As a media composer and installation artist, Kathy McTavish (ze/hir) creates chance-infused, open systems. Ze uses generative methods to build networked, multichannel video and sound environments ::: cross-sensory, polyphonic landscapes which flow from the digital web (the cloud) into physical spaces.

Kathy has a background in cello performance, mathematics, ecology, music theory and code. The confluence of these disciplines informs hir work as a composer and multimedia artist. As both a musician and a mathematician, Kathy likes multi-threaded, dynamical systems and chance-infused, emergent patterns. As a queer artist, ze is interested in the ways we construct personal stories / myths and the infinite, bendable between.

Kathy’s current work explores the porous, intimate boundaries between humans and machines ::: the erotic dynamics of tapping glass ::: the carbon cycle ::: the cyborg body ::: the fragile electric body ::: the resistance cyborg ::: the networked, digital hive mind ::: the swarm.

Fellowship Statement

I like patterns but my work explores chance & improvisation. Mathematical models are a score. They are a blueprint to draw contours of change and movement ::: convergences, divergences, emergent patterns and cascading, system-level impacts.

Chance is a frayed thread, a stochastic cloud, a pointillist field, a complexity, an uncertainty, a ragged line. Chance is a prayer ::: a slim window of chance to survive this time of profound climatic change. Evolution requires fruitful deviation. A system's ability to adapt to change depends on its ability to mutate ::: on trial & error & improvisation.

I am interested in the poetics of code ::: the networked (i) ::: a deviant, queer learning machine ::: aerial artist ::: (m)bodied cloud ::: burlesque, cybernetic ze ::: beat poet of electricity ::: a honey ::: a lure ::: a torrent.

Photo by Magic Box Photography, Duluth, MN.

Kate Marks’ (she/her) film PEARL WAS HERE has over 25 million views on YouTube. She is a 2016 HBO Access Directing Fellow as well as a 2013 Project Involve Fellow (Barbara Boyle Award winner). She directed the HBO Access pilot MANIC, which premiered in the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and received Best Drama from the New York Television Festival and Best Actress in a Drama at Series Fest. Her award-winning shorts (PEARL WAS HERE, HOMEBODY, 7 DAY GIG, and MIRACLE MAKER) continue to screen all over the world, including Slamdance, Edinburgh International, Palm Springs ShortFest, New Orleans, Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, and Cleveland International Film Festival as well as broadcast on PBS.



Kate holds a BA from Brown and her MFA in film-directing from CalArts where she received the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts. Additionally, Kate is an organizer, a teacher, a stilt-walker, a bad trombonist, and a reckless dancer.

Fellowship Statement

I come from a long line of tricksters. My grandpa was famous for his epic pranks and my dad was a legendary wild man. Telling tall tales is in my blood and (like a good trick) my films use comedy, surprise, and spectacle to take you somewhere unexpected. My stories feature oddballs, misfits, and losers and I love experimenting with tone, mining humor out of dark situations. I am currently working on my first feature, THE COW OF QUEENS. In the final days of her father’s illness, Sonya and her dad, Del, go on one last adventure to usher an escaped slaughterhouse cow to freedom through the streets of New York. It’s an off-kilter love story about a dad, a daughter, a cow with a dream, and the good people of Queens.

Photo by Jamie Milner.

Simon Liu (he/him) was raised between Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, UK and lives in Brooklyn. His films and 16mm multiple projections have been presented at film festivals globally including the Toronto, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. He has performed at institutions such as the M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, CROSSROADS at SFMoMA, Yale University and as part of Dreamlands: Expanded—an expanded cinema series presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Microscope Gallery. Liu is an adjunct faculty member at the Cooper Union School of Art and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Wave Farm and the Jerome Foundation. He is in post-production on his first feature, Staffordshire Hoard and is developing a film which imaginatively traces the passage of an ancestor who traveled from Guangzhou to Amsterdam by foot.

Fellowship Statement

In recent years my practice has centered around building a filmic catalogue from my places of origin through a body of work consisting of abstract diary films, alternative documentaries and 16mm projection performances. These works act as a storage mechanism that activate the potential for me to reconsider my formative experiences and how they relate to my position as a half Chinese, half English person who was born and raised in the former British colony of Hong Kong. I’m driven by a desire to compress fleeting exchanges into a single frame—by exploiting the material potential of “outdated” analogue formats—with the intent of relaying an exaggeratedly contemporary experience. Currently I’m working on a suite of 16mm films which call into question the ethics of image making and two feature documentaries that interrogate personal family mythologies in relation to centuries old histories of South China and the English Midlands.

