Jerome
Hill
Artist
Fellows
2023-25

Sequoia Hauck (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, trans, Anishinaabe and Hupa multidisciplinary artist creating film, poetry, and performance art that decolonizes the process of art-making. Their work weaves together Indigenous epistemologies, queer and trans identity and the exploration and possibilities of Indigenous futurism. They make art surrounding the narratives of continuation and resiliency among their communities. Their films have been in the Minnesota International Film Festival and the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. They are a Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) New Angles 2020-2021 Fellow, as well as a recipient of the SPNN Fresh Vantage Post Production grant supporting their upcoming documentary series They Didn't Deserve to Die. www.sequoiahauck.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am finishing my upcoming film They Didn’t Deserve to Die, a six episode documentary about six Native families across Turtle Island sharing their heart-wrenching stories of loved ones lost to police brutality. Through memories, stories, and home videos these families honor the lives their sons and brothers lived, not just the day they died. I plan to tour the film to the communities who contributed and shared their stories. This will be the first audiences of the film as a way to honor and celebrate the lives of those we have lost. I believe filmmaking is a powerful form of storytelling. I will take this time during my fellowship to intentionally further my artistic practices. To weave and connect more with ancestors and relatives. Learning from my queer, trans, indigiqueer, two-spirit kin to honor what they have to share and soak up the knowledge they are willing to gift.

Photo by Sam Malm.

Tahiel Jimenez Medina (he, him his; they, them, theirs) is a Colombian first-generation immigrant director. In dedication to his mother and immigrant mamas who escape generational violence, he presents Colombian immigrant identity through a lens that celebrates ever-evolving emotional and ancestral journeys, memories, and dreams. His visions about immigrant and Colombian identity are culture catalysts to decolonize, remember, and heal ancestral cycles. Medina has premiered films at national and international film festivals including Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, New York Latino Film Festival, and Provincetown International Film Festival—and in local parking lots for his community to gather and imagine new worlds. His documentary about Colombian immigrants in Minnesota, Día a Día 2020: One Day at a Time, is available on PBS online channels (pbs.org, PBS Video App). Recent recognition includes The TPT PBS 2020 Project, The Next Step Grant, The Apichatpong Weerasethakul PlayLab Workshop, and The McKnight Artist Fellowship.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

For this fellowship, I will tend to my creative spirit and relationships to family, friends, and collaborators. It will be a time to be radically honest about what kind of films my soul yearns to create and with who I co-create this path forward. I will rest, focus, and reflect in preparation to develop my first narrative feature film. This film will bring to light the stories of my community and ancestors who shine through me.

For part of my fellowship, I will collaborate with my aunties and my mother to record and make films of the stories of our lives. Their magical journeys tell of spicy romance, unbroken courage rooted in love, and unfathomable lived tragedies. Their narratives will inspire generations far into the future. I dedicate this fellowship to them, in all their undeniable beauty, in their profound wisdom, and unparalleled presence.

Photo by Adja Gildersleve.

Raven Johnson is an award winning, Liberian-American filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work deals with the realities of Black experiences in predominantly white spaces around the American Midwest. Raven graduated with her MFA from NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film program and is the current filmmaker-in-residence at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Raven is a 2022 Locarno Film Festival resident in Switzerland, a recipient of Jerome Foundation’s 2021 MN Artist Development Grant, a 2021 Jerome Emerging Artist-in-Residence at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and a 2019-2020 Cinéfondation resident in Paris. Johnson is currently in development with her debut feature film, RUBY: PORTRAIT OF A BLACK TEEN IN AN AMERICAN SUBURB which has received support from SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a filmmaker, I am deeply committed to telling stories of the African diaspora that focus on Black Joy and Black Liberation as its central source of healing. My goal is to create films that are thought-provoking, emotionally resonant, and which tackle complex issues about the intersectionality of race, gender, and class with profound nuance and astute sensitivity. My hope is that my work will provoke deep and meaningful discourse for a worldwide audience.

Photo by Raven Jackson.

Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture Woman Filmmaker Fellowship and Sisters in Cinema Documentary Fellowship. Kayiza is the recipient of the 2022 Documentary Development Initiative grant in partnership with HBO Documentary Films and The Gotham. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Crystal was the winner of the 2020 Tribeca Through Her Lens grant with her film Rest Stop, which premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and was selected for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. She is currently working on her first feature film, which received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a filmmaker, my work has been defined by exploring the in-between. The space between scripted and non-fiction cinema, the western world and the African Diaspora, all of the lines separating communities in my hometown in Oklahoma, the interior of my home as a child of immigrants and my access to space as a US citizen. The emphasis on location, memory and time in my work is largely rooted in a desire to define this gap and to make this nuance more legible. I am interested in how all of these things intersect with the most mundane elements of our lives. The everydayness that we often overlook, particularly within the inner lives of Black folks, is what I find most compelling. During the fellowship period, I plan to continue to work on my first scripted and non-fiction feature projects as well as pursue joy and rest in the most unremarkable and quiet parts of my daily life.

