Blossom Johnson is a Diné playwright, dramaturg, and screenwriter. She is Yé'ii Dine'é Táchii'nii, and her maternal grandfather is Deeshchíí'nii. She was awarded a residency with Willowtail Springs in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Additionally, she has been awarded AlterTheater Ensemble's AlterLab 2020-21, the 2022 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship, 2022 Netflix Animation Foundations Program Mentee, La Lengua/ AlterTheater Ensemble's Decolonization Stories Commission 2022, The Playwrights' Center 2022-2023 Jerome Fellowship, and the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals for the 2023 and 2024 fiscal year. Her play, Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being), Or A Boarding School Play, made the Kilroys 2023 Web list, and had a World Premiere with Bag&Baggage Productions and Native Theater Project. Johnson holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and a BA in Theatre from Arizona State University.

Fellowship Statement

I am honored to be a 2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and I am excited to continue to serve my community as a storyteller. During my Fellowship I will conduct research, learn, and continue to write a new play and musical that centers Diné experiences. I want to strengthen my community by leaning into my culture, history and language. By doing this I can disrupt the dominant American Theatrical narrative that often does not highlight, engage and empower Native people and their stories. This little rez girl is full of joy, hope and possibilities. Axhéhéé (Thank you)!! 

Photo by Joshua Cummins.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

Photo by Roshan Ganu.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

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

Fellowship Statement

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

Photo by Canaan Mattson.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

Photo by Roshan Murthy.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

Photo by Sabrina Jasmin.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

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

Photo by Sarah Sampedro.

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

Fellowship Statement

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

Photo by Sharolyn B. Hagen.

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

Fellowship Statement

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