Or Zubalsky is an artist exploring overlaps between trauma, memory, transformation, and healing. They were previously a resident at Pioneer Works (2023), NEW INC incubator member (2023), and C/Change R&D Lab fellow (2023). Zubalsky’s work has been supported by The New Museum, The Museum of Art and Design, Queens Museum of Art, Rhizome, Eyebeam, Culture Push, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Art Matters, among others. They been developing a trauma-informed approach to making and relating to art through practicing, teaching, peer learning, and organizing. They have made video, performance, and software-based work that unpacks how memory operates, specifically in relation to settler colonialism. Since becoming a parent, Zubalsky has been exploring the inner workings of memory in relation to post-trauma and gender. They live in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn) with their partner and child.

Fellowship Statement

The main subject in my work is the gap in fragmented post-traumatic memory. It is a space of absence and disconnection as well as an opening through which resonance can be felt. In the past years, I made work that recognized the existence of the gap and explored some of its characteristics. Now, I am ready to make work from within it. My experience of post-trauma is such that the mysterious operations of memory can be both terrifying and precious. To aspire to make work from within the gap is to seek an opportunity to channel lightness and ease in response to oppression and harm. Having the support to sustain my practice for three years will help me grow into this work. This support will allow me to move at the rhythms that my body will allow, develop a new visual vocabulary, and document the beauty in the interwoven processes of healing and transition. 

Photo by Levi Mandel.

Bren Wyona is a filmmaker born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Southern California. Through hybrid narrative and documentary media, their work explores shifting class landscapes, identity loss, and communal recovery. Wyona’s latest short film, that with which ringing is done, held above, in place—supported by Untitled Filmmaker Organization (UFO) and Zeiss—is a dynamic road trip documentary that investigates her own Diné ancestors and the Indian Child Welfare Act through the stronghold lens of Cowboy and Indian cinema. Wyona is a 2021 Flaherty Fellow, a 2021 Oolite Arts Grant Recipient, and a 2023-2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through a fellowship with the UFO Short Film Lab. They are currently in development for their first feature film, a narrative set in New Mexico and Ireland.

Fellowship Statement

I’d like to continue making films that center the unlearning of fast-gratifying plot trauma. My current projects include a short documentary featuring Indigenous drag queens, Meteorite Shepherds, a narrative about two shepherds from New Mexico and Ireland, and Camping a hybrid road trip film following a group of queer Indigenous legends living in Los Angeles. This Fellowship will be crucial in allowing me resources and time to evolve into long-form practices. As I begin to develop my first feature films, I want to ensure that these practices are in collaboration with Diné elders including group therapies, cast and crew education, and mechanical processes like film development with foraged plant materials. The industry is in dire need of intentional film sets that fight for land protection, collaborative labor, and honorable images.

Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. Ude has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022, she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book, Watch Me, in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.

Fellowship Statement

During the Fellowship I will further my investigations into Black mourning and memory through two practices. The first is an improvisation practice I call: “forgotten body.” Forgotten body asks: Can I talk back to the dead? Can I befriend grief? Can my relationships to what I have lost grow stronger in the wake of loss? Forgotten body asks you to move sensitively not sensibly, encouraging your subconscious to lead. It is built on an anticolonial approach that strengthens our connections to Black ancestry and embodied history. The second is a performance/archival project: Major. In Major, a team of Black Southern femmes embody the movement of our girlhood to answer the questions of our present. Major follows the intimate journey of returning to a body you think is lost. How can you reorganize your body to dance in the ways you were born to, but have been trained out of? 

Photo by Rachel Keane.

ms. z tye is a Brooklyn-based artist who is interested in physical investigations, including but not limited to movement, voice, sculpture, and theater. tye explores concepts through ancestral praise. She is intrigued with somatic relations and how they associate with emotional connectivity. She has been included in exhibitions with Bronx Museum of Arts, Volta/Armory Art Fair, Swivel Gallery, Untitled Art Fair, Cierra Britton Gallery, The Living Gallery, Long Gallery Harlem, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Art in Buildings, and Participant INC. Choreographic work has been commissioned by The Kitchen, BMW, The Shed, Danspace, Lotto Royale, MQBMBQ, BOFFO, Jack, Gibney, Movement Research, and Dance Canvas ATL.

Fellowship Statement

My work recognizes that with any act of public sharing lies precarity. In this space of vulnerability and perilousness, I hope to bring forth softness in the gaze of spectators through nostalgic imagery designed to spark dialogue and raise consciousness. Rooted in memory, my work reclaims rituals from the Pentecostal church as ceremonial acts. My reclamation rituals invite audiences to question phrases such as,  “Come as you are” and, “The land of the free.” These prompts are not uplifiting for queer and trans folx like myself, which is revealed through the audience responses. My practice embraces attributes of faith, spirit, and the performance of patriotism to ritualize clarity and redemption for me and my community.

* intentional use of lowercase

Photo by Cheril Sanchez.