Simone LeClaire is a queer woman director and editor whose work spans genres from parabolic feminist fairy tales to grunge comedies. Her seven narrative shorts have screened at over 30 festivals around the midwest and world, including the Indianapolis LGBT Festival, the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Fest, and Festival de films féministes de Montréal. Their latest film Bathroom Break received awards for writing, acting, and comedy on its festival circuit before being distributed by Tello Films in February 2022. LeClaire has edited three narrative features, including the hit queer romcom Merry & Gay, and edited the 2018 Our Space is Spoken For documentary. Locally, she has been interviewed on Film in Minnesota and Where To From Here, and invited to teach her approach to life-affirming filmmaking at Moonplay Cinema, Film North, and various educational institutions. LeClaire’s creative lineage also includes countless childhood movies made with her sister in northern Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My most effective films to date have all used a minimalist, observational cinematography, ultimately inspired by the Danish filmmaking approach of the Dogme 95 manifesto. But, there’s an ongoing tension in my practice between an attraction to the intimacy and organic spontaneity that minimal crews can achieve, and my love for highly composed imagery and elaborate production design. I aspire to now explore more expansive visuals by working with more complex camera and lighting setups and experienced production crews. The fellowship presents the space to take all that I’ve learned and taught myself in my eight years of short-form, indie film directing, and support my transition to more elaborate production processes, longer-form storytelling, and new-to-me genres. Current works-in-progress include two narrative shorts and a documentary feature in post-production, and my debut narrative feature, Pat & Glo Save the World (Sort Of), a queer, sci-fi rom-com set 100 years in the future.

Photo by Trista Marie McGovern.

Rafael Samanez is a Peruvian filmmaker who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in New York City. Samanez was the Founder and Executive Director of a Bronx-based grassroots organization, VAMOS Unidos, advocating for immigrant and worker’s rights. His work as a community organizer inspires his films, which center intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, race, migration, and class. He received a 2018 Princess Grace Award/Honoraria in film, was a John Grist Documentary/BAFTA New York Scholar, and graduated with an MFA from the City College of New York in 2019. His short film, Out of the Shadows, won Best Documentary Film Award at the 2019 Cityvisions and appeared in multiple film festivals including New York Latino Film Festival, Urbanworld and San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. Rafael is currently working on two feature length documentaries, is a film consultant, and teaches media production courses at the City College of New York.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I aspire to produce impactful films that reframe narratives traditionally defined by status quos. My art builds strong connections with universal experiences where viewers can traverse through nuanced journeys elevating conversation and thought. I want my films to appeal to and validate directly-impacted audiences while challenging conventional norms. During this fellowship I plan to finish two feature length documentaries. The first, My Existence is Resistance, covers the life and work of three influential trans women of color breaking down barriers in New York City during the height of the global pandemic. The second, Defend the Sacred, focuses upon Indigenous resistance within the militarized environment of the Mexico/U.S. border.

Merit Thursday (he/him) is a white, queer, and transsexual experimental animator, educator, and curator. He teaches in the animation department at MCAD, and has experience in youth arts programming in the Twin Cities. As a curator, he has hosted and programmed local screening series such as Cinema Lounge, queer series Video Variant, and the currently running Weird Stuff Only. As an independent filmmaker, Thursday is partial to screening his works on the local and DIY level, but has also screened works globally.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As an independent animator, I have been noticing the ways that I feel pulled both towards the pre-cinema animation practices, as well as the new media and algorithmic techniques developing today. I feel excited to use this time as a fellow to extend my practice in both directions. Firstly, I have been exploring and excited by the ways that my analog or traditional practices can be manipulated in surprising ways using algorithmic functions of video editing software. I am reaching a point where the pre-built algorithmic processors are getting better at their intended functions, which doesn't feel exciting to me. I will be using this time to learn how to build my own processors, so that I can better rely on the chance, circumstance, and surprise of a somewhat broken machine. Additionally, I am always fascinated by pre-cinema techniques, such as crankies, puppetry, shadow theater, and optical toys. I will also be spending this time researching these practices and integrating them into my digital realm. I am so humbled and excited by the opportunity and spaciousness to expand my technical reach and be able to answer questions in new ways.

Alex Bijan Zandi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work explores the social difficulties and enchantments of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Zandi studied creative writing at the Washington University in St. Louis where he received the Howard Nemerov Prize for Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Film/Video at Bard College. Zandi was a 2022 Reykjavík Film Festival Talent Lab fellow and in 2021 participated in the MACRO x The Black List Feature Screenwriter Incubator. His films have been screened internationally at venues such as the Amsterdam International Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award), Abrons Art Center, Knockdown Center, Petzel Gallery, and 15 Orient Gallery. Zandi is currently developing his first narrative feature film, Saffron Threads with Rathaus Films.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work seeks naturalism with fantasy, observation with emotive empathy, narrative logic with poetic enigma. I believe that aesthetic experience is more profound when thinking and feeling is activated both internally and at a critical distance. This mantra reflects my subjectivity as an Iranian-American: the double-consciousness of being a unique individual with desires and flaws, while simultaneously being an “other” projected by a post 9/11 society.

