Past
Grantees

Jobi Adams and Brandi Foster are long-time best friends who together make up the folk duo Pine & Fire. They met in 2011 while attending an arts high school in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. There Brandi studied music while Jobi studied writing. That’s still reflected in their roles today as Pine & Fire with Jobi being the main songwriter and Brandi being the multi-instrumentalist. Together, they make original music influenced by American Roots music of the past and the struggles of today. In 2021 they gained visibility when they became finalists in the GemsOnVHS: Gems in the Rough Songwriting Contest which saw over 700 entries. Later in 2021 they were featured on Ditty TV’s 12 Artists You Should Know. Over the past three years they’ve released three self-produced projects, We’re All Thinking It… (2020), The Son (2021), and People Come & Go (2022). In 2022, Pine & Fire took their music to 13 different states.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We describe our music as contemporary American folk music with a punk sentiment. We do what folk music has always done: challenge the status quo and document the times we’re living in. Folk music functions like an archive, a documentation of what common people were experiencing throughout history. We contribute to that archival lineage by bringing traditional folk influences through time into our own music about today. While we often sing songs of struggle and grief, we also sing of joy, growth, and imagining a world beyond struggle.

In 2022, we went on a month-long self-booked tour and released our third self-recorded project. While we take pride in our D.I.Y. ethics, we’re looking forward to the opportunity to work with others in 2023. We’re hoping that this year we can record and release our first full length studio album, a collection of original songs exploring working class life in the Northland.

Ka Baird is a performer, composer and sound designer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and a psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. They have worked/collaborated with many other musicians, artists, filmmakers and choreographers, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation and interdisciplinary work.

Recent engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), and Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL). They were a 2020 recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art's Emergency Grant as well as a Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Roulette Intermedium in 2018.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

With the generous support of this fellowship I plan on continuing to explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. By combining experimental sound design with sound-reactive gestures, movement and acts of physical endurance, I will continue to challenge notions of how sound is presented and shared. I plan to further my explorations in acoustic processing, extended microphone techniques, granular synthesis, modular synthesis, sampling and embodied practice. I want to expand my compositional process and create larger scale, interdisciplinary works that involve multiple collaborators.

Photo by Alex Phillipe Cohen.

Victoria Blanco is a writer from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Her first book, Out of the Sierra, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2023. The research and writing for this book were supported by a Fulbright Award, with additional research, grant and residency opportunities supported by the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, BreadLoaf, East Side Freedom Library as part of Coffee House Press’ In-the-Stacks and the 2018 Roxane Gay Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction at the Jack Jones Literary Arts writers’ retreat. Blanco’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult and Bat City Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a Fellow in the 2017–2018 Loft Mentor Series.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am beginning work on my second book, which will use archival footage, oral history, family stories, and personal memory to narrate the story of the U.S.-Mexico border as it runs through the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The book will also focus on the sin fronteras/no borders movement that is rooted in these cities, with the aim of imagining the sister cities as borderless.

Solomon J Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They were a Tin House Graphic Narrative Resident in Fall 2021. Their work is often about memory and mourning in the aftermath of violence, intertwined colonial histories, and joyful resistance to fascism everywhere. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach as adjunct faculty in history, media, and gender studies. Their first monograph, the graphic nonfiction work Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am currently in the process of completing a graphic nonfiction book, Heavyweight, which interrogates my own family history in the context of European colonialism and the Holocaust, and multidirectional memory from a third generation perspective. My work is deeply invested in accessible communication of ideas through visual storytelling, and the work that pictures and words do together. As a trained historian, my comics are research driven, and I encounter analog painting as a way of sitting with the stories I’m working to tell. During the Jerome Foundation Fellowship, I hope to expand my practice in new directions, while developing a graphic novel project based on archival research, which will tell the story of a multigenerational haunting and organized crime in the world of Jewish Baltimore.

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.

Donte Collins (they/them; b. Chicago Heights. 1996) is a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright, and movement artist named the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Saint Paul, Minnesota. They have received fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, The Adroit Journal, the McKnight Foundation, The National Urban League, The Dramatist Guild Foundation, Frontier Poetry, Indiana Review, and BOMB Magazine. They believe poems allow us to wander back to ourselves, to meet ourselves anew. They believe poems are deeply human gestures here to gather us, to propose new, critical & compassionate floor plans for the future, for the self. They believe poems are the beginning. They are an alum of TruArtSpeaks, an arts & culture organization cultivating literacy, leadership, and social justice through the study & application of Spoken Word and Hip Hop culture. Their choreopoem Mercy is forthcoming.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Mercy is a dreamscape, an un-language-able anti-disciplinary book of erasure, both kneading & collapsing reactive attachment disorder, adoption, apophatic theology, afro-pessimism & be-longing. Mercy is a book of jazz wishing to capture each speaker’s emotional mapping by rupturing lyrical poetry to fuse re-memory, family, culture, dream-inheritances, and history in hopes of radically shifting the speaker’s senses of (selves) in the face of childhood neglect. Punctuated with erasures of a clinical diagnosis, we watch the speaker transform their condition (one many adoptees face) by constructing fire escapes through language, fleeing memory, childhood, and the church. Each set aflame in the name of salvation.

