Jeesun Choi is a transnational Korean playwright, librettist and physical theatre artist. Her plays move through diaspora, (im)migration, and transnationalism to reveal the joy and agony of the human condition. Selected plays include BUST (Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, O'Neill NPC Finalist), Lost Coast (Playwrights Realm's Ink'd Festival, Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Works), Manuka (EST/Youngblood Podcast), The Seekers (Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Bushwick Starr Reading Series), and Untitled/Diaspora (JACK Radical Acts Festival). She is currently a Librettist Fellow at American Opera Project, a member of EST/Youngblood, Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, an affiliated artist at New Georges, and a member of DGA. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Realm, and more. In 2020, she was awarded Artist of Exceptional Merit by Asian American Arts Alliance. MFA Ensemble Based Physical Theatre, Dell’Arte International.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a transnational Korean theatre artist, I write stories that express the joy and agony of the human condition, especially in the context of (im)migration and diaspora. Being an (im)migrant artist, I have experienced how personhood is a complex union of experience, desire, and purpose. People of diaspora spend our lives articulating who we are because it evolves constantly, evading the identity categories set by the dominant cultures. In my plays, I seek to capture these moments of personal and communal transformation while continuing to innovate the theatrical form. Currently, I am working on a revenge tragedy, Influence, a chamber opera with the composer Paul Pinto, and a show at JACK about the Korean diaspora for October 2023.

Photo by Eric Johnston.

Sarah Rothberg creates playful, poetic, usually-a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationship to the world around you. These take many forms ranging from VR/AR to installation, performance, video, writing, workshops.

These experiences exist in a variety of contexts: at galleries, museums, festivals, on google docs, at the consumer electronics expo, screens in the NYC Subway system, Apple stores around the world, zoom calls, secret twitter accounts, or the MoMa (unsanctioned). Some hosts have included: bitforms gallery, Rhizome, NRW-forum, MTA Arts, Sotheby's S2, CultureHub, Gray Area Foundation. Rothberg is on the faculty at NYU (interactive media at ITP), a member of ONX Studio, and a mentor/former-member at NEW INC.

Rothberg is part of collaboratives: MORE&MORE UNLIMITED, which facilitates workshops for imagining changed worlds, and IS THIS THING ON? a post-web2 experiment in artist-driven livestreaming.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Usually, I make things to connect to someone: you! or myself.

I am currently working on spaces (mostly virtual) for performance and conversation, and am specifically interested in how technologies facilitate different kinds of interactions between people, as well as different ways of thinking and imagining.

In general, I pursue projects that allow me to engage with emerging technologies (broadly speaking), and question how they impact the world with a mix of experimentation, silliness, critical inquiry, sensitivity and joy!

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a Filipino American artist, writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work and research have revolved around an interdisciplinary reflection on how legacies of empire inform social and economic value systems. She received her MFA through both the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work has been included in new media festivals and galleries including Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Initial Public Offering, Reddit, online (2019); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Meitzler’s work has received support from HarvestWorks, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work relates Filipino etiological myths to a sense of personal, economic and historical rupture. As the climate crisis continues to grow, I use the mythic, origin stories of tropical storms as a way to connect to the unresolved moments of the past and powerfully propel beyond them. A lot of the writing and storytelling that I do, interweaves colonial history and this climatic turbulence alongside my own personal experiences, which is as someone who grew up between the tension of two cultures deeply defined by Americanism. Currently, I am working on an animation that follows three Filipino nurses, inspired by my mother and her community, as they engage with Philippine etiological myths of earthquakes as a response to the embodiment of colonial debt.

Yo-Yo Lin (林友友) is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary artist who explores the possibilities for self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. She often uses animation, live performance, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.” Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care.

Refusing the Western medicalization of the crip body, she works towards a “soft data” archive that holds space for illness in its wholeness. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives.

Lin was a 2019 artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and a 2020 Open Call recipient for the Shed. She teaches at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns fellow. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Over the years of building my interdisciplinary art practice, I have committed myself to making work that expands dominant notions of what filmmaking, technology, or space-making can be. Some of the questions I asked and continue to ask include: How do we tell cinematic stories spatially, physically and virtually? Can we reclaim data-gathering as daily practice for soft knowledge? What are the ways we can reframe the body as a technology? How do we build care and community-building into how we work with and develop technology? I am interested in how we continue to practice ways of working with technology that deepens and strengthens our relationship to our bodies, our communities, and the earth. This fellowship will allow me to expand and deepen my artistic practice in a research-oriented manner while simultaneously offering me the space to continue to create care-focused, tech-driven performances, tools, and spaces with and for disabled, chronically ill, POC communities.