During my fellowship, I will work toward making Saffron Threads. Through the eyes of an Iranian-American teenager, the film chronicles societal crossfire after 9/11 and the rise of the alt-right in suburban Boston. I will also develop a new project that explores the intergenerational trauma stemming from the multiple Iranian Revolutions and the possibility of cultural redemption.

Photo by Taylor Brophy.

Victoria Blanco is a writer from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Her first book, Out of the Sierra, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2023. The research and writing for this book were supported by a Fulbright Award, with additional research, grant and residency opportunities supported by the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, BreadLoaf, East Side Freedom Library as part of Coffee House Press’ In-the-Stacks and the 2018 Roxane Gay Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction at the Jack Jones Literary Arts writers’ retreat. Blanco’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult and Bat City Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a Fellow in the 2017–2018 Loft Mentor Series.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am beginning work on my second book, which will use archival footage, oral history, family stories, and personal memory to narrate the story of the U.S.-Mexico border as it runs through the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The book will also focus on the sin fronteras/no borders movement that is rooted in these cities, with the aim of imagining the sister cities as borderless.

Solomon J Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They were a Tin House Graphic Narrative Resident in Fall 2021. Their work is often about memory and mourning in the aftermath of violence, intertwined colonial histories, and joyful resistance to fascism everywhere. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach as adjunct faculty in history, media, and gender studies. Their first monograph, the graphic nonfiction work Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am currently in the process of completing a graphic nonfiction book, Heavyweight, which interrogates my own family history in the context of European colonialism and the Holocaust, and multidirectional memory from a third generation perspective. My work is deeply invested in accessible communication of ideas through visual storytelling, and the work that pictures and words do together. As a trained historian, my comics are research driven, and I encounter analog painting as a way of sitting with the stories I’m working to tell. During the Jerome Foundation Fellowship, I hope to expand my practice in new directions, while developing a graphic novel project based on archival research, which will tell the story of a multigenerational haunting and organized crime in the world of Jewish Baltimore.

Gen Del Raye (he/him) is half Japanese and was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. His debut story collection, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. His writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Best Small Fictions 2017, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, MN, where he loves the winters and misses the ocean.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My upbringing in Japan and subsequent move to the US when I was eighteen reflects a complicated mix of privilege and othering, and I strive to explore this truthfully and honestly through my work. My forthcoming book, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, is a portrait of a mixed-race family that holds together despite the societal, historical, and linguistic pressures that threaten to pull it apart. Outside of my writing, I work as a translator and interpreter, and I try to use the skills gained through this work to inform my creation of multilingual fiction. Right now, I am particularly interested in finding new ways to carry the puns and wittiness of non-English dialogue into English-language stories in a way that privileges bilingual readers.

Photo by Xue Feng.

Halee Kirkwood is a poet, teaching artist, and bookseller living in Minneapolis. Kirkwood earned their MFA from Hamline University. They are an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) fellow, a Loft Mentor Series Fellow, a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a recent artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Artists, published with Poetry Northwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Kirkwood is the faculty editor of Runestone Journal, a national undergraduate literary annual. Originally from Superior, Wisconsin, they are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My primary concern as a writer is to radically redefine nature and place-based poetry. Rather than poetry that presents a static, passive portrait of nature and place, I am invested in writing that embodies living ecologies and histories, poetry that necessitates deep attention, specificity, humility, justice, and action. I am currently focused on two landscapes in my work that I plan to continue work on during my fellowship period. First, I plan to continue my poetry manuscript-in-progress on collisions of class within manufactured ecologies, braiding my experience as a life-long retail worker from a low-income background with a sense of scientific observation. Second, I plan on advancing my writing on the Lake Superior region by beginning a lyric essay manuscript, tracing the Ojibwe migration path along the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river areas. Through this nascent project, I want to explore what it means to be a mixed white & Ojibwe traveler through prose, inviting in periods of research, interview, and lyric immersion.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use the fellowship term to explore possibilities for layering sound, integrating graphics and text into literary readings, and imagining new possibilities for venues where literary readings take place. I am interested in how technology and other approaches can expand access to live performance. My interests are inspired by a desire to connect with audiences in a more meaningful way and by my recent work focused on thinking about the potential uses for paper and the physical page.

Photo by Ayanna Muata.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested and compelled by communal memory, tall tales, and Black expressions of gender and divergence. Inspired by the Black American diaspora to which I belong, I am working on a book about the intersection of family, American surveillance, and Black radical faith. Following the life and lineage of protagonist Alphonso–descendant of a slave and slave owner in a small cotton town of Edgefield North Carolina–as he evolves and shape-shifts from petty criminal and womanizer to sober foot soldier and eventual minister of Islamic Temple No. 1 in New York City. BORN AGAIN is biomythography exploring the consequences of melanin, locomotion, and generational curses.

Photo by Justin J. Wee.

