LaMont Hamilton (he/him) is an autodidact interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Hamilton uses lens, performance, writing and sound amongst a variety of other mediums to negotiate between the material and the conceptual. His practice as an artist is considered visual art, but he strives for synesthetic engagements that decentralizes the ableist assumption of the “visual” and considers how bodies engage with work.

Hamilton has been the recipient of several residencies, fellowships and awards including the Jerome@Camargo residency in Cassis, France, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, MFAH CORE program in Menerbes France, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Artadia Award, ArtMatters Grant, Artist in Residence at Duke University’s African and African American Studies, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art amongst others. Hamilton has also showed at institutions such as MoMA, The Kitchen, ISSUE PROJECT ROOM, Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomburg Center, The Drawing Center and The Sculpture Center.

Fellowship Statement

I see myself in the tradition of those who view the role of “the artist” as a specific calling. One doesn’t simply choose to be an artist but is moved, deeply, into this space of wonder. We are all born with (various forms of) antennas which we use to perceive the world, but the artist is ignited to make sense of this perception. This (re)imagination is at the crux of the current direction of my practice. Whereas before my commitment was to the historical, in a pivot, I am now fully invested in art’s capacity for deep meditation, transformation. I am engaged in two working principles—Transrealistic poetics and Barulhos—first presented by poets Norman H Pritchard and Ferrier Gullar (respectively), to provide an open-ended structure for this investigation.

Jes Fan (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, China. They are the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant Recipient, Recess Art Session Residency, Bemis Center Residency, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, Pioneer Works Residency, John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally; selected exhibitions include Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong), Disposed to Add at Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia), Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University’s Sarah Doyle Gallery (Providence). They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design.

Fellowship Statement

My studio practice is rooted in a haptic approach to understanding how identity is materialized, biologically and ontologically. I use substances such as hormones, silicone and soap—materials that are imbued with erotic and political signifiers to articulate my concerns about diasporic politics, transgender identities, and posthumanism.



Currently, I am working on new film, titled Xenophoria. Xenophoria, at first glance, simulates a YouTube cooking video, but the narrative quickly dives into the lab process of melanin production. Here, E. coli bacteria is used as a host, allegorical to ways in which miscegenation has been viewed as a dangerous contamination, and broader anxieties of racial intimacy. The mood of the video shifts and the camera turns to medical portraitures of the 19th century by Lam Qua. A set of paintings that depicts tumors of patients in the Canton region. These paintings ascribe to a colonial period when race and character is still not fully taxonomized, and medical science was sought out as a tool to dissect race as a distinct category. The film ends with a sudden jolt to an interview with a researcher who proposed to harness melanin's anti-radioactive properties for interspace travel in the near future.



My work magnifies the surreal realities of existing as a biological body in the age where the body is reconceptualized in digital, informational and molecular terms. It dwells in this productive anxiety and offers no resolution to identity politics that are riven by binaries.

Photo by Han Minu.

Rachel Breen (she/her) has exhibited her work across the Twin Cities and nationally. She has received several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field and an artist residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Rachel’s social engagement projects have twice been a part of Northern Spark, an all-night public art festival addressing climate change. Rachel is a professor of fine art at Anoka Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and received her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College. She worked as a community organizer for social justice organizations and political campaigns across the country and is a co-founder of Jewish Community Action in Minnesota. These experiences influence the process and content of her art today. Rachel was born and raised in Minnesota. Her ancestors had roots in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.

Fellowship Statement

At the core of my practice is a sewing machine, which I use to draw, create installations and perform. I describe my work as “public making” as it encourages reflection about social concerns. Through acts of sewing, I divert sewing’s original purpose, that of creating, toward social critique. I call attention to the stitch as a symbol of human interdependence, and I use it to express a belief in the possibility of social change and repair.

My recent work examines the implications of two garment workplace tragedies, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City and the 2013 Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Bangladesh. I connect these tragedies to raise questions about the relationship between overconsumption and the abject working conditions of garment workers. With this fellowship, I plan to continue investigating these questions, focusing especially on matters of scale, materials, and public participation.

Photo by Justin Allen.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (she/her) is a Lebanese-American photographer, born in Beirut, and currently living and working in Queens, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, and Familiar Stranger, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, New York; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

Fellowship Statement

My work focuses on the ways in which globalized communication brings idealized images from one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, I am building my own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards. In one sense the advertisements serve as a visualized end energizing capitalist growth, and in another they purport a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city. The advertisements and pervasive neo-liberal capital represent our most recent form of colonialism. What is fascinating to me about this system is that it employs images as its most powerful tool. This under-documented place is now occupied by images of a different place and people.