Sound Sovereign/Brown is a composer, vocalist, and former healing practitioner, whose work is rooted in sacred refuge, embodied decolonization, and restorative liberatory practice.

Sound’s music includes chant-based chamber pieces, orchestrated song landscapes, and trio-based groove adagios, with vocal components ranging from pre-lingual/speechless callings, to mantra, lyrical language, and prayer.

As a vocalist and arranger, Sound is a member of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber (led by the renowned Greg Tate, who transitioned December 2021), and the vocal director for Treya Lam.

Interdisciplinary projects beloved to Sound include working with Mendi and Keith Obadike, Stefanie Batten Bland, Elliott Sharp, Anaïs Maviel, Tonya Pinkins, and Derek McPhatter.

As a composer, Sound’s first full length solo project, Data and the Disciple, vol. 1, has been commissioned by the American Composers Forum, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, intended to release and live premiere in 2024.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work is grounded in ritual, rest, and ancestral-artistic pathways, as means for accessing our lost medicines, unraveling and dissolving trauma, and remembering our inherent, indigenous, decolonized knowing. 

Engaging spaciousness, pulse, harmonic intimacy, embodied listening, evolving repetition, and a continuum of language states, creates a gateway for me:

Invoking pre-identity universal information, intergenerational and collective memory, and the deeply personal, individualized experience, which is communally witnessed (and/or shared), held and transformed. 

This receptive-intuitive-somatic compositional process has also served as a visceral guiding system for my own healing, as someone navigating chronic physiological trauma/stress conditions.

I land and root as I discover that which profoundly releases restricted, suppressed, and obstructed breath… That which recalibrates my own heartbeat… And that which allows me, in my black body, the reclaiming of my own voice, in a world that simultaneously seeks to both silence and exploit it.

Screen capture from video courtesy of Joe’s Pub.

Kavita Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, educator, researcher, polyglot and lifelong New Yorker hailed by NPR for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” Her projects blending modern jazz, new music, and world traditions include Visions (2014), Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), Interplay (2018, nominated for France's Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year), and Cape Verdean Blues (forthcoming, 2023). She is currently working on a new album of original music for her jazz quintet. Kavita performs her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on six continents, and her work has been supported by New Music America, Chamber Music America, Jerome Foundation, Camargo Foundation, and Park Avenue Armory. She has worked with Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, Miguel Zenón, Lionel Loueke, Billy Childs, Miho Hazama, among others. Kavita holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a composer-vocalist who integrates performance practice, improvisation, and ethnomusicological field research to create original works that unearth and expose the virtuosity of the human voice. Made in deep engagement with the jazz tradition while also advancing its global sensibilities, my music is about and for people like me—communities in exile, refugees, stateless people, cultural nomads, and those who straddle hybrid identities. By creating works that are multifaceted, complex, cosmopolitan, and inclusionary of those at the margin, I strive to shed light on underrepresented cultures and musical traditions and to provoke my audience to question hierarchical notions of social identity. Current projects include All Roads Lead to Home, original music for jazz quintet inspired by a pilgrimage to my ancestral villages in coastal Gujarat, Little Drifters of a Split Earth, an immersive opera for youth voices about global child migration, and Who Will See My Garden Grow?, a collection of personal songs around the subject of motherhood. I am grateful to the Jerome Foundation for this recognition and continued support of my work.

Photo by Heather Sten.

Named by The Guardian as a musician “who will enrich your life,” Shruthi Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer and vocalist with a unique dual background in Carnatic (South Indian classical) and Western classical music. Shruthi has won numerous honors, including the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her compositions are performed worldwide; in 2021, her work premiered at the United Nations COP26. She is a Carnatic vocal disciple of her mother, musician Nirmala Rajasekar, and has studied as a Western classical soprano with Jerry Elsbernd, Rochelle Ellis, and Patricia Rozario, OBE.