Debra J. Stone is a writer of essays, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been published in Jarnal Literary Journal, Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She has received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, “Grandma Essie’s Vanilla Poundcake,” Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her short fiction, “year-of- staying–in place,” was Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. Debra is chair of the board directors at Graywolf Press in Minneapolis and board member of the Northwoods Writing Conference in Bemidji, Minnesota. She resides in Minneapolis. https://www.debrajeannestone.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will research the migration of my family and travel to the Black towns of Missouri, Oklahoma and the town my ancestors founded when they were Exodusters and ranchers during the Nebraska territory. Currently, I am working on The House on Rondo, a novel-in-progress. As this is a new project, I am developing new skills through workshops, mentors and other tools to complete a finished draft. I am interested in my work joining in the dialogue regarding reparations for the descendants of the destroyed Rondo neighborhood and the ancestors whose generational wealth was stolen from them.

Photo by Anna Min of Min Enterprises.

Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work charts cross-cultural connections and dislocations, while tracing the enmeshed nature of seeing and of being seen. I’m invested in the concept of opacity: the right to be unknowable—and unmarketable—and the implications of being a site of continually shifting contradictions and unstatic experience.

Recently, my poems have been driven by slippages and scramblings in tenses—when the past ruptures into the present, or when the future leaks into the past—and by forms of historical, collective, and personal memory and postmemory that warp, stain, disfigure, and erode.

I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity.

Jobi Adams and Brandi Foster are long-time best friends who together make up the folk duo Pine & Fire. They met in 2011 while attending an arts high school in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. There Brandi studied music while Jobi studied writing. That’s still reflected in their roles today as Pine & Fire with Jobi being the main songwriter and Brandi being the multi-instrumentalist. Together, they make original music influenced by American Roots music of the past and the struggles of today. In 2021 they gained visibility when they became finalists in the GemsOnVHS: Gems in the Rough Songwriting Contest which saw over 700 entries. Later in 2021 they were featured on Ditty TV’s 12 Artists You Should Know. Over the past three years they’ve released three self-produced projects, We’re All Thinking It… (2020), The Son (2021), and People Come & Go (2022). In 2022, Pine & Fire took their music to 13 different states.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We describe our music as contemporary American folk music with a punk sentiment. We do what folk music has always done: challenge the status quo and document the times we’re living in. Folk music functions like an archive, a documentation of what common people were experiencing throughout history. We contribute to that archival lineage by bringing traditional folk influences through time into our own music about today. While we often sing songs of struggle and grief, we also sing of joy, growth, and imagining a world beyond struggle.

In 2022, we went on a month-long self-booked tour and released our third self-recorded project. While we take pride in our D.I.Y. ethics, we’re looking forward to the opportunity to work with others in 2023. We’re hoping that this year we can record and release our first full length studio album, a collection of original songs exploring working class life in the Northland.

Ka Baird is a performer, composer and sound designer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and a psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. They have worked/collaborated with many other musicians, artists, filmmakers and choreographers, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation and interdisciplinary work.

Recent engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), and Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL). They were a 2020 recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art's Emergency Grant as well as a Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Roulette Intermedium in 2018.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

With the generous support of this fellowship I plan on continuing to explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. By combining experimental sound design with sound-reactive gestures, movement and acts of physical endurance, I will continue to challenge notions of how sound is presented and shared. I plan to further my explorations in acoustic processing, extended microphone techniques, granular synthesis, modular synthesis, sampling and embodied practice. I want to expand my compositional process and create larger scale, interdisciplinary works that involve multiple collaborators.

Photo by Alex Phillipe Cohen.

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer Amanda Ekery creates music filled with imagery and strong narratives. Her work has earned support from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and the Jerome Foundation, and has been featured at the Portland Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, and The Kennedy Center. Amanda’s 2018 album Keys With No Purpose, was written as a reaction to the sexist culture women continue to face in jazz and informed by her research on females in jazz education which is soon to be published in the 2023 Routledge Companion to Women in Music Leadership. Her most recent album, Some (more) Short Songs, released in 2021 was praised in Downbeat Magazine saying, “her compositions are great” and “full of moments of amazingness.”

She was awarded the 2022 Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalist Association for her dedication to gender equity work with El Paso Jazz Girls. Learn more at aekerymusic.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Árabe is my ongoing project about Syrian and Mexican shared culture and history on the El Paso border. It covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. I am exploring new sounds and artistic mediums in Árabe including original compositions inspired by research and personal history, essays delving into the stories behind each song, electronic compositions reimagined from 80-year-old family home recordings, and a community centered approach that invites others into her creative process and release of the project. My hope is to complete Árabe as a CD/book that is filled with photos and art, and my essays and music.

Photo by Ross Wightman.

Atim Opoka is a Ugandan-American songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist who fuses afro-pop and hip-hop while embracing the power of transformative story-telling. She is most recently a 2021 recipient of a Waters Grant as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Opoka has performed original works at the Stone Arch Bridge Festival and Powderhorn Park Festival. She has a BA in Vocal Performance from McNally Smith College of Music.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We live in a society that is fast paced, go and grab. Looking for the next trend or 7 sec distraction or viral video with no regard to the cost or impact, positive or negative. I believe art is a holistic experience that requires the full body mentally, physically and spiritually. It doesn't judge, but asks for your time and space, modeling and shaping all of our experiences to get us where we are right now. I am growing, and I will continue to grow, and not only feed my garden, but I will add and water those who let me, and one day I will bloom, when I oughta bloom.

