Bren Wyona is a filmmaker born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Southern California. Through hybrid narrative and documentary media, their work explores shifting class landscapes, identity loss, and communal recovery. Wyona’s latest short film, that with which ringing is done, held above, in place—supported by Untitled Filmmaker Organization (UFO) and Zeiss—is a dynamic road trip documentary that investigates her own Diné ancestors and the Indian Child Welfare Act through the stronghold lens of Cowboy and Indian cinema. Wyona is a 2021 Flaherty Fellow, a 2021 Oolite Arts Grant Recipient, and a 2023-2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through a fellowship with the UFO Short Film Lab. They are currently in development for their first feature film, a narrative set in New Mexico and Ireland.

Fellowship Statement

I’d like to continue making films that center the unlearning of fast-gratifying plot trauma. My current projects include a short documentary featuring Indigenous drag queens, Meteorite Shepherds, a narrative about two shepherds from New Mexico and Ireland, and Camping a hybrid road trip film following a group of queer Indigenous legends living in Los Angeles. This Fellowship will be crucial in allowing me resources and time to evolve into long-form practices. As I begin to develop my first feature films, I want to ensure that these practices are in collaboration with Diné elders including group therapies, cast and crew education, and mechanical processes like film development with foraged plant materials. The industry is in dire need of intentional film sets that fight for land protection, collaborative labor, and honorable images.

Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. Ude has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022, she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book, Watch Me, in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.

Fellowship Statement

During the Fellowship I will further my investigations into Black mourning and memory through two practices. The first is an improvisation practice I call: “forgotten body.” Forgotten body asks: Can I talk back to the dead? Can I befriend grief? Can my relationships to what I have lost grow stronger in the wake of loss? Forgotten body asks you to move sensitively not sensibly, encouraging your subconscious to lead. It is built on an anticolonial approach that strengthens our connections to Black ancestry and embodied history. The second is a performance/archival project: Major. In Major, a team of Black Southern femmes embody the movement of our girlhood to answer the questions of our present. Major follows the intimate journey of returning to a body you think is lost. How can you reorganize your body to dance in the ways you were born to, but have been trained out of? 

Photo by Rachel Keane.

ms. z tye is a Brooklyn-based artist who is interested in physical investigations, including but not limited to movement, voice, sculpture, and theater. tye explores concepts through ancestral praise. She is intrigued with somatic relations and how they associate with emotional connectivity. She has been included in exhibitions with Bronx Museum of Arts, Volta/Armory Art Fair, Swivel Gallery, Untitled Art Fair, Cierra Britton Gallery, The Living Gallery, Long Gallery Harlem, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Art in Buildings, and Participant INC. Choreographic work has been commissioned by The Kitchen, BMW, The Shed, Danspace, Lotto Royale, MQBMBQ, BOFFO, Jack, Gibney, Movement Research, and Dance Canvas ATL.

Fellowship Statement

My work recognizes that with any act of public sharing lies precarity. In this space of vulnerability and perilousness, I hope to bring forth softness in the gaze of spectators through nostalgic imagery designed to spark dialogue and raise consciousness. Rooted in memory, my work reclaims rituals from the Pentecostal church as ceremonial acts. My reclamation rituals invite audiences to question phrases such as,  “Come as you are” and, “The land of the free.” These prompts are not uplifiting for queer and trans folx like myself, which is revealed through the audience responses. My practice embraces attributes of faith, spirit, and the performance of patriotism to ritualize clarity and redemption for me and my community.

* intentional use of lowercase

Photo by Cheril Sanchez.

Jasmine Reid is a transatlantic poet for the people. She is the author of Interlocutor Goddess (Autumn House Press, forthcoming), winner of the 2024 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize; and Deus Ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Poets House, her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Reid was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is an assistant professor at NYU.

Fellowship Statement

My primary goal for this Fellowship is to complete work on a collection of poems figured out of the tranatlantic-transgender middle passage and wound, misassigned at birth, poems that rearrange the traumatic into the life-bearing, the cut into the invaginated. In plasticity and reconstruction, from wound to womb, I conceive new, liberative passage. So enacted: a fugitive fecundity that escapes the annihilative imagination of the bourgeois state unto revolutionary path and possibility. Through research on such defiant forms, phenomena, and ideation (consider the matsutake and the astronomic “perfect black body”), and the work of poets in revolutionary struggle, I will sharpen the poems’ political vision, formal invention, and improvisation. This sharpness will righteously ooze, draw blood from reader to rehydrate the knowledge that we are inseparable from land, soil, stars, and each other. Inner space pregnant with outer space: a poetry for the people to become earthlings, again. 

