Mary Prescott is a Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. Her output includes several large-scale interdisciplinary works involving music, theater, film, word, and movement; as well as improvised music, opera, sound journaling, film music, solo, and chamber concert works. Prescott is an awardee of the McKnight Composer Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, NPN Creation and Development Fund, a New Music USA Grant, and many more. Her recent residencies include Loghaven, Camargo, VCCA, and Lanesboro Arts. Prescott holds piano performance degrees from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Manhattan School of Music and is a Steinway Artist.

Fellowship Statement

Responding to my own encounters with marginalization, I create embodied work that draws critical attention toward social imbalances. By illuminating invisible stories, recovering lost and forgotten identities, and untangling systemic impacts of social and cultural structures, my work gives voice and brings awareness to underrepresented communities and subject matter, focusing on Asian-Americans, women, and mothers. I connect to audiences with searching, mysterious, and evocative performances that activate empathy and responsibility, and ultimately initiate social change and justice. During my Jerome Fellowship, I will develop Ancestral Table, a shared meal and interdisciplinary performance, including music, word, movement, and film, that examines the relationships between ecology, migration, cultural inheritance, and maternal legacy through my Thai mother’s family recipes. This work furthers my explorations of Asian mythologies, folklore and Futurism.

Photo by Bill Phelps.

Alys Ayumi Ogura (オグラ アリス ア有美)(she/her) is a dance performance-maker, storyteller, dancer, and through her movements, voice, and quirky humor. A Twin Cities-based native of Japan, Ogura has been developing her own work since 2015. Ogura started her dancing with two mentors: the late Mika Kurosawa and Rob Scoggins, who each offered unconditional encouragement. She has worked with more than 40 artists—near and far—including Hauser Dance, Emily Johnson/Catalyst, ASDC, Emily Gastineau, Sandrine Harris, Kata Juhasz, Pam Gleason, Pramila Vasudevan, and Laurie Van Wieren. Ogura has created more than 20 works performed in various U.S. venues, including the Walker Art Center and Southern Theater. Recognition highlights include: Arts Organizing Institute (2017-18), Naked Stages (2021) Fellowships, An Isolated Act commission at the Red Eye Theater’s New Works 4 Festival (2023), and Keshet Makers Space Experience Residency (2024). Ogura is also a steering-committee member for DanceMN.

Fellowship Statement

When I develop and perform my work, I want to challenge the audience's acceptance of ambiguity by flipping the power dynamic and centering on my mother tongue, and Japanese views and values. My thematic foci and social concerns focus on my identity as an Asian woman who speaks English with a Japanese accent.  I wonder how I can offer my audiences—particularly those with different cultural frameworks for navigating the world—a glimpse of my worldview. This is the question I want to continue pursuing, to provide a safer, more enjoyable, and perhaps even transformative experience for my audiences. I want to use my voice to give a platform to those who have similarly marginalized voices. Rather than appropriating others’ voices, I will be a good ally and amplify their voices through my own creative work. This is a challenging, but worthwhile endeavor I am eager to continue exploring. 

Photo by Pat Berrett. Courtesy of Keshet Makers Experience Space, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Taylor Ngiri Seaberg (they/them) is a Black, bi-polar, gender non-binary composer, multi-instrumentalist, photographer, and organizer based in South Minneapolis, Minnesota with artistic communities in Chicago and Mexico City. Born in Kusel, Germany, migrating to the southeast coast in Norfolk, Virginia, and settling with family in Minnesota, Ngiri was introduced to different music styles in their formative years. Their main love is the bass guitar. They go by the tongue-in-cheek artist moniker, “Manic Pixie Dream Boi” to highlight representation of bi-polar disorder within the Black queer community. Ngiri was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board (MSAB) 2019 Cultural Community Partnership grant for an artist networking series called Artist Feast. They were awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) grant and Red Bull Arts grant for their protest photography around the Uprising in the Twin Cities in 2020 and a 2021 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Fund. They also performed in an artist residency, The Playground Experience, curated by 2021-2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Vie Boheme, in partnership with Public Functionary.

Fellowship Statement

Ngiri's work lies at the intersections of protest work (with photography and songwriting focusing on the Black experience) and breaking the mental health stigma, having been diagnosed with Bi-polar type 1 from a young age. They play bass and electric guitar, piano and flute, all of which they self-record and self-produce.

During the fellowship period, Ngiri aims to highlight the intersections of bi-polar disorder and artmaking, specifically with their self-produced (albeit slightly manic) album—a kaleidoscope of diverse beats called Manic Pixie Dream Boi, the queer tongue-in-cheek moniker that is also their artist name.

Photo by Alex Hazel.

Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet and educator. A former public school teacher, she received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell. A recent Philip Roth Resident and Hub City Writer in Residence, she has received fellowships from places such as Tin House, MacDowell, Millay Arts, and others. Her work can be found in various journals, including Nimrod, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix), Winter Tangerine, Frontier, Jaggery, and Callaloo. Masum-Javed was a 2023–24 Loft Mentor Series Fellow and 2024 Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellow. She has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, Caldera Arts, Hub City, Vermont Studio. She currently resides in Minnesota where she teaches at Macalester College and is finishing her first book.

Fellowship Statement

I am drafting and redrafting my first collection of poems, which at its heart questions: What does it mean to daughter? Each poem enters the question through a different door, untangling it through a new form. I've found that every door leads to another, and that the relationship and power systems within a home often mirror those of society. Perhaps the repair work of a family can reflect something back to us about transforming society. During the Fellowship, I will work on my second book, still a seedling. This new work will be a speculative, epistolary novel in verse—involving letters between a prophetic great-grandmother and her grandchild, both living on the same commune generations apart.

Blossom Johnson is a Diné playwright, dramaturg, and screenwriter. She is Yé'ii Dine'é Táchii'nii, and her maternal grandfather is Deeshchíí'nii. She was awarded a residency with Willowtail Springs in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Additionally, she has been awarded AlterTheater Ensemble's AlterLab 2020-21, the 2022 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship, 2022 Netflix Animation Foundations Program Mentee, La Lengua/ AlterTheater Ensemble's Decolonization Stories Commission 2022, The Playwrights' Center 2022-2023 Jerome Fellowship, and the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals for the 2023 and 2024 fiscal year. Her play, Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being), Or A Boarding School Play, made the Kilroys 2023 Web list, and had a World Premiere with Bag&Baggage Productions and Native Theater Project. Johnson holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and a BA in Theatre from Arizona State University.

Fellowship Statement

I am honored to be a 2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and I am excited to continue to serve my community as a storyteller. During my Fellowship I will conduct research, learn, and continue to write a new play and musical that centers Diné experiences. I want to strengthen my community by leaning into my culture, history and language. By doing this I can disrupt the dominant American Theatrical narrative that often does not highlight, engage and empower Native people and their stories. This little rez girl is full of joy, hope and possibilities. Axhéhéé (Thank you)!! 

Photo by Joshua Cummins.

Roshan Ganu is a multimedia artist originally from Goa-India, currently based in Minneapolis. She works at the intersection of moving image collage, projection, and non-linear notions of space and time. Ganu is an awardee of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) by the Minneapolis Institute of Art for her exhibition titled रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine. She received the MCAD-Jerome Early Career Award in 2022 and was an artist in residence at Out of the Circle residency in Cairo, Egypt in 2023. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Medrar For Contemporary Art in Cairo- Egypt, MdW Art Fair in Chicago, Rochester Art Center, and Soo Visual Art Center in Minnesota, among others. Publications such as Brooklyn Rail, Star Tribune, Minnpost, MNArtists-Walker Art Center, and Minnesota Public Radio have written about her work with features, articles, and interviews. Ganu currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at Hamline University.

Fellowship Statement

During the Fellowship, I intend to use the video medium to explore a familiar place: the Konkan region which lies along the west coast of India. This is where I grew up, as did the past few generations of my family. As a foreigner in Minneapolis and a local in the Konkan belt, I am curious about the aesthetic that will emerge from this relationship. My work plays with narrative in visual layers that reappear from one body of work to another. I am pursuing an archive of this unique visual vocabulary via the myriad languages and places that build my identity, especially the Marathi language. As a moving image artist, my transdisciplinary installations invoke each aspect of our consciousness: the sensorial, emotional, physical, spiritual, the awake, as well as the sleeping. An immersive space activates this multi-modal engagement, wherein intricately layered video, narrative, sound, color, light, and texture makes the work accessible to a broad spectrum of audiences.

Photo by Roshan Ganu.

Tommy Franklin is a filmmaker, writer, producer, and creator of Weapon of Choice Podcast. He was a founding board member of All Square, is a founding board member of Ostara Initiative, and is a communications consultant at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. His documentary You Don’t Know My Name (in production) has received support from Sundance, ITVS, Firelight Media, The Marshall Project, The Just Trust, Jerome Foundation, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Vital Projects Fund, and others. As of late, Franklin has developed his artistic practice during fellowships with Film Independent, CNN, Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, and others. Franklin’s one hour drama pilot Intrepid was a finalist for 2021’s Sundance Episodic Lab, and he was a 2022 Sundance BIPOC Mentorship Program Mentee. A double survivor of incarceration (born in prison and formerly incarcerated), he creatively reimagines power structures, focusing on Black liberation. He’s sure he wants to do this.