Photo by Evelyn Speers.

The Narcotix is a West African art-folk band based in Brooklyn, with feathers all over. It is many-limbed and limber, a five-piece with voices, guitars, bass, keys and drum set. Reverb-laden vocals blur and swell in dissonant intervals, buoyed by a riverbed of shimmering Congolese guitar riffs, thumping P-bass, cavernous synths and traphouse hi-hats. The result of this band's cohesion is a compelling musical statement whose relationship to identity is as fraught, complex and ever-changing as anything else in this time.

The rave reception of the debut EP Mommy Issues, released in summer 2021, paved the way for The Narcotix to take their musical compositions to new heights. With this fuel, composers/instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas have reimagined the boundaries with which to push the musical landscapes usually bound by the automatic resignation of conformity. With the instrumental prowess of Adam Turay (rhythm guitar), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Matt Bent (drums), Foinchas and Quansah have amassed the Will, and now means, to harness the creative force and pour it into their upcoming debut album, Dying.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We’re currently working on completing our debut album, a 10-song homage to the practice of exercising unwavering vulnerability whilst creating. The recording process for the album began on September 24, 2022. So far we’ve recorded the foundations of each song and we plan to incorporate the full instrumentation and production elements over the next few months. Following the release of the album, we’d like to plan a series of concerts and a proper US tour. During the fellowship, we are especially keen to sharpen our technical skills through various lessons and workshops. This upskilling will serve as a vehicle through which we will be able to explore broadening our live performances. For example, we’d like to expand on live arrangements by adding elements of improvisation where appropriate. Studying composition will enable us to incorporate additional instrumentalists such as horns, strings, and percussion players.

Photo by Florencia Villa.

Named by The Guardian as a musician “who will enrich your life,” Shruthi Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer and vocalist with a unique dual background in Carnatic (South Indian classical) and Western classical music. Shruthi has won numerous honors, including the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her compositions are performed worldwide; in 2021, her work premiered at the United Nations COP26. She is a Carnatic vocal disciple of her mother, musician Nirmala Rajasekar, and has studied as a Western classical soprano with Jerry Elsbernd, Rochelle Ellis, and Patricia Rozario, OBE.

Shruthi has been in residence at the Anderson Center, Tusen Takk Foundation, and Britten Pears Arts. An alumnus of Princeton University and a former Marshall Scholar, Shruthi pursued graduate study in the United Kingdom in ethnomusicology and composition. She serves on the board of new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Through music, I explore identity, community, and joy. In my work, my two idioms of Carnatic and Western classical intersect and converse to show how different influences coexist in all of us. Each of us is a mosaic of our experiences. When recognized, our varied backgrounds allow us to understand each other, no matter how different our individual stories are. This is what drives me to create: to build spaces for reflection and exchange.

Community is central to every aspect of my composing, from the cultural and diasporic experiences that inspire me to the different groups of listeners and performers that I bring together in the music that I create. I love writing for the voice because singing is simultaneously personal and communal. To sing together requires us to breathe together, to sense one another, and to listen to our neighbors — making us more present, grounded, and giving.

Photo by Alia Rose Photography.

Kavita Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, educator, researcher, polyglot and lifelong New Yorker hailed by NPR for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” Her projects blending modern jazz, new music, and world traditions include Visions (2014), Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), Interplay (2018, nominated for France's Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year), and Cape Verdean Blues (forthcoming, 2023). She is currently working on a new album of original music for her jazz quintet. Kavita performs her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on six continents, and her work has been supported by New Music America, Chamber Music America, Jerome Foundation, Camargo Foundation, and Park Avenue Armory. She has worked with Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, Miguel Zenón, Lionel Loueke, Billy Childs, Miho Hazama, among others. Kavita holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a composer-vocalist who integrates performance practice, improvisation, and ethnomusicological field research to create original works that unearth and expose the virtuosity of the human voice. Made in deep engagement with the jazz tradition while also advancing its global sensibilities, my music is about and for people like me—communities in exile, refugees, stateless people, cultural nomads, and those who straddle hybrid identities. By creating works that are multifaceted, complex, cosmopolitan, and inclusionary of those at the margin, I strive to shed light on underrepresented cultures and musical traditions and to provoke my audience to question hierarchical notions of social identity. Current projects include All Roads Lead to Home, original music for jazz quintet inspired by a pilgrimage to my ancestral villages in coastal Gujarat, Little Drifters of a Split Earth, an immersive opera for youth voices about global child migration, and Who Will See My Garden Grow?, a collection of personal songs around the subject of motherhood. I am grateful to the Jerome Foundation for this recognition and continued support of my work.

Photo by Heather Sten.

Sound Sovereign/Brown is a composer, vocalist, and former healing practitioner, whose work is rooted in sacred refuge, embodied decolonization, and restorative liberatory practice.

Sound’s music includes chant-based chamber pieces, orchestrated song landscapes, and trio-based groove adagios, with vocal components ranging from pre-lingual/speechless callings, to mantra, lyrical language, and prayer.

