Ayana Evans is a New York City-based visual performance artist. All of her video, lithography, screen-printing, watercolor mono-prints, installations, and projection extends from her performance work. She received her MFA in painting from Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. Evans has performed at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Newark Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the Queens Museum and countless public locations for her guerilla-style performances. Her international work includes shows at FIAP performance festival in Martinique, Tiwani Contemporary in London, and Ghana’a Chale Wote festival. Evans was a 2018 Fellow at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art, 2018 NYFA Fellow, and 2019 Savage Lewis Fellow with Art on the Vine. Her recent press includes The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Hyperallergic, and CNN. Evans is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University.

Fellowship Statement

I am a NYC-based performance artist, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The sensibilities of both locations heavily influence my work with the body, race relations, and gender bias. My on-going performances/public interventions include: Operation Catsuit, I Just Came Here to Find a Husband, and a new series of collaborative works with artists of diverse backgrounds. These performances map how my body is perceived and treated as it operates in artistic and social spheres. Roberta Fallon, co-founder of Artblog, describes me as, “One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur.” And writer Seph Rodney of Hyperallergic and The New York Times wrote: “I have seen [this] artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor-length lace gown, a dollar-store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips — risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement.” During this residency I will continue the Operation Catsuit series via experimental film and costuming.

Photo by Makonnen

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist, designer, and curator interested in how migration affects ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has had her work supported through Create Change fellow at the Laundromat Project (2018-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), and Center for Books Arts (2020-2021).

Fellowship Statement

For the past two years, I’ve been conceptualizing a piece titled Citizen Clock that looks at the path to citizenship, as well as, work around the legal process of migration. The Jerome Foundation fellowship will provide the support to develop this work and to collaborate with fabricators to bring this idea to life. It will also provide a space to expand my participatory practice into more conceptual objects that archive these processes. I’m excited to be part of this community and learn from all the different fellows.

Photo by Manolo Salas

Joseph Buckley (he/him) is a Black British Sculptor living and working in New York City. Recent solo shows include Letter from the Home Office at Lock Up International in London; Cousin Table at Cuchifritos, NYC; Traitor Muscle at Art in General, NYC; and Brotherhood Tapestry at The Tetley in Leeds, England. Recent group projects include I don't Know Whether The Earth is Spinning or Not... at the Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (for the VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art); and Cellular World: Cyborg-Human-Avatar-Horror, at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2018).

Fellowship Statement

I have found myself preoccupied with the mechanics of objectification and dehumanization, and with a continuum I perceive that goes ‘corpse—slave—human—statue—sculpture’ and back again.

I am interested in the way that systems of abuse replicate themselves, at different scales, across our society. On the topic of replication, I am heavily invested in mold-making and plastic casting: I am interested in the connotations of industrial production, and the violence such industry implies.

Of late, I have been trying to work towards the topics of fascism and its contemporary manifestations. Some of my sculptures are of fascists and are ‘about’ fascism but, gendered as they are, they have also served as a way to focus my thinking surrounding the eternal font from which fascism metastasizes: a swollen, toxified, and entitled masculinity... a boil on my soul’s ass I must continuously lance and drain.

Photo by Jenny Hung

Leslie Barlow (she/her) is an artist and educator working in Minneapolis, MN. Barlow uses figurative oil painting to share stories that explore the politics of representation, identity, otherness, and race. Barlow earned an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2016) and BFA from the University of Wisconsin- Stout (2007). Recent support of Barlow’s work includes: 2019 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, and several Minnesota State Arts Board grants. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota, helps run the organization MidWest Mixed, is a member of the mural collective Creatives After Curfew, and she also supports emerging artists as the Director of Studio 400.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in examining and reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. My life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Working within the tradition of figurative painting provides a platform and space to challenge the norms and hierarchy of who is painted, what stories are amplified, and by whom. The work is created from places of vulnerability, nuance, community conversation, and personal experience. What results from my work is not the desire to simply have dialogue, but to manifest the power of images. My current body of work-in-progress is 3 years in the making. Titled Within, Between, and Beyond, it combines painting and video documentary and will be exhibited in 2021 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Photo by Ryan Stopera

Lily Jue Sheng is a moving image artist working across film, animation, collage, text, performance, and 2D mixed media. They were born in Shanghai, China, raised in New Jersey, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Massachusetts. Their work has recently been presented by Mono No Aware and The Poetry Project in New York City. Their work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally including at Roulette Intermedium, ArtBook @ MoMA PS1, the Knockdown Center, and Outpost Artist Resources in New York City; Light Field Festival in San Francisco, Images Festival, Winnipeg Underground Festival, and CineCycle in Canada; and TCAC (Taipei Contemporary Art Center) in Taiwan.

Fellowship Statement

I make films. I also make images, poetry, and other things, within the process of filmmaking, and occasionally perform them. My current work uses my own speech and writing to sort through the noise of language attrition, code-switching, and place attachment. This approach produces sort of patchy, quotidian, and sometimes unwatchable films. It's also the way I know how to tell stories. It’s this storytelling that becomes my breaking process, breaking up hegemonic cinema/narrative traditions, especially continuity, classification, and translation.