Photo by Nico Reano.

Ella Josephine Julia (Cleo) Moore is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice uses participatory art, music composition, instrument-making, bandleading, installation, and fabric arts. Under the alias Cleo Reed, they complete musical projects that are rooted in their ancestral and cultural lineage. Their debut album project, Root Cause was released in 2023 and alongside the work they premiered a self-directed performance art piece titled Black American Circus at AFROPUNK Festival, Banlieues Bleues in Paris, and Brooklyn Museum. Reed is a recipient of the 2024 Map Fund. Reed is currently a resident at Abrons Arts Center’s AIRspace Performance Residency through 2026, and a 2025 Session Resident for Recess Arts. Recently, they developed software instruments for Jon Batiste’s American Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

Fellowship Statement

Whether underground or academic, experimental or popular, I am drawn to question the notion of tradition, to dissolve the binary, make noise, and push the barrier between artist and audience. My goal is to catalyze conversation and challenge notions of tradition and identity, dissolving the barriers between artists and audience. During the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, I intend to create work focused on expanding musical works into more multidisciplinary and socially-engaged projects. I work toward a future that enables me to realize intentional creative endeavors and encourage joy within collaborative spaces such as museums, theaters, and unseen spaces. 

Photo by Geoffrey Baptiste.

sadé powell is a concrete poet from New York City, exploring the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic possibilities of her 1930s Royal typewriter. Rooted in Black feminist poethics and inspired by the gritty spirit of her upbringing, she examines the dissemblant vernacularity of what is colloquially considered “the hood." Through experimental print and paper techniques, powell critiques grammar and mucks up orthography. Her work has been supported by the Whitney Independent Study Program, The Poetry Project, The Center for Book Arts, Hand Papermaking Magazine, Triple Canopy, and KOLAJ Magazine, among others. In 2023, she published chapbooks periodluv with Belladonna Collaborative and wordtomydead with Ugly Duckling Presse. Her debut collection, dontbeabitterbtch, is forthcoming with selva oscura press. She holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from San Francisco State University and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch, and serves on the editorial collective for Women & Performance Journal.

Fellowship Statement

i approach this Fellowship as an opening—a field of possibility where i can situate the mundanity of divestment and its otherwise. my practice, rooted in concrete poetry and the generative dissemblance of illegibility, engages with themes of vernacularity and the unknown. these modes disentangle normative frameworks that demand performance and understanding, carving space for the grit and blur undergirding fugitive aesthetics. through ephemeral installations and experiments with scale, form, and papermaking, i aspire to render Black abstraction as relational and deeply social, embedding it as a ubiquitous storytelling presence across the boroughs. 

* intentional use of lowercase

Photo by Chris Cuadrado.

Asif Mian uses video, installation, performance, and sculpture to investigate the tenuous connections between the events that shape one’s life. He has held solo exhibitions at Management and Crush Curatorial in New York City and Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia, and has participated in group exhibitions at Okayama Art Summit, the Whitney ISP, The Shed, Queens Museum, and BRIC, among others. Mian is a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist awardee and has been featured in ArtForum, Artnet, Art Observer, and The Dallas News. He was awarded the Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Fellowship, where his multi-chapter project, RAF, was the focus of a 2021 solo exhibition. His work breaks down and rearranges mediums to evoke a liminal psychological space, where the “ghosts” of events and the mental processing of violence reside. He graduated from Drew University with a BA Biology and BA Studio Art; earned an MFA Visual Arts from Columbia University; and is a Skowhegan alum.