Photo: Still from E-Ticket (2019) - Photo of the Artist at a WTO Protest in 2006.

Naomi Ko (she/her) is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and cultural producer. Her TV pilot, NICE, was an official selection at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Naomi created, wrote, and starred in the half-hour pilot. Naomi also played Sungmi in the 2014 Sundance award-winning feature film Dear White People, is a Moth StorySlam winner, and a featured performer for Mortified. Naomi performs with Funny Asian Women Kollective (FAWK) around the country and her comedic writing and performance can be seen in Episode 5 of The Mortified Guide, now available on Netflix. Naomi is the co-founder of the APIA MN Film Collective and has won multiple grants, awards, and fellowships for her work. Naomi is currently in pre-production for an upcoming short film she is directing and she is developing her feature film Good Genes.

Fellowship Statement

My work primarily focuses on creating unapologetic and raw film and TV narratives that feature fearless Asian American women. Even though the genres I play with can span from a raunchy sports comedy to a historical drama, at its core, each story explores the diversity of spirit, personality, and interests of Asian Americans in a grounded and humanistic lens. Currently I am exploring the ways in which Asian American women exercise their agency through my next feature film, Good Genes. It is a black comedy about a group of scientists of color who create their own personal genetics ancestry company to alter the genetic ancestry of known racists and white supremacists.

Photo by Katherina Vang.

Adam Khalil (he/him) and Zack Khalil (he/him) (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and are currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). They both graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College and are UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows and Gates Millennium Scholars.

Fellowship Statement

Our work centers indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—while subverting traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative nonfiction practice. With a practice that includes experimental filmmaking, documentary, performance & curation, we are charting out a critical & unconventional space for situating & interrogating ideas of indigeneity today.

Photo by Bayley Sweitzer and Sam Richardson.

Carrie Hawks (they/them) makes art to investigate gender, sexuality, and race and promote healing. Their works have been exhibited at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, CinemAfrica (Stockholm), Cape Town, and Tokyo. Animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, doll-making and performance are all vital parts of their art practice. They harness the magic of animation to tell stories. Their film black enuf*, partly funded by Jerome Foundation, was nominated for a New York Emmy, won numerous festival awards and had its broadcast debut on American Public Television’s World Channel in 2019. They have performed with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, and participated in the Set on Freedom Artist Residency at the Queens Museum. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University.

Fellowship Statement

My art confronts self-imposed and external assumptions about identity in order to promote healing, particularly in relation to race, gender, and sexuality. My work highlights stories that are not being represented enough. My practice presents alternate ways of connecting through a variety of media including animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, and performance. I also incorporate humor. In performance, I have asked participants to tell me about their nemeses so that we could destroy them on paper. In film, I’ve asked “if I am Black enough” for my peers and myself, and what Blackness is. I search for strategies to address being an outsider and holding self-love. My art exudes strength in its honesty, craft, and visual metaphors. I draw upon my insecurities, confusion, and fear and invite the audience to reflect on theirs. My current project, Inner Wound Real, focuses on people of color and their experiences with self-injury.

Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Kerri Edge (she/her) is an artivist who uses dance and film as vehicles to shed light on issues of social injustice and commemorate the achievements of African American people. She is Artistic Director of the Edge School of the Arts (ESOTA), which was founded in the image of the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center (BJCAC). ESOTA is dedicated to bringing the art and discipline of African American dance to young aspiring artists and audiences, from local to international. Kerri began her dance training at the age of three at BJCAC in Jamaica, Queens where she met her mentor Michael Peters, who sparked her interest in dance for film. She continued her studies at The Eglevsky Ballet School, LaGuardia High School, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Martha Graham School, and SUNY Purchase. She earned her Masters in Arts Administration from New York University and is currently a Professor of Dance at Medgar Evers College. Her commitment to the Jamaica arts community is evidenced by her volunteer work with the Jamaica Is . . . Arts Alliance, the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation and the Queens Sickle Cell Advocacy Network.

