Jessica Beshir is a Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker. She is interested in cinema that responds to an intuitive process and the forms that emerge from this journey. Her feature debut, Faya Dayi, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and screened around the world garnering multiple awards including the Truer Than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirits (2022), the Grand Jury Prize & Fipresci Awards at Visions du Reel (2021), the Grand Jury Prize at the Full Frame Film Festival (2021), best Cinematography awards at the ASC (2022), IDA (2021), DOC NYC (2021) and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards (2022). Faya Dayi was released theatrically in North America by Janus Films, broadcast nationally on POV’s 35th season on PBS (2022) and was released in Europe and Latin America by Mubi. Jessica is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow and has been honored with grant support from the Jerome Foundation, Sundance Institute, the Doha Film Institute and NYSCA.

Fellowship Statement

As a filmmaker, I am interested in cinema that is nomadic in nature, a cinema that is liberated from the confines of genre/narrative expectations to create an aesthetic that fluidly moves amidst temporal and sonic spaces, between the physical and the spiritual worlds, invoking the mythical while grounded in socio-political concerns. I am interested in the unique cinematic forms that emerge when intuition is a guiding compass and process is trusted in the creation of stories that look and feel as free and fragmentary as Memory.

During the Fellowship, I will travel to Ethiopia to do archival research and to record oral histories of elders who lived through the Cold War. The vision is to create a poetic work whose aesthetics and thematics are rooted in the historical realities of the present to uncover past histories and the cycles of war that continue to provoke massive exiles.

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist. Her poetry has been published and anthologized in wildness, Interim, and New Letters as the 2023 Winner of the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. She is a 2024 Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). Additionally, she has received fellowships and generous support from New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Kolaj Institute, MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists, Salzburg Summer Academy, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Poets & Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among other honors. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage—a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. Her collages have appeared in Create! Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Southern Cultures, and The BOOOOOOOM Care Art & Photo Book. She has exhibited at LA Zine Fest, Black Zine Fair NYC, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies Ordinary Survival Inaugural Film Festival.

Fellowship Statement

I do Black women’s work. My poetry and collage projects center the lives and experiences of Black women, matrilineage, and ancestors. My practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and I am influenced by beauty, the desert and the cosmos, migration, divination and astrology, archives, Americana, and what remains. My work examines freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Much of my work relies on history as a primary source. My mother, a dark skinned daughter of Texas Juneteenth folk, was born the same week the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Education, and my father was a descendant from one of the original Louisiana Creole families. As a result, I inherited and carry the South with all of its blood, glory, and contradiction. I am grateful that the Fellowship will allow me to work towards my first full length poetry collection, Hoard, and to expand my experimentation and ongoing work with the archive.

Coleen Baik is a Korean American artist and writer based in NYC. Her short films have screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Everyman Cinema in London, and in domestic and international festivals. Her latest film, 엄마 나라 | MOTHER LAND, premiered at Brooklyn Film Festival and is a meditation on loss through animations on a turntable. Her time in North Korea, during a 2015 peace mission now documented in the award-winning Crossings by Mu Films, was a pivotal experience that continues to influence her work through themes of absence, longing, memory, and myth. Baik shares progress from her art studio every two weeks on the-line-between.com, a Substack-featured publication. Her essays have appeared in various serials, including Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. She received a BA in French from Wellesley College; she has no formal training in filmmaking or animation. She is a member of the Korean American Artist Collective.

Fellowship Statement

I currently work in animation, painting, and prose. Visual mediums facilitate connection through ambiguity; verbal mediums do so through clarity. I’m excited to plumb these mechanics in a unified practice during the Fellowship. In storytelling, I've been interested in connecting dots between micros and macros (familial, national; individual, cultural) in the context of my various identities—as Korean, American, and cis-gender woman. I make films because, for one, I believe they make it possible to engage with a general audience, even through such a specific lens. During this Fellowship, I’ll begin working on my next animated short film. I‘m investing in tools such as a downshooter animation stand to explore new filmmaking techniques. I plan to travel for research, and hope to spark collaborations. I look forward to growing in both knowledge and craft with the help of this award.