Shruthi has been in residence at the Anderson Center, Tusen Takk Foundation, and Britten Pears Arts. An alumnus of Princeton University and a former Marshall Scholar, Shruthi pursued graduate study in the United Kingdom in ethnomusicology and composition. She serves on the board of new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Through music, I explore identity, community, and joy. In my work, my two idioms of Carnatic and Western classical intersect and converse to show how different influences coexist in all of us. Each of us is a mosaic of our experiences. When recognized, our varied backgrounds allow us to understand each other, no matter how different our individual stories are. This is what drives me to create: to build spaces for reflection and exchange.

Community is central to every aspect of my composing, from the cultural and diasporic experiences that inspire me to the different groups of listeners and performers that I bring together in the music that I create. I love writing for the voice because singing is simultaneously personal and communal. To sing together requires us to breathe together, to sense one another, and to listen to our neighbors — making us more present, grounded, and giving.

Photo by Alia Rose Photography.

The Narcotix is a West African art-folk band based in Brooklyn, with feathers all over. It is many-limbed and limber, a five-piece with voices, guitars, bass, keys and drum set. Reverb-laden vocals blur and swell in dissonant intervals, buoyed by a riverbed of shimmering Congolese guitar riffs, thumping P-bass, cavernous synths and traphouse hi-hats. The result of this band's cohesion is a compelling musical statement whose relationship to identity is as fraught, complex and ever-changing as anything else in this time.

The rave reception of the debut EP Mommy Issues, released in summer 2021, paved the way for The Narcotix to take their musical compositions to new heights. With this fuel, composers/instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas have reimagined the boundaries with which to push the musical landscapes usually bound by the automatic resignation of conformity. With the instrumental prowess of Adam Turay (rhythm guitar), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Matt Bent (drums), Foinchas and Quansah have amassed the Will, and now means, to harness the creative force and pour it into their upcoming debut album, Dying.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We’re currently working on completing our debut album, a 10-song homage to the practice of exercising unwavering vulnerability whilst creating. The recording process for the album began on September 24, 2022. So far we’ve recorded the foundations of each song and we plan to incorporate the full instrumentation and production elements over the next few months. Following the release of the album, we’d like to plan a series of concerts and a proper US tour. During the fellowship, we are especially keen to sharpen our technical skills through various lessons and workshops. This upskilling will serve as a vehicle through which we will be able to explore broadening our live performances. For example, we’d like to expand on live arrangements by adding elements of improvisation where appropriate. Studying composition will enable us to incorporate additional instrumentalists such as horns, strings, and percussion players.

Photo by Florencia Villa.

Atim Opoka is a Ugandan-American songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist who fuses afro-pop and hip-hop while embracing the power of transformative story-telling. She is most recently a 2021 recipient of a Waters Grant as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Opoka has performed original works at the Stone Arch Bridge Festival and Powderhorn Park Festival. She has a BA in Vocal Performance from McNally Smith College of Music.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We live in a society that is fast paced, go and grab. Looking for the next trend or 7 sec distraction or viral video with no regard to the cost or impact, positive or negative. I believe art is a holistic experience that requires the full body mentally, physically and spiritually. It doesn't judge, but asks for your time and space, modeling and shaping all of our experiences to get us where we are right now. I am growing, and I will continue to grow, and not only feed my garden, but I will add and water those who let me, and one day I will bloom, when I oughta bloom.

Photo by Evelyn Speers.

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer Amanda Ekery creates music filled with imagery and strong narratives. Her work has earned support from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and the Jerome Foundation, and has been featured at the Portland Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, and The Kennedy Center. Amanda’s 2018 album Keys With No Purpose, was written as a reaction to the sexist culture women continue to face in jazz and informed by her research on females in jazz education which is soon to be published in the 2023 Routledge Companion to Women in Music Leadership. Her most recent album, Some (more) Short Songs, released in 2021 was praised in Downbeat Magazine saying, “her compositions are great” and “full of moments of amazingness.”

She was awarded the 2022 Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalist Association for her dedication to gender equity work with El Paso Jazz Girls. Learn more at aekerymusic.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Árabe is my ongoing project about Syrian and Mexican shared culture and history on the El Paso border. It covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. I am exploring new sounds and artistic mediums in Árabe including original compositions inspired by research and personal history, essays delving into the stories behind each song, electronic compositions reimagined from 80-year-old family home recordings, and a community centered approach that invites others into her creative process and release of the project. My hope is to complete Árabe as a CD/book that is filled with photos and art, and my essays and music.

Photo by Ross Wightman.