Nia O. Witherspoon (she/her) is a black queer writer/director, vocalist/composer, and cultural worker. Described as “especially fascinating” by Backstage Magazine, and named in Phoenix’s “Top 100” Artists, Witherspoon’s work creates contemporary ritual-space grounded in African Diaspora sensibilities to speak to the issues of our times. Currently in residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Witherspoon has received New York Theatre Workshop’s (NYTW) 2050 Playwriting/Directing Fellowship, BRIC’s Premiere Residency, Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund Grant, Brooklyn Arts Fund (BAC), Downtown Urban Theatre Festival’s “Audience Award,” Lambda Literary’s Emerging Playwriting Fellowship, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Her works, including The Messiah Complex, YOUMINE, and SHE have been developed or featured at BRIC, HERE, NYTW, National Black Theatre, BAAD, Dixon Place, The Fire This Time Festival, and Movement Research. Witherspoon holds a PhD from Stanford University, and is currently a Playwright-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts (Amherst). She has works commissioned in the 2019-20 season by The Shed, Playwright’s Realm, La Mama ETC, and JACK.

Fellowship Statement

I am a concept-driven artist invested in creating spaces where black/queer/trans/female folks, and, more largely people of color, are able to be seen in their full humanity, and their full divinity. This means that while contemporary tragedy and inter-generational trauma often trigger a project’s inception, ultimately, I aim for my works to place my communities in a context that far exceeds the 500-years of colonial time and instead to find the palimpsest of wisdom in liberation. Freedom is not something I have achieved yet, but it is something I feel pulled uncontrollably toward. I am working to cultivate freedom in myself, in my works, and in my collaborators, by any means necessary. I am also learning that freedom is very much about surrender to the imperfect, and so I try to create spaces (from plays to rituals to rehearsal rooms) where vulnerability is the most valuable currency.



I am deeply inspired by the resonance inside of dissonance—particularly in reparation of the sacred/secular binary. I am also invested in the concepts of layering and unfolding, as the nature of diaspora is palimpsestic, cyclical, and always in motion. In The Dark Girl Chronicles, Yoruba divination scripture lives alongside verbatim investigation-room testimony, court transcripts, and Cardi B to unearth the stories of black women warriors against state violence. I am excited by the potential of theatre to allow us to see what we would otherwise not see—the moonlit vision—the “magic eye” that offers a window the Great Mystery. In The Messiah Complex, the nightclub has permission to become the ritual ground and sacred cemetery. A heteronormative Black Panther has permission to love a transwoman. And his transmasculine child has permission to become the Messiah, leading the next generation of the black liberation struggle.

Photo by  Zavé Martohardjono.

Ikechukwu Ufomadu (he/him) is a comic entertainer, named one of five “Comics to Watch in 2018” by Time Out New York. His original projects include: Ike at Night (The Public Theater), Nightcap | by Ike (Joe’s Pub at The Public), Ike Night (Ars Nova, San Francisco Sketchfest), Ike for the Holidays (Joe’s Pub at The Public), Ike by Chance (Ars Nova), Inspector Ike (Comedy Central Corporate Retreat), Ike’s Wonderful World of Leisure (Exponential Festival) and more. His short-form series Words with Ike has aired on VICE and IFC.



He trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; the International Theatre Workshop in The Netherlands; and Studio Five’s theatre and dance programs in Indonesia. Ikechukwu has been an artist-in-residence at Joe’s Pub at The Public and SPACE on Ryder Farm.

Fellowship Statement

As a comic entertainer, my primary objective is to entertain, comically.

My work often takes the formats of classic American variety and talk shows and sets them in performance contexts that make them feel both familiar and strange. This results in humor that is disorienting and plays with people’s expectations, while maintaining a warm, welcoming “big tent” sensibility that invites an audience of diverse life experiences to come along for the ride.

Crafting intimate entertainments that can serve as sites of shared laughter, improvisation and play is a pressing need in a time marked by deep divisions, fragmentation and social deadlock. Indeed, our deepest impasses, individually and collectively, are marked by the absence of such play. My hope is to build a body of work that succeeds as entertainment while stimulating those human qualities necessary to not only cope with the problems of our time, but resolve them.