Calley N. Anderson (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright from Memphis, TN. Her work has been staged at several colleges and 10-minute play festivals around the country, including commissions by the Davidson College Theatre Department and the University of Memphis Department of Theatre and Dance. Anderson is currently a National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Resident Playwright. Her work has been supported by Page 73, SPACE on Ryder Farm/RE Endeavors, American Theatre Group PlayLab, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, MacDowell, Liberation Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, and the Dramatist Guild Foundation. Anderson holds an MFA from New School for Drama and a BA from Davidson College.

Fellowship Statement

Almost everything I do (personally, professionally, and artistically) is inspired by, in service of, and/or a reflection of Southern Black folks. My Memphian-ness is the heartbeat of my work. Even if a particular play is not set in Memphis or the South, both are woven into the work—alive and pulsing in the background because it is my frame of reference for being in this world. I believe it creates an on-ramp for other Southern Black folks: to fully see themselves as the critical part of someone’s journey, the main and supporting characters on someone’s stage, and the audience, whose opinion matters most to at least one person in the world. Like many before me, I hope to use my work not just to build new narratives for Southerners to hold, but also for those beyond our Mason-Dixon to witness, engage with, and take seriously. 

Photo by Nathaniel Johnston.

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work explores the cybernetic and temporal entanglements within societal dynamics. She aims to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. Aliyu is a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation. Her work has been presented internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design Week (Vienna, Austria), Film at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh, PA), Centre for Heritage, and Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.

Fellowship Statement

I draw upon my body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculptures, videos, installations, virtual environments, publications, archives, and social practice. Grounded in antiracist, decolonial, and feminist critiques of technology, my work situates personal, familial, and ancestral histories within broader sociopolitical frameworks. During the fellowship, I plan to research, conceptualize and build new works that experiment with sculptural and digital media, with an aim to expand the narrative possibilities of my practice.

ỌLÁKÌÍTÁN ADÉỌLÁ is a writer and experiential artist working between the lyric, multimedia installation, and theatrical performance. Kìítán’s artistry is in flux with ÌSÈSE of the Yorùbá tradition and continually devoted to storytelling eros and wayward survival. He authored the interactive memoir, Whiskery Squid and the experiential art box, Perfekt Trans~. Kìítán’s work has been exhibited and published in The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Wrong Biennale, Five Myles, NY Art Book Fair, Swiss Art Awards, For Space, Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast Journal, amongst others, and has received support from CUE Art Foundation, Recess Art, the Toni Beauchamp Award, Lucky Risograph, and The School for Poetic Computation.

Fellowship Statement

I dwell with lived experience, poke underneath the hood of time, slice and cut things apart to unravel submerged—historical, bodily, and psychic—realities within. Survival is also laying our stories bare. I am crafting a house—a novel—honouring ancestral thrums, heat and native rhythms. For a verse novel that crawls across generations, striding through time drenched in wild love and grief, it is important to give ear and eyes abundantly to its grunts, where it breaks and desires to be stitched back with crimson and gold streaks. This Fellowship will support my time to drill more into the lyric as a form to animate history and as a poetics of being. Perhaps epics choose us. I’ve had a realtime experience of this. The lyric and I continue to have the most intricate relationship.

A. E. Wynter is a Black, Jamaican-descended writer, editor, and curator living in Saint Paul, MN. She has received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and has organized various events throughout the Twin Cities, including readings, writing workshops, and multimedia art exhibits. Wynter was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series and a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency. Her poems have appeared in Torch Literary Arts, West Trade Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Wynter received The Florida Review 2024 Editors’ Award in Poetry, the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Fellowship Statement

As a writer, I explore many themes: family and womanhood, home and spirituality, memory and language, ghosts and genetic inheritance, the dissonance between being Black and American. Recently, I have begun to examine these themes through the lens of the body, or rather, body translation—interrogating emotional, spiritual, and physical scars to create a conversation in which the body talks back. Is body memory our most reliable record keeper? How does a body housing fractured histories become whole? Throughout the Fellowship, I will work on in-progress poetry collections and continue to experiment with existing and (re)imagined forms, finding ways of “bodying” the poem to process personal and communal histories. The goal is to create another language in which to understand the world, the self, and the unseen. 