I have been researching semi-colonial Shanghai, in an effort to learn more about labor, trade, and changing regimes. I’m hoping to parse the archives by making new readings. I’m also looking to gather stories in Shanghainese, to overlap the pedestrian, political, private, and public spheres of Shanghainese. This will open a line of inquiries. Who or what determines when or which oral tradition continues? How do passages, people, and cinematic media move in tandem?

I also recently completed a collaborative film titled Ikebana that might screen sometime in 2021.

Photo by Mono No Aware

Anna Samo was born in 1980 in Russia. On her first job in Moscow while scanning and coloring hand drawn animation, she witnessed how thousands of separated drawings put together, suddenly turn into a living character. She experienced the tickling feeling of surprise and wonder. This feeling has not left her ever since.

Samo studied animation in Russia and Germany. She was encouraged to create very personal work and to strive for her own authentic voice. As an independent filmmaker she uses a variety of analog animation techniques to create emotional and poetic work. Her films have been screened and won awards at highly acclaimed film festivals around the globe such as Anima Mundi, Krakow Film Festival, Full Frame, DOC NYC, Berlin Film Festival - Berlinale, Annecy Film Festival and Sundance among many others. Samo relocated to the USA in 2013. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Fellowship Statement

I look around and filter what I find through what's inside me. And while doing so I discover something I did not know before. I am inspired by clowns, poets and fools.

Animation is a super power! You can create anything you want – it just takes time. The time spent outside the studio is being condensed, changed through the time spent in the studio. Hours, days, months become pressed into the seconds of film-time. And like the hero of an old tale, who has to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes, I have to paint over thousands of pages and draw down hundreds of pencils before I can arrive at my destination. I don't know where I am heading, but I like walking.

Photo by Tom Bergmann

Stefani Saintonge is a Haitian-American filmmaker, educator and editor who won the juried and audience award at BlackStar Film Festival for her short film, Fucked Like A Star. Her work has screened at several festivals and institutions internationally including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hammer Museum and the Smithsonian National African American Museum. As a member of New Negress Film Society, she co-created their annual Black Women’s Film Conference. She has received support from SFFILM, Jerome Foundation and Bronx Arts Council and served as an artist in residence with Haiti Cultural Exchange. Her work as an editor has screened at Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Guggenheim Museum and PBS.

Fellowship Statement

The process of liberation fascinates me. Whether it's physical labor, spiritual awakenings or self-interrogation, my work investigates the minutia (and oftentimes the mundanity) of building a new world. It could be a spiritual plane where meditation yields new imaginings or an actual massive, rapid undoing. I am drawn to the repetitive physical acts that force growth. I will use this time to develop a feature film about the week leading up to the slave rebellion that would spark the Haitian Revolution.

Photo by Babas Denis

LaJuné McMillian is a new media artist, and creative technologist making art that integrates performance, virtual reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code’s Weird Reality. McMillian was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and figure skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Abrons Arts Center, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist, I leverage embodied and digital technologies to research and develop various artistic works across platforms (digital, and in person). During this Fellowship I plan to continue my work on The Black Movement Library. A library for Black people to learn about digital technologies in relation to Blackness, our movements, our histories, and our liberation.

Photo by Sarah O’Connell

Benjamin May’s directorial debut, The Legend of Swee’ Pea, premiered at DOC: NYC and played at over 40 festivals worldwide, winning five Best Documentary Feature awards and two Best Director awards. His second feature, Wet House, an immersive film about the largest harm reduction facility for chronic alcoholics in the US, is distributed by 1091Pictures and Saboteur Media. Ben's work has been funded by grants from the McKnight Foundation, St. Paul Cultural Star, and the Jerome Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

As a documentary filmmaker, I am most interested in subjects and environments we might consider strange or remote—not because they are inherently more interesting or offer more conflict—but because I believe we are all a lot more similar than we are different. Everyone is susceptible to abandonment, failure, and loss. And because film is a deeply intimate endeavor it is the ideal medium to probe our proximity, question our biases, and examine the constructions we take for granted.

Humans are robust, but life is fragile. Working as a neuroradiologist for the past ten years, I have learned that, despite our powerful tools to observe the nature of life, truth is elusive, and certainty is non-existent. As a physician and a filmmaker, I find this idea both terrifying and inspiring and it is the crux of my work.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist. Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and in Film Festivals such as True/False, New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa, and Blackstar Film Festival. She was named to Filmmaker Magazine's 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List” and is the recipient of a 2020 San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, as well as a finalist in the 2020 Venice Film Festival’s prestigious film lab the Biennale Cinema College. She received a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO Fellowship, a 2015 TFI Future Filmmaker Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in modes of filmmaking and remembering that are liberatory for black women. My work deconstructs the default conventions of representation that we have been taught, weaving together non-fiction, theatrical performance, narrative intervention, and fantasy. The result is a style of storytelling where the past is always present, and time is not linear but in fact a constant weave.

Photo by Dominick Lewis