Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work hybridizes theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play by employing consumer technology—such as VR, GoPro and GPS—and featuring diverse, multi-generational performers. Emily Harvey Foundation (NYC) has presented Liu’s projects in numerous solo showings (2014-2017). In 2017, she staged HANG OUT, a site-specific, episodic play in Manhattan Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park. MAKE A FOUNTAIN, an extensive catalog documenting those performances, was released in 2018. Liu was a resident artist at LMCC 2018-19 and ISSUE Project Room 2019, and a fellow at Institute for Public Architecture 2020. Her recent projects included PLAYDATE, a neighborhood-wide play in and about Downtown Brooklyn, and PIGTAIL–A Swivel Stool Dance™—both commissioned by ISSUE Project Room.

Fellowship Statement

Highlighting the shifting, participatory nature of viewership, mediated in real time by everyday use of technology, my practice reveals how experimentation is most fruitful when it escapes predetermination. My projects have included collaborations with bankers, construction and municipal workers, sociologists, psychotherapists, dog walkers, and scientists—sometimes all in the same performance. Poking at the traditional boundaries of media-based art, and often smashing the 4th wall between performer and spectator, I stir together contradictory forces of memory, spatiality, and the inherent friction and great possibilities of sociality. My second book, Heavily Prescribed Good Times, on PLAYDATE and PIGTAIL, will be released in 2021.

Photo by Steve Bookman

Amoke Kubat remains curious about self, the natural world, and the Sacred. She reclaims African Indigenous Spiritual sensibilities to reconnect to the first worlds, Spirit and Nature, as practice for holistic wellness. Self-taught, Amoke uses artmaking and writing to continue to heal herself and hold a position of wellness in an America sick with social injustices.

Amoke is an accidental playwright. Her play ANGRY BLACK WOMAN & Well Intentioned White Girl began as a conversation with a friend. Amoke expressed her annoyance with being called “angry black woman.” Her friend responded, “Like the well intentioned white girl'”? This play continues to tour as public readings in Minneapolis and rural Minnesota cities, and is available on Vimeo. As a Naked Stage Fellow, her second play, Old Good Pussy and Good Old Pussy, was performed at the Pillsbury House Theater in 2020. This play explores aging, ageist stereotypes, sexuality, and the social interpersonal tensions between intergenerations.

Fellowship Statement

My artistry is a tapestry of growing relationships, that has been woven from a motherless life, non-traditional black experience, discovery of the self through pain and tribulations as I strive to live my fullest life. I draw upon the strengths of diasporic African peoples and my Ancestors.

In 2020, in the time of COVID and World Wide Socio-political UNRESTS, I fought past, present and future. It was the battle to proclaim and be heard that, MY LIFE MATTERED when growing old is disdainfully feared. Old and aging peoples are more vulnerable and at risk and sometimes seen as collateral damage.

My new work will explore Black women's UNSAIDS about AGING; mind, body, and sexuality. But what if old black women, upon turning 100, revealed themselves to be Goddesses?

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Bushwick-raised artist and educator. He was the 2015 Hispanic Organization of Latino Artists (HOLA) Best Ensemble Award Winner, ATI Best Actor Award Winner 2016, HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer 2017 and 2016 Princess Grace Honorarium in Theater. He has taught theater and poetry in NYC Public Schools for ten years. He has toured internationally and appeared on TEDxBushwick, performed in Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals, Richard Maxwell’s Samara, Kaneza Schaal’s JACK &. and Victor Morales’ Esperento. In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater’s UTR Festival for ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn.

Fellowship Statement

I am currently working on Taxilandia, a culmination of my work over the past 9 years that serves as a living collection of the people, spaces, and stories from my community. After the virtual run with La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and The Tank in NYC, when Covid-19 rules permit, I will start the groundwork for a live production with New York Theatre Workshop and the Bushwick Starr. After the city-run, I will use Taxilandia and what I've learned from my years of collaborative creation in New York City to lead conversations with displaced people across America. I want to collaborate with local artists and theaters to adapt the show for their own communities. The 15 years of teaching artist work and cataloging gentrification I’ve done within Bushwick will inform the artistic conversations I’ll have with communities across America.