Photo by Mindy Tucker.

Kareem M. Lucas (he/him) is a Brooklyn born and Harlem-based actor/writer/producer/director. His solo pieces include The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro, From Brooklyn With Love, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, A Boy & His Bow, and Black Is Beautiful, But It Ain’t Always Pretty. He is currently co-collaborating on the development of the immersive theatrical piece The Black History Museum...According to the United States of America, as a writer/performer with the Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative at HERE Arts Center. He recently presented his solo piece, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, as a part of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door Series, and The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro as part of his 2019 Mentor Project at Cherry Lane Theatre. Kareem received an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program.



For more info follow him on Instagram @KareemMLucas.

Fellowship Statement

I feel a great responsibility to articulate what it is to be Black now. Currently, my curiosity is drawn to investigating and deconstructing the Black heterosexual cis-gendered male perspective as it functions within America’s White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. How the legacy of slavery, racism, misogyny, religion and the value of the Black body over the Black mind still insinuates itself into our modern day existences and systems, as we navigate love, intimacy, identity, and self-worth in this digital media age The greatest service I may provide through my work is to communicate on behalf of my culture, so that we may reflect, heal, inspire, take responsibility, and move forward, because this lack of self-awareness, self-care, self-love, and overall accountability has diminished our progress as a people in this land for many generations.

Photo by Stan Demidoff Photography.

Khary Jackson (he/him) is a poet, playwright, dancer and musician. He has written several plays, one of which (Water) was produced in 2009 at Ink and Pulp Theatre in Chicago. As a hip hop/street dancer he was fortunate to create and perform a piece at the 2018 Choreographers’ Evening at Walker Art Center. He has been a recipient of several generous grants, including the 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Writing, the Minnesota State Arts Board’s 2012 Cultural Community Partnership Grant and 2010 Artist Initiative Grant for Poetry, the Many Voices Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center in 2005 and 2007, as well as the 2009 VERVE Spoken Word Grant from Intermedia Arts. He is an alumnus of Cave Canem, the esteemed writing fellowship for black writers. His first poetry book, Any Psalm You Want, was published with Write Bloody Publishing in the spring of 2013.

Fellowship Statement

It is my aim to use multiple artistic mediums in the service of a greater, unifying idea. After years of focus on individual areas of arts composition and performance, this feels like the time to bring them together, and create artistic experiences that can speak to someone on multiple levels of engagement. I am looking at poetry/creative writing as the grounding element in a collaboration with dance, music, video and visual art. I want others to hear more of what I’m hearing, see more of what I’m seeing, and, perhaps, move with me in whatever ways they can.

Photo by Erin X. Smithers.

Joe Horton (he/him) is a rapper, artist, and founding member of FIX music and arts collective. His interdisciplinary work spans medium and genre, but always features a signature blend of futurism and mysticism. The best example of this is his latest work, A Hill in Natchez, is a surreal work that combines elements of dance, visuals, and music. Joe is currently working on a new album produced by Anatomy (Kill the Vultures) as well as VESSEL, a visual and musical work that will premiere at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Fall 2019.

Fellowship Statement

I owe as much to the mystical tradition as I do the artistic. I am interested in nurturing vital knowings that come directly from the Mystery. I want to marry ancient techniques of ecstasy and forward-thinking technologies. I want to sing to the moment as it passes.

Kathryn Haddad (she/her) is a writer, teacher and community organizer whose work explores contemporary Arab American experiences and reflects on the political reality of life for Arab Americans. Kathryn founded Mizna – one of the few Arab American Arts and literary organizations in the United States and served as Artistic/Executive Director for twelve years. She’s a recipient of a Bush Fellowship for work with the Arab American community and received three Playwright’s Center Many Voices Fellowships. Her plays have appeared in various venues, including the anthology, Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. Kathryn was awarded the 2018 Kay Sexton Award at the Minnesota Book Awards for her literary impact on the State of Minnesota through her work with the Arab American community.

Fellowship Statement

I strive to tell Arab and Arab American stories through theater - reflecting on the social and political climate at home and abroad. Immigration, family life, political struggle, colonization, religion, and bicultural experience have all been subjects I have explored. This award will give me the opportunity to work with community to continue the dialogue and conversation through art. The fellowship will allow me time to work on my craft as a playwright and strengthen my writing through study and practice. I would like to make new connections and collaborations with theaters, individuals, and communities that share a common vision, and I hope to reach new audiences with my work.