Fellowship Statement

My artistic growth requires ongoing self-reflection, as well as interrogating society and my role in it. I’m rooted in principles of creativity that come from lived experience, and I look forward to engaging and collaborating with artists who don’t run away from challenging realities we face in the world. The way formerly incarcerated people are stigmatized in society extends to the Hollywood ecosystem. We are seen as one-dimensional, “broken” with blatant character flaws and therefore not considered to be integral and valued in the storytelling process from the ground up, as if with our lived experience we aren’t the experts on the nuances within the justice-impacted universe. I spent three years in prison, locked away in five different correctional facilities. I have suffered deep pain and loss having lived through barriers connected to mass incarceration; the only journey toward healing for me is unfolding layers of truth through creative endeavors.

Zola Dee is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer whose works are deeply invested in exploring Black Americana, African diasporic religions, and imagining freer worlds for the Black collective body. Her plays include GUNSHOT MEDLEY, Smile, Goddamnit, and Father, Father. Other accomplishments include: 2023 I Am Soul National Black Theater Resident Playwright, Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow 2022-2023, Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellow 2021-2022, Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop 2019-2020. Dee is a graduate from California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in acting and a minor in creative writing. She is currently represented by WME and Management 360.

Fellowship Statement

I am currently developing a trilogy of plays set in the South Carolina Lowcountry, exploring the journey of a Black family from Reconstruction to the present day. The story centers a young girl named Presence who witnesses her mother's, already fragile mental health deteriorate after her grandmother dies and the family home is sold. Presence embarks on a literal journey through her family's past. She's determined to unearth the roots of the "sadness" that has plagued this family for generations and put an end to its cycle. This project is deeply intertwined with field research within the Gullah Geechee community. The Fellowship will provide invaluable support in continuing this research and expanding it to Bahia, Brazil, for a different set of plays I am developing. By connecting these narratives across port cities like Salvador and Charleston—spanning continents and time—I aim to showcase not only the resilience and complexities of the diaspora, but also our ever-enduring joy. 

Photo by Canaan Mattson.

Born and raised in North Dakota and now residing in Northern Minnesota, Elizabeth Chatelain is an award-winning documentary and narrative filmmaker. Her work focuses on women's perspectives from the rural Midwest. Her documentary short My Sister Sarah won the International Documentary Association’s Award for Best Student Documentary and was a Student Academy Award Finalist. Her films have screened at festivals across the country and the world, including Interfilm Berlin and SXSW. Chatelain’s feature projects have participated in the Berlinale Script Station, the Sundance Institute’s Financing Intensive, the Blacklist/Women in Film Writer's Residency and the Stowe Story Labs. She is an Academy Nicholl Fellowship Semi-Finalist and a Showtime Tony Cox Screenplay Competition Winner. She was awarded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Climate Storytelling Fellowship in 2024. Chatelain holds an MFA in Film and Video Production from University of Texas, Austin and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU-Tisch.

Fellowship Statement

As a filmmaker born in North Dakota and residing in rural Minnesota, I am passionate about telling stories from the rural Midwest, particularly from a woman’s perspective, with nuance and sensitivity. From the effects of the oil industry in Western North Dakota to the psychological and social intricacies of Minnesota’s farming culture, it is my vision to present the stories of the north—and ultimately other underrepresented areas—to the rest of the country and the world. I am also deeply committed to engaging rural communities in all of my work, collaborating with local artists and performers. I will shoot my debut feature film, Løvset's Manoeuvre, in Hibbing, Minnesota, in collaboration with the communities of the Iron Range. My aim is to tell thought-provoking, relatable stories from these unique areas that will resonate with people everywhere.

Photo by Roshan Murthy.

Noelle Awadallah نوال )she/her) is a Palestinian-American choreographer, dancer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance alongside Leila Awadallah. For six years (and counting), Awadallah has also been dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre. She holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).  Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. Sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multi-directional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. She has presented work at multiple venues such as Red Eye, University of Minnesota, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, and The Southern Theater. She is the recipient of the 2020 Hinge Arts Residency, a 2023 MOVO Residency, New Works Isolated Acts through Red Eye Theater, and the 2024 Creative Individuals Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Fellowship Statement

Over the next three years, I will be in embodied research concerning the connections between Palestine and South Dakota. I am planning to research Palestinian stories of land, exile, erasure, and displacement to the stolen land I grew up on in South Dakota to where I currently reside in Mni Sota Makoce. I am questioning how these three versions of home converse in birthplace, living place, and roots of origin, while examining principles of Land Back and the Right of Return. My multidisciplinary approach includes site-specific improvisation, writing, dance, and farming explorations. This fellowship will begin my research into farming and dancing side by side, as both laborious and ancestral practices held in the container of Body Watani, with my sister and creative collaborator Leila Awadallah.

Photo by Sabrina Jasmin.