Photo by Davide Ranieri.

Oanh Vu (she/her) is a puppeteer, educator, and community organizer. As a second-generation Vietnamese American, she employs humor and the playful art of puppetry to weave narratives centered on healing and social change for her communities. Her latest puppet show, Phantom Loss, follows a cast of multi-generational Vietnamese characters as they navigate the legacies of war and what healing can look like in the wake of historical violence. Oanh has been recognized with grants from the Jim Henson Foundation in 2023 and 2024. She began her puppetry journey with Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop and served as a 2024 Maker Series Artist in Residence at Pillsbury House Theatre. Her work has reached audiences at various venues across the Twin Cities, including In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, Minnesota Opera, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), the Playwrights' Center, and Theater Mu.

Fellowship Statement

I hope to use this Fellowship to support the creation of my next puppet show, which will delve into the impacts of labor and capitalism on Asian Americans, whose value is often measured by their productivity. These damaging perceptions contribute to wage inequality and lead to issues such as overextension and burnout.

Additionally, I am excited about using this Fellowship to better balance my role as an artist with my work as an educator, and community organizer. I wrestle with how to effect tangible changes in people's material conditions. This is a question I am actively exploring and look forward to unpacking further. I find that narrative is a powerful tool to shape our understanding of the world and thus a way to create political change. The puppetry field in America is sorely lacking BIPOC artists, so many of our stories are missing from this artform, despite puppetry having historical global roots. As a Vietnamese American I want to continue creating shows that are unapologetically Vietnamese but generally accessible to non-Vietnamese people.

Photo by Ryan Stopera.

Amy Usdin weaves onto worn nets, sculpting work that speaks to loss, longing, and the dissonance of nostalgia. With a BFA in Graphic Communications from Washington University, St. Louis, she began her current practice in 2018. She has exhibited throughout the United States and in Australia in surveys representing the diversity and breadth of contemporary craft and fiber art. In 2025, she will open solo shows at Lawton Gallery in Green Bay, WI and the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, TN. Usdin has held residencies with Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the Miller Art Museum, and Praxis Fiber Workshop. She has received past support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Usdin  is a 2024 Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award recipient and a 2024/25 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellow.

Fellowship Statement

I needle-weave abstract physical and psychological landscapes onto aging fiber artifacts—most often fly nets for horses and fishing nets. As I recontextualize these materials of trade into critical and aesthetic space, the transformation creates new narratives that honor the revolving intersections of past and present. The ragged nets act as empathic objects, offering a point of connection and shared humanity. I am increasingly interested in the correlation between bodies of land and water and bodies of flesh and blood—the trauma they endure, what is inevitable versus imposed; weaving fills a need to document these scars aesthetically. Throughout the Fellowship years, this slight conceptual shift will find expression through net sculptures as well as loom-woven work that sits in conversation with them.

Mohammed Sheikh is a self-taught filmmaker, director, and cinematographer dedicated to capturing the unique narratives of Somalis. His filmmaking journey began unexpectedly in the Kebribeyah refugee camp in Eastern Ethiopia. There, his mother’s storytelling and audio tapes kindled a passion in him for storytelling and film. Through films like The Forgotten Ones and Balwo, he sheds light on the resilience, culture, and experiences of his community, aiming to foster understanding and preserve Somali stories. His work is a blend of authenticity and visual impact, celebrating the depth of Somali life. His short narrative films The Forgotten Ones and Luul have received recognition on platforms like CBS, Sahan Journal, and MPR News. Sheikh received a grant from the 2023 Jerome Foundation MN Film Production program.

Fellowship Statement

I aspire to tell authentic Somali stories that amplify community voices and challenge stereotypes. By adding dreamlike visuals and symbolic imagery, I want to bring fresh perspectives to my work and spark important conversations. During the Fellowship, I plan to focus on improving my craft, sharing my films at festivals, and connecting with a wider audience. I’m working to share my documentary The Forgotten Ones, which highlights the opioid crisis in the Somali community. This opportunity will allow me to dedicate myself fully to my artistic journey and make a meaningful impact through my storytelling. I’m currently working on my first feature film, Barni, about three friends searching for a missing girl in a Somali village and developing a new project about family and displacement.