As a vocalist and arranger, Sound is a member of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber (led by the renowned Greg Tate, who transitioned December 2021), and the vocal director for Treya Lam.

Interdisciplinary projects beloved to Sound include working with Mendi and Keith Obadike, Stefanie Batten Bland, Elliott Sharp, Anaïs Maviel, Tonya Pinkins, and Derek McPhatter.

As a composer, Sound’s first full length solo project, Data and the Disciple, vol. 1, has been commissioned by the American Composers Forum, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, intended to release and live premiere in 2024.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work is grounded in ritual, rest, and ancestral-artistic pathways, as means for accessing our lost medicines, unraveling and dissolving trauma, and remembering our inherent, indigenous, decolonized knowing. 

Engaging spaciousness, pulse, harmonic intimacy, embodied listening, evolving repetition, and a continuum of language states, creates a gateway for me:

Invoking pre-identity universal information, intergenerational and collective memory, and the deeply personal, individualized experience, which is communally witnessed (and/or shared), held and transformed. 

This receptive-intuitive-somatic compositional process has also served as a visceral guiding system for my own healing, as someone navigating chronic physiological trauma/stress conditions.

I land and root as I discover that which profoundly releases restricted, suppressed, and obstructed breath… That which recalibrates my own heartbeat… And that which allows me, in my black body, the reclaiming of my own voice, in a world that simultaneously seeks to both silence and exploit it.

Screen capture from video courtesy of Joe’s Pub.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Phingbodhipakkiya is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has explored microscopic universes, familial memories, and the power of collective action, revealing the often unseen depth, resilience and beauty of marginalized communities. Her work has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, highway tunnels, subway corridors, and on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2020-2021, she was artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and the Guardian and is held in permanent collections at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My artistic practice is about finding joy and belonging even in the face of grief and injustice, and rallying communities to imagine a shared future we can’t yet see. Through defiant storytelling, my work brings forth colors, patterns, textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices that need to be heard. Through listening and partnership, I seek to expand the narrative around the AAPI community and other communities of color and fighting to reveal the unseen labor of women.

As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will continue creating participatory works that invite audiences to commune, connect and lay down their burdens—spaces of healing and wonder that allow us to tell our stories and imagine new pathways forward.

Upcoming projects include a civic practice residency with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and a public art series focused on the prevention of domestic violence with the Asian Women’s Shelter.

Photo by Deb Fong.

Lela Pierce grew up in rural MniSota Makoce, the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She maintains artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Pierce has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). Her work has been presented internationally in both Sweden and India as well as in the Twin Cities at venues including Bockley Gallery, SOOVAC, Franconia Sculpture Park, Walker Art Center, and the Soap Factory. Pierce holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN—where she currently teaches sculpture—and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The persistent practice of imagining transformation is vital for seekers of freedom.

Oscillating between 2D, 3D, and 4D (sonic/performance/film), I currently create spaces, images and situations that expand “inbetweenness,” borders and places of transition. Through a mapping of internal and external experiences of sensation of the corporeal body, I attempt to map vehicles of life force and interconnected processes of transformation. My current body of work is deeply influenced by the concept of “Sankofa,” moving forward with knowledge of the past.

Through practice and attention, I speak a personal decolonized aesthetic language—centering ancestral connections, the 5 elements of nature and feminist sentiments.

Self portrait by Lela Pierce.

The multimedia works of Maggie Thompson (Ojibwe) expand various textile traditions’ inherited ways of being and becoming. Thompson skillfully and intuitively works with both natural and synthetic materials to address personal and universal experiences of loss, grief, and love.

Selected for the 2023 Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Thompson has recently had solo exhibitions that include Just Friends at Bockley Gallery (2022) and Dakobijige / She Ties Things Together at the Watermark Center in Bemidji, Minnesota (2021). She has been awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and her work is collected by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Minnesota Historical Society, among other public institutions.

Thompson holds a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and is based in Minneapolis, MN.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I want to begin researching my Mom's side of the family more in depth in order to create new photographic, textile-based work using weaving and industrial knitting techniques. As I have created so much work based on the loss of my Dad, I want to create new work based on the joy of my Mother. Having the ability to reflect on the relationship of mother and daughter will also be important on a personal level, as she is growing older.

I have begun this body of work through a single commissioned piece for the Hood Museum of Art. The work is a self portrait photograph that is cut down in to strips that are being woven through with blue 1/8" pieces of ribbon. The overall pattern created with the ribbon is based on my mom’s blue and white dishes with an Ojibwe floral flare.

I want to continue exploring this new technique of weaving photography and ribbon, along with refining my programming skills on the industrial Stoll knitting machine to continue to challenge preconceived ideas of what Native art should and can be.

Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator based in Minneapolis. Through diverse methodologies that include archival research, collage, digital drawing, film, and installation, Turner engages the history of fascism in Minnesota as a synecdoche for understanding and challenging the aesthetics of US History. Recent solo exhibitions include Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum, Uncanny Familiarities of Scenes and People at St. Cloud State University, and Order and Discipline at Ridgewater College. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Minnesota Humanities Center, Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Federation, the Minnesota State Inter-Faculty Organization, and the Jerome Foundation. Turner received a BA from Amherst College and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently Chair of Visual Art at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists and a lecturer at both St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I use digital processes to recontextualize text and images extracted from physical archives as a means of identifying American Fascism and exposing its aesthetic continuity from past to present. Recently, I have shifted to consider the aesthetics of anti-fascist resistance by examining a moment in 1938 when Minnesota union organizers traveled to Mexico to study with Leon Trotsky, then living with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. At Trotsky’s advice, the organizers created the militant Union Defense Guard, which was successfully deployed to intimidate a mob of fascists and their leader. I am fascinated by this confluence of revolutionaries. How would their conversation flow between politics, place, art, and labor? Can we trace an aesthetic language through these individuals? What can we learn of anti-fascist resistance (and fascism’s response) from this meeting? I am currently materializing my digital and archival processes as a series of woven tapestries and an experimental documentary.

Photo by Rik Sferra.

Charisse Pearlina Weston (born 1988, Houston, TX) is a conceptual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California-Irvine and is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program. She has recently participated in group and solo exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College of Art, Smack Mellon, and the Queens Museum. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Artadia, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and Bard Graduate Center. In 2021, she received the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artsy, Art Review, and Art in America. Currently, Weston is artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I understand the expansion of my current work to include an exploration of the importance of glass in carceral architecture, as well as the ways in which inmates use glass and mirrors to subvert the panoptic lens of these disciplinary spaces which rely heavily on glass, one-way film, windowless spaces, and regimented access to both natural and artificial light to exert power and dominance. I am interested in how juridical policies and procedures reinforce these protocols. Furthermore, I would like to explore the possibilities of pushing the scale of my work to explore these ideas to consider the complex problematics of contemporary installation and sculpture.

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, performance, public art, video, and installation, they create art works that redefine fixed notions of history and the body. They are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective identities. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at The Hirshhorn, the Hammer Museum, SculptureCenter, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Shed, and more. Williams’ exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, BOMB Magazine, and Hyperallergic. They were recently featured in Cultured Magazines’ “2023 Young Artist List.”

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work unearths obscured histories deeply embedded in the landscape. My forthcoming projects reimagine nationalist symbols and neoclassical architecture to investigate power, sovereignty, and the ideals at the core of the American project.

Photo by Tomás Stockton.

Shen Xin practices empowering alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. Their interests lie in understanding culture on its own terms. Seeing it as an active commitment to the learning, teaching and engaging with relating to places as land, their work opens up to inhabiting the multitudes of the selves through the lens of time. Engaged with moving image, video installation, public event and collective process, Shen Xin imagines and creates affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities.

Xin’s solo presentations include ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) (Swiss Institute, New York, 2022), Brine Lake (A New Body) (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021), Double Feature (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2019), Synthetic Types (Stedelijk Museum, 2019), To Satiate (MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), Warm Spell (ICA, London, 2018), and half-sung, half-spoken (Serpentine Galleries, London, 2017). Their group exhibitions include Language is a River (MUMA, Melbourne, 2021), Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning (Gwangju Biennale, 2021), Sigg Prize (M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2019), Afterimage (Lisson Gallery, London, 2019), and Songs for Sabotage (New Museum Triennial, New York, 2018). They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and held the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam (2018-19).

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I seek to create works that inherit and speak to values concerning culture and ecology. I’d like to develop a body of works that are connected to the role of being a student towards restorative relationship with the land. In these upcoming years, I’d like to learn how to better listen to the unknown and known spaces of one’s multitude, and to become familiar with ways of being accountable to language, image, sound and space. I’d like to affirm both through context of what is spoken and how it is spoken, that the human speech is but a part of what the earth speaks. Through learning and embodying the sensorial affinity within and between languages, I imagine encounters with ways back to the coherence of relations, between human language and ecology. Having worked with translations of many different languages, it is of interest to me to understand the inter-lingual world, where translations between one and others activate the resources of various languages with respect to one another. I’d like to hold languages as soil, and as soil, languages inscribe us into various depths in relation to their expressive vitality through time, to facilitate the relinquishment of language’s human exclusivity.

Yo-Yo Lin (林友友) is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary artist who explores the possibilities for self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. She often uses animation, live performance, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.” Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care.

Refusing the Western medicalization of the crip body, she works towards a “soft data” archive that holds space for illness in its wholeness. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives.

Lin was a 2019 artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and a 2020 Open Call recipient for the Shed. She teaches at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns fellow. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Over the years of building my interdisciplinary art practice, I have committed myself to making work that expands dominant notions of what filmmaking, technology, or space-making can be. Some of the questions I asked and continue to ask include: How do we tell cinematic stories spatially, physically and virtually? Can we reclaim data-gathering as daily practice for soft knowledge? What are the ways we can reframe the body as a technology? How do we build care and community-building into how we work with and develop technology? I am interested in how we continue to practice ways of working with technology that deepens and strengthens our relationship to our bodies, our communities, and the earth. This fellowship will allow me to expand and deepen my artistic practice in a research-oriented manner while simultaneously offering me the space to continue to create care-focused, tech-driven performances, tools, and spaces with and for disabled, chronically ill, POC communities.