Fellowship Statement

In my multichapter RAF project, I am drawing from personal and familial experiences of violent crime, alongside structures of criminality and policing, to articulate how these forces have shaped facets of American culture. I am developing a video work, Qareen, that will combine forensic documentary, character performance, and thermal infrared videography. I am also developing sand sculptures and wall reliefs by ‘possessing’ sand through catalytic and bonding techniques. Sand can flow like water, solidify like stone, melt into glass, and alchemize into mirror. Its sensorial traits are essential in engaging conscious and subconscious explorations of emotional processing. By merging classic art therapy methods with my own practice of experimental sculpture and performance, I would like to explore how the effects of violence, trauma, and therapy can be reinterpreted through innovative art practices.

Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti, raised in the Bahamas) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with the relationship between materiality and larger cultural and social phenomena. He has exhibited at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2025); Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts (2024); MoMA PS1, New York (2023); Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2023); Lehmann Maupin, New York (2022); White Columns, New York (2021); and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas,and Mestre Projects, in Nassau, Bahamas (2012, 2021). Meris is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum (2019); a NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020); and a Studio Museum in Harlem A.I.R 2022-2023. Always Jeffrey never “Jeff.” He earned his AA in arts and crafts from the University of the Bahamas in 2012, a BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in 2015, and an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2019.

Fellowship Statement

In my practice, I oscillate between the embodied trauma of the colonial project in my kinetic sculptures to utilizing restorative strategies in my sculptures, paintings, and installations. What would healing centuries of xenophobia, queerphobia, and other oppressive systems look like? My destiny is in search of sanctuary; I believe that the future is Black. I use symbols of trauma and transform them into beacons of hope and prosperity. During the Fellowship, I plan to advance my studio practice and create more sustainable structures for my practice.

Photo by Will Pippin, Cultured Mag.

Liana Mack (she/hers) is a writer, born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Her poetry and erotica has been published in Hobart, Hunger Mountain Review, Sarka, Triangle House Review, Dream Boy Book Club, dirt child, and more. She is a former lifestyle writer at The Cut (New York Magazine) and Heroine (Grailed). Her research and writing on the plaçage system has been recognized by the Edith Wharton/Straw Dog Writer’s Residency at The Mount in Lennox, MA and Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL. Mack has also been supported extensively in her writing by international residencies including Arteles (Hämeenkyrö, Finland), Metropolitan Fukujusou (Kyoto, Japan), and Gullkistan (Laurgvatn, Iceland). She is of Black, Wesort, and Swedish descent. Mack has a BS in Visual Art from the School of Art + Design at Purchase College and studied writing under Elaine Kahn, Eileen Myles, and Cynthia Cruz.

Fellowship Statement

I write sexy, slippery fairytales starring the subtle magic and actual monsters that menace real life. My work warps the boundaries of arousal and disgust, hunger and gluttony, romance and obscenity. It’s escapist, but never without consequences. It’s trashy and awake. It’s rancid, lush, and shameless. The next several years will be an especially antagonistic time to be a woman writing openly about sex, power, and sickness, which makes holding the line all the more urgent. I am so beyond honored to be supported by this Fellowship as I generate new work. 

Photo by Ramuel Galarza.

Nancy Ma is a first-generation performer, playwright, and filmmaker from Chinatown, New York City. Her solo show, Home, premiered with The Latino Theater Company in Los Angeles, and has been performed at schools and festivals around the country. She has worked with Pan Asian Repertory Theater, Ojai Playwrights, and UTR/The Public, and been awarded residencies with The National Arts Club, The New Harmony Project, The Museum of Chinese in America, and Fresh Ground Pepper. Most recently, her short documentary 有一天你不在 One Day You are Not Here, wrapped the festival circuit. Ma is also the co-founder of Max2 Film Festival, a two-minute film festival focused on experimentation and community. She has taught with The Brooklyn Arts Council, Young Storytellers and Built4Collapse, and currently facilitates storytelling workshops with The Moth.

Fellowship Statement

My work is inspired by my identity as a first generation Asian American woman who was raised in a working class immigrant environment. This means processing a lot of buried feelings, doing the most to prove being female is enough, and laughing and crying loud enough to make up for the silence and survival in my family. I explore what home feels like, and that often means I revisit painful and unprocessed memories of people and places. I am currently working on Sweatshop Melody, a musical that follows a group of immigrant women who work at a garment factory; and This Body was Made for Bleeding, an experimental multimedia multilingual theater piece about the blessings and burdens of the female body. I aspire to make spaces that facilitate collective healing and difficult conversations.

Photo by Peter Konerko.