a writer, I never thought it come true, never thought I was good enough. As I start to live my dreams as a writer, I constantly go back to this idea of destroying the system, but more importantly creating a system, a way of life that can replace the one we are currently surviving. When I was 14 I met my brother Tino, he is a spirit. Tino has a different way of moving, living and loving. Through Tino, I found Oko--  my safe place. I believe the way to save blackness in America, is through Oko.

Donte Collins (they/them; b. Chicago Heights. 1996) is a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright, and movement artist named the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Saint Paul, Minnesota. They have received fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, The Adroit Journal, the McKnight Foundation, The National Urban League, The Dramatist Guild Foundation, Frontier Poetry, Indiana Review, and BOMB Magazine. They believe poems allow us to wander back to ourselves, to meet ourselves anew. They believe poems are deeply human gestures here to gather us, to propose new, critical & compassionate floor plans for the future, for the self. They believe poems are the beginning. They are an alum of TruArtSpeaks, an arts & culture organization cultivating literacy, leadership, and social justice through the study & application of Spoken Word and Hip Hop culture. Their choreopoem Mercy is forthcoming.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Mercy is a dreamscape, an un-language-able anti-disciplinary book of erasure, both kneading & collapsing reactive attachment disorder, adoption, apophatic theology, afro-pessimism & be-longing. Mercy is a book of jazz wishing to capture each speaker’s emotional mapping by rupturing lyrical poetry to fuse re-memory, family, culture, dream-inheritances, and history in hopes of radically shifting the speaker’s senses of (selves) in the face of childhood neglect. Punctuated with erasures of a clinical diagnosis, we watch the speaker transform their condition (one many adoptees face) by constructing fire escapes through language, fleeing memory, childhood, and the church. Each set aflame in the name of salvation.

For my fellowship, I’ll focus on further adapting this manuscript for the stage. This project has shed its name and form many times since its inception, and I hope to keep following its pulse to a place of sharing with you. I’ll also spend this time taking professional development courses + seeking mentorship to help shape its theatrical elements. This fellowship will also give me time to center rest and balance as an artist + human. I’m forever in awe of where my wonder can lead me, and it feels particularly surreal to have landed among such a passion-driven cohort + foundation. I cannot wait to share what I find with Jerome’s generous support.

Photo by Trevor Sweeney.

Jeesun Choi is a transnational Korean playwright, librettist and physical theatre artist. Her plays move through diaspora, (im)migration, and transnationalism to reveal the joy and agony of the human condition. Selected plays include BUST (Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, O'Neill NPC Finalist), Lost Coast (Playwrights Realm's Ink'd Festival, Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Works), Manuka (EST/Youngblood Podcast), The Seekers (Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Bushwick Starr Reading Series), and Untitled/Diaspora (JACK Radical Acts Festival). She is currently a Librettist Fellow at American Opera Project, a member of EST/Youngblood, Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, an affiliated artist at New Georges, and a member of DGA. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Realm, and more. In 2020, she was awarded Artist of Exceptional Merit by Asian American Arts Alliance. MFA Ensemble Based Physical Theatre, Dell’Arte International.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a transnational Korean theatre artist, I write stories that express the joy and agony of the human condition, especially in the context of (im)migration and diaspora. Being an (im)migrant artist, I have experienced how personhood is a complex union of experience, desire, and purpose. People of diaspora spend our lives articulating who we are because it evolves constantly, evading the identity categories set by the dominant cultures. In my plays, I seek to capture these moments of personal and communal transformation while continuing to innovate the theatrical form. Currently, I am working on a revenge tragedy, Influence, a chamber opera with the composer Paul Pinto, and a show at JACK about the Korean diaspora for October 2023.

Photo by Eric Johnston.

Sarah Rothberg creates playful, poetic, usually-a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationship to the world around you. These take many forms ranging from VR/AR to installation, performance, video, writing, workshops.

These experiences exist in a variety of contexts: at galleries, museums, festivals, on google docs, at the consumer electronics expo, screens in the NYC Subway system, Apple stores around the world, zoom calls, secret twitter accounts, or the MoMa (unsanctioned). Some hosts have included: bitforms gallery, Rhizome, NRW-forum, MTA Arts, Sotheby's S2, CultureHub, Gray Area Foundation. Rothberg is on the faculty at NYU (interactive media at ITP), a member of ONX Studio, and a mentor/former-member at NEW INC.

Rothberg is part of collaboratives: MORE&MORE UNLIMITED, which facilitates workshops for imagining changed worlds, and IS THIS THING ON? a post-web2 experiment in artist-driven livestreaming.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Usually, I make things to connect to someone: you! or myself.

I am currently working on spaces (mostly virtual) for performance and conversation, and am specifically interested in how technologies facilitate different kinds of interactions between people, as well as different ways of thinking and imagining.

In general, I pursue projects that allow me to engage with emerging technologies (broadly speaking), and question how they impact the world with a mix of experimentation, silliness, critical inquiry, sensitivity and joy!