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a Filipino American artist, writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work and research have revolved around an interdisciplinary reflection on how legacies of empire inform social and economic value systems. She received her MFA through both the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work has been included in new media festivals and galleries including Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Initial Public Offering, Reddit, online (2019); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Meitzler’s work has received support from HarvestWorks, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work relates Filipino etiological myths to a sense of personal, economic and historical rupture. As the climate crisis continues to grow, I use the mythic, origin stories of tropical storms as a way to connect to the unresolved moments of the past and powerfully propel beyond them. A lot of the writing and storytelling that I do, interweaves colonial history and this climatic turbulence alongside my own personal experiences, which is as someone who grew up between the tension of two cultures deeply defined by Americanism. Currently, I am working on an animation that follows three Filipino nurses, inspired by my mother and her community, as they engage with Philippine etiological myths of earthquakes as a response to the embodiment of colonial debt.

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!

A.P. Looze is a transgender multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practice supports them to turn toward the history of pain in their family and this nation in order to end lineages of violence and open up portals to love. Their original solo performances have included The Ways I Wished to Love Her at Pillsbury House + Theater, Foray Softly at The Guthrie, The Grief Experiments through 20% Theatre Company, A Dream of Brightness at the Red Eye Theater, God Made Me Crooked at Queertopia, and Finding Loaded Guns in Weird Places at Pleasure Rebel. Their tennis-inspired music video musical C’Mon Baby Stroke It premiered at Trylon Cinema in 2021. They were a 2016 20% Theatre Q-Stage Fellow, a 2018 Pillsbury House + Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Northern Lights Artist on the Verge Fellow, and part of the 2022 Red Eye Theater Isolated Acts Cohort.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use this fellowship to deepen my contemplative practice and continue to explore decoloniality, making interdisciplinary work inspired by spiritual/economic/political liberation. For the past ten years, I have explored questions of embodiment as a trans person. As my gender’s boundaries dissolve, I am more interested in surrendering to the vast pluriverse of non-human wisdom. This fellowship will support my work with the Akashic Records, a realm of consciousness that holds unconditional love for all souls. The Records have provided insights through music, poetic words, and imagery that I have integrated into recent performance and installation work. I will continue to open the Records, holding pressing questions related to whiteness, embodiment and decoloniality. I will follow the inspiration of what emerges to create new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with my creative process and spiritual explorations.

Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. Her artistic practice spans mediums and genres, engaging dance, music, physical and scripted theatre, design, burlesque, literature, construction, performance, theory, composition, devising, and the culinary arts. Her work has historically been concerned with identity, simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and expectations of “truth” in queer performance. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a leading QTGNC focused arts organism in the Twin Cities. Her original work as been presented by Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening), Red Eye Theater (NW4W), Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, Northern Spark, Right Here Showcase, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Wanderlust Productions, and 20% Theatre Company, where she worked in many capacities from 2015 to 2021, ultimately serving as Artistic Director in its final years. She is a 2019 mentee of The National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theatre/Art2Action), and a member of Actor’s Equity.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am arriving at this fellowship in my 31st year. Virgo Sun, Gemini Moon. Venus in Libra, Mars in Cancer. I know so much of Transition and am a new Student of Time. Southern child, eldest cousin. Self-named, Wed, I feed. Without apology, a new score. Autonomous entrances and exits. Available to possession and exorcism, avoidant of martyrdom and apotheosis. Curbed censor, encouraged teacher. Naming, creating, re-naming, re-creating. Of course there will be New Works Multi-Cross-Trans-Inter-Extra Disciplinary (eek). Of course the humor the wink the glint the cheek the nod the glance the smile the ode homage collage décolletage. An Icon in the making, hunny. Always gild the lily, why else be Gay? I'm over joy resistance rage. Down with meaning and conjuring and proselytizing didactics. Here’s to the dilettante the liar the raccoon the conduit the Transsexual aesthete. The charlatan dances and still we clap laugh cry eat come. It’s all in the making every second even now.

Photo by Steve Campbell (Locomotofx).

Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist, researcher and robotics maker. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by the New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine. He was a resident at The Kitchen in 2021. He is a recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts/ Wavefarm Media Arts Assistance Fund, Jerome Foundation/Harvestworks New Works Commission, and Knockdown Center (NYC) residency for time-based art.

He has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Levitation Festival, Museum of Contemporary art of Lima and Central Park Summerstage Fania Records 50th anniversary. His album Roza Cruz with his Latin American experimental project La Mecánica Popular was named one of the best Latin American albums of the decade by Zona Sucia and Estereofonía. Featured at CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Daily News, and NPR. He holds a PhD from NYU and published the book Fusión: A Soundtrack for Peru.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested in synesthesia, the cross-pollination of the senses, and polyrhythm. I want to generate pieces across time/space contexts that use polyrhythm and synesthesia as tools to generate a state of contemplation. For this I will develop a series of pieces that combine robotics, video, music, performance art and sculpture.

Photo by Juan Pablo Aragón.