Fellowship Statement

I am an artist making sense of the world that I am a part of; I would like to leave a trace in forms that are felt and experienced for all people, now and for future generations. I am an artivist grappling with notions of memory and time, along with the role of African American-based dance rituals and body memory, through all of the senses, finding locations for where they intersect and create sensations of depth and wonder.



My 4 Little Girls film uses the universal languages of photography, song and dance to depict stories from the American Civil Rights Movement. An extensive education component helps children and adults explore history together through the use of objects from a vast collection of expressive poster samples from the Civil Rights Movement, lessons on two important social issues, and engaging hands-on activities. REFORM: Racial Disparities in the American Justice uses tap dance as a vehicle to shed light on the racial disparities in the American criminal justice system encouraging others to advocate for legislation. The collection of tap dance monologues set to music, poetry and film tell stories that highlight the African American male experience with the criminal justice system and the lasting effects on both the African American family and the community at large. The short stories are compiled into a unified work that stands with victims threatened by the increased discrimination and encourages audience members to realize the promise of equality America makes to us all.

Photo by Saiku Branch.

Jason Coyle (he/him) and Laska Jimsen (she/her) work across nonfiction forms from video documentary to 16mm filmmaking. Their individual and collaborative work has screened at festivals and venues including Ann Arbor, Athens, Big Muddy, IC Docs, Los Angeles Filmforum, Cellular Cinema, and Walker Art Center. Laska and Jason are individual recipients of Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and a Jerome Foundation Minnesota Film & Video Grant. Laska is Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College; Jason is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

Fellowship Statement

Our experimental nonfiction film and video work foregrounds acts of observation in sustained investigations of human-animal relationships, systems of management and classification, and representations of the everyday. Our ongoing series Almanac is a collection of formal studies of light, motion, and time, exploring sensory dimensions of seasonal states through singular moments in afternoons across the year. Research is integral to how we conceive of and create longer-form documentaries. We are currently developing new projects that draw on the history of automation and pose questions about contemporary labor and workplace transformations.

Photo (Jason Coyle and Laska Jimsen’s Deer of North America 2017) courtesy the artists.

Shirley Bruno (she/her) holds Masters from London Film School and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains where she was an artist fellow. Shirley's shorts have received awards at major festivals including the Off-Limits Prize in Competition for her experimental short AN EXCAVATION OF US at Annecy International Animated Film Festival (2018) and the Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (2018). Her docufiction TEZEN was awarded prizes from the National Greek Film Centre (2017) and the StudioPrix Collector (2016) initiated by art collectors Isabelle and John-Conrad Lemaître. She has received funding and support for her work from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, La Cité International, and LIM—Less is More part of Le Groupe Ouest.

Fellowship Statement

Shirley’s films draw from her heritage preserving and radicalizing her ancestral traditions and mythology. She creates modern myths that expose the slippery spaces between the material and metaphysical world, documentary and fiction, between collective memory and history. She explores the everyday, the Sacred, and the intimate violence in the things left unsaid that mark us generation after generation. Her work often takes its point of departure from neglected histories as well as from rumors, dreams, superstitious beliefs, and memories both real and imagined. Currently, Shirley is developing her first feature film, an intimate meditation on women, land, and family legacy.

Photo by Léa Girardin.

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Republic, the Southampton Review, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), Blunderbuss Magazine, the Offing, Brooklyn Rail, Joyland Magazine, the Scholar and Feminist Online, the Rumpus, and has received honorable mention from Glimmer Train Press. He was a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction, and a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–2018 Workspace program. He is also an associate editor at Apogee Journal. Alejandro holds a master's degree in Public Health from the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to his writing career, he managed cancer-screening studies, designed HIV/AIDS health worker curriculum, and taught public health advocacy.

alejandrovarela.org

Fellowship Statement

I write about the complexities of class-jumping. I see strength within community, and solidarity across communities, as health intervention. I draw from public health research on stress and inequity to craft tales that paint a way forward. My hope is for readers to finish my stories and think, “Reparations for the descendants of slaves, of course!” Or “A minimum wage of $30 per hour (pegged to inflation), duh!” But I also want my writing to make people ask themselves: “How do Ben Affleck and George Clooney each have Oscars while Alfre Woodard has only been nominated once... 35 years ago?”



I’m currently finishing a collection of short stories, and I'm working on a novel about a man who returns home to care for his parents. Several of his high school friends also struggle to survive. He traces the roots of their poor health to the isolation of their formative years.

Photo by Charly Debrosse © LMCC.