Photo by Crichton Atkinson

Phillip Howze is a playwright and theater maker whose works include Self Portraits (BRIC-Arts Media) and Frontieres Sans Frontieres (Bushwick Starr). His plays have been seen and developed at American AF Festival, Bay Area Playwrights, Clubbed Thumb, Lincoln Center Education, New York Theater Workshop, Page 73, PRELUDE, Public Theater/NYSF, San Francisco Playhouse, Sundance Theater Institute, Theatre Masters, and Yale Cabaret. He is currently a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3, and was recently named Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University’s new Theater, Dance & Media program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Fellowship Statement

Fellowship is a noun. Among its meanings are communion and companionship.  In a year of unfathomable loss, collective grievance and individual grief, when we have been necessarily distanced from each other, thoughts of fellowship could rightly feel like a throwback, or frivolity. Often for theater artists, fellowship has served as a friendly harbinger: a herald of hope, company and good humor. How might fellowship serve this same cause today? Not to commiserate with the times, but to imagine and commune in renewed ways. To wonder and refashion old words into new worlds. Together, to remember the meaning of things.  

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist and vocalist known for large multidisciplinary projects and for his use of music to examine sociopolitical issues. Samora is the director and creator of The Transformations Suite, an acclaimed project combining music, theatre, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African Diaspora. Samora’s collaborators include Sara Bareilles, Titus Kaphar, Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Daveed Diggs, and Lalah Hathaway. He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is a featured member on the new albums, August Greene and Let Love, with Common and Robert Glasper. A Sundance Composers Lab fellow, Samora scored the award-winning documentary Whose Streets? and the Field of Vision film Concussion Protocol. He is a member of Blackout for Human Rights, the arts & social justice collective founded by Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay, and was musical director for their #MLKNow and #JusticeForFlint events.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist, my primary goal is to ensure that whoever experiences my work will be altered in some way that affects their daily lives; how they think and act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationship to their country and world. I hope to bend the conventions of artistic genre and discipline to create pieces that deeply pierce the soul, grasping at the foundational elements of what it means to be alive in this moment. My work deeply criticizes the oppressive systems of American corporatism and colonialism, and reveals the many ways people are wounded by these systems as well as the many ways they fight back, imagining possibilities beyond what is allowed. I am a prison and police abolitionist. Current projects I'm working on include The Healing Project (about trauma & healing from incarceration and violence), Venus Smiles Not (about how traditional masculinity distorts the ways men learn how to deal with loss), and Grief, a collection of songs reflecting on the past two years. I'm honored to receive this support from the Jerome Foundation to continue my work.

Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. She works at the crossroads of mediums - music, visual art, dance, theater and performance art, and has been a creative force for artists such as William Parker, Daria Faïn, Shelley Hirsh, César Alvarez, Steffani Jemison. Maviel is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction of cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing and transformative act. She performs and teaches extensively in New York, throughout North, South & Central America, and Europe. Both solo albums hOULe and in the garden, were released on Gold Bolus Recordings and received international acclaim. Lastly, Anaïs Maviel was the 2019 recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship to generate new works at Roulette Intermedium in New York City, and of the 2020 American Composers Forum Create commission for new work with the Rhythm Method string quartet.

Fellowship Statement

My work wants to hold space for weaving and disentangling narratives of self in relation to society, earth and cosmos. Despite globalization and refined technologies, individualized lives scarcely embrace interdependence. Yet the uniqueness of each being— this one thing that we share —is in fact our livelihood, both for one and many. The relational complexity of this Creole (not quite postcolonial) anthropocene era, is the field in which I operate. Music, as a form of communication prior to articulate language, is fundamental to the human experience and for the capacity to conceive of oneself in relation to one’s environment. I shape sensory experiences made of what I hear from the world, bridging the fragmented and envisioning harmony in the sensible. I hope to light the desire in everyone to re-create ways to relate, so that actualizing one means actualizing all. Transformation is an alchemical phenomenon, a leap connecting ancestral wisdom to utopian futures.

Photo by Dar Es Salaam Riser

Gamin Kang, simply known as “gamin,” is a New York City-based multi-dimensional artist performing across the genres of traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations worldwide. Ralph Samuelson, a senior advisor of Asian Cultural Council, once praised gamin as “a true pioneer and innovator, leading traditional instruments in exciting new directions.” Gamin plays 3 types of Korean winds and is a designated Yisuja (Senior Diplomate), official holder of Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for Court and Royal Military music. Gamin earned her Doctorate in Korean Musical Arts at Seoul National University.

Re-inventing new sonorities from ancient, somewhat restrictive, musical systems, gamin has received several cultural exchange program grants, including Artist-in-Residence at the Asian Cultural Council, and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism of the Republic of Korea. Gamin has collaborated in cross-cultural improvisation in NYC with world-acclaimed musicians Jane Ira Bloom, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Jen Shyu, presenting premieres at Roulette, New School, and Metropolitan Museum. Gamin was a featured artist at the Silkroad concert, Seoul, 2018, performing on-stage with Yo-Yo Ma.

Fellowship Statement

I play three winds: piri (double reed bamboo oboe), taepyeongso (traditional oboe), and saengwhang (mouth organ). I am now on a journey to explore musical identity, discover new connections, and collaborate with artists from different backgrounds and cultures. Our common thread is communication and self-expression. My quest begins by studying other arts and music traditions, to discover how to best express these different strains through sound and composition.

In 2011, I began participating in musical activities outside of Korea, where I was born and educated. I have since devoted my career to intercultural music-making, working with western artists and those from East Asia, particularly in projects that bring together traditional instruments with digital sound sources.

Tradition is continually transformed by new generations of artists. My compositions merge Korean tradition with modern perspectives from audiences and environments. I am developing projects based on inter-disciplinary collaborations with interest in humanity and history.

Photo by Elan Asch

Prince Harvey is a New York City-based artist, musician, and producer most famously known for recording his first album in an Apple Store. In 2017, he released an EP called Golden Child, followed by Stay Bold: 100 Days 100 Songs, where he premiered a new song every day for 100 days as a protest against Trump. In 2018, Prince was an artist at HarvestWorks and a commissioned artist at The Shed where he began work on a new music album and series of short films.

Harvey’s music has been featured in The New York Times, Noisey, Billboard, VICE, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Fader, and Afropunk among many others. Upon release of his first album, PHATASS, he received notice from major music and news publications, as well as celebrities like Lil Wayne, Russell Simmons and Talib Kweli. Prince Harvey’s forthcoming album will be released in Summer 2021.

Fellowship Statement

For the last one decade through music, film and performance works, I have been creating a guide that explores nuances of black and queer culture, usually censored from the general public. My practice is emboldened by my insatiable need to charter unchartered waters. To tell stories that haven't been told. To show the surprising extent of human potential through innovation and the exploring of new and unique avenues. Growing up without certain privileges, I have learned to infuse an element of hacking in the work that I do to accelerate the results that I want. As an artist I believe my talents are best utilized by creating personal and collective narratives that challenge widely accepted views of normalcy.

Photo by Christopher Garcia Valle

Eric Frye is an American composer and artist. He is known for his solo performance and installation work, which explore the dissociative and psychoactive functions of sound and image. Recently, he premiered audio-visual pieces in LA, Vancouver, Tokyo, and New York City. He has performed multi-channel works alongside central figures of experimental music including Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra (Ina GRM). His recent solo recordings include Diffusion Soliloquies (2020) and Sketches for Functional Music (2019) and sound design and voice processing for a short film, Elephant Juice, by Swiss designer Simone Niquille.  Frye’s work has been shown at HeK, Switzerland; Hangar Art Centre, Barcelona; Audio Visual Arts, New York City; Rochester Art Center, Minnesota; Variform Gallery, Oregon: and more. He has performed extensively in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.

Fellowship Statement

In 2020, I collaborated with Viennese artist Stefan Juster (Jung An Tagen). We produced two sound projects, Pulsar Acid and Variations for Computer Ashtray, with plans to work with film in the coming months. I am currently researching voice obfuscation software and ambisonics while collaborating with colleagues on a number of multi-disciplinary projects. Intertwining surreal narratives with a multi-disciplinary approach to sound, I am assembling a shapeshifting auditory scene, one that explores the malfunction of perception and how it relates to new ways of masking, or blurring the self.

PaviElle is an amazing interdisciplinary artist, hailing from Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the recipient of an Upper Midwest Emmy Award as well as, a Sage Award for Dance and Choreography. She received a 2020 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Musicians and an, American Composers Forum Grant for her classical composition, A Requiem for Zula (2019) written in celebration of her Mother, Zula Young. She is known for her powerhouse vocals and for performing with an equally powerful 6-piece band. PaviElle was voted as Minneapolis City Pages “Best R&B Vocalist of 2015,” her band was named one of First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2015. She is a Teaching artist and a part of the Jazz Department Faculty at MacPhail Center for Music. PaviElle honed her craft as a teenager at Penumbra Theatre, SteppingStone Theatre and with collective, EduPoetic Enterbrainment.

Fellowship Statement

I am a composer, musician, lyricist, spoken-word artist, dancer, playwright, and actor. I am influenced by so many prolific artists, nationally and locally, however, I embody my own unique technique and sound. I am an artist who believes in alchemy and that art can be used as a vehicle to not only heal myself but, to heal others in the process as well. I have realized in this process that my niche is in combining all of my artistic disciplines to create shows with music, movement, acting, dramatic storytelling and singing. The next movement and goal for my career is creating multi-disciplinary shows and further deepening learning how to orchestrate scores for orchestras. I plan to travel to work with composer mentors, as well as, study healing sound therapies. And, I hope to tour my work from this fellowship, nationally and locally.

Photo by Sharolyn B. Hagen