For my fellowship, I’ll focus on further adapting this manuscript for the stage. This project has shed its name and form many times since its inception, and I hope to keep following its pulse to a place of sharing with you. I’ll also spend this time taking professional development courses + seeking mentorship to help shape its theatrical elements. This fellowship will also give me time to center rest and balance as an artist + human. I’m forever in awe of where my wonder can lead me, and it feels particularly surreal to have landed among such a passion-driven cohort + foundation. I cannot wait to share what I find with Jerome’s generous support.

Gen Del Raye (he/him) is half Japanese and was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. His debut story collection, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. His writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Best Small Fictions 2017, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, MN, where he loves the winters and misses the ocean.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My upbringing in Japan and subsequent move to the US when I was eighteen reflects a complicated mix of privilege and othering, and I strive to explore this truthfully and honestly through my work. My forthcoming book, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, is a portrait of a mixed-race family that holds together despite the societal, historical, and linguistic pressures that threaten to pull it apart. Outside of my writing, I work as a translator and interpreter, and I try to use the skills gained through this work to inform my creation of multilingual fiction. Right now, I am particularly interested in finding new ways to carry the puns and wittiness of non-English dialogue into English-language stories in a way that privileges bilingual readers.

Sxr OM Dxtchxss-Davis is a playwright from Minneapolis. The rhythms and cultures of North Minneapolis and Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions are infused in the worlds of their plays, which aim to redefine blackness in terms of love, family, community and the magic that comes along with not knowing where one truly came from. They received a 2016-2017 Many Voices Fellowship from the Playwrights’ Center and have since presented their work locally at Pillsbury House + Theatre. Dxtchxss-Davis has also recently received the I Am Soul National Black Theater (2019) and the Apothetae and Lark Playwriting Fellowship. They studied playwrighting and sociology at Augsburg College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My goal in life is to create stories that reflect black life in America. I went to college for sociology, so I could understand how the system works, so I could destroy it. During my time studying, I took a few playwriting classes. As a kid I always wanted to be a writer, I never thought it come true, never thought I was good enough. As I start to live my dreams as a writer, I constantly go back to this idea of destroying the system, but more importantly creating a system, a way of life that can replace the one we are currently surviving. When I was 14 I met my brother Tino, he is a spirit. Tino has a different way of moving, living and loving. Through Tino, I found Oko--  my safe place. I believe the way to save blackness in America, is through Oko.

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.

Hamilton’s work expands on themes at the intersection of race and Disability. She uses elements of her training in traditional West-African and Postmodern Dance, as well different access practices, mainly Audio Description, as an integral part of the creative process and final product of everything she makes.

Hamilton’s work as a performance maker has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). As a performer, Hamilton has worked with Skeleton Architecture, Maria Bauman/MBDance, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Gesel Mason Performance Projects.

Hamilton has taught dance at several colleges and has been a special education teacher in the New York public school system for the past 12 years. As a Disability Arts consultant, she has worked with the Mellon Foundation, ArtSpeak, Dance USA, The Shed and Movement Research.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am currently working on two different projects:

An Immersive, multidisciplinary installation and performance titled How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up, which explores the growth, use and medicalization of cotton as a historical thread between Blackness and Disability. This piece utilizes a multimedia design, multiple Audio Descriptors and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performer's changing needs.

A trio between myself, a D/deaf movement artist and an ASL interpreter. In this trio, we will utilize a narrow platform as a stage, and embody the conflicts that can arise when certain existing access practices contradict, or exist at the expense of one another. Through the rigor of dancing with and thinking through the differences of our specific Disabilities and where they meet, we will also move towards the tangible and/or utopian longing to find a space that can attend to the needs of every-body.

Nazareth Hassan is a writer, director, and musician. They work interdisciplinarily in writing, performance, sound, music, and image-making. Their performances and plays have been performed and workshopped at The Royal Court Theatre, Theatertreffen Stuckemarkt, The Shed, The Vineyard Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, MINT Gallery, Jermyn St. Theatre, and Museo Universario del Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC CDMX). Their performance score Untitled (1-5) was published by 3 Hole Press. Sound composition work includes A Song of Songs at The Bushwick Starr, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Everything I Will Be at JACK, and This House is Not a Home at Substance Skatepark. He has released three singles. They are the resident dramaturg at The Royal Court Theatre.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I make work about ambivalence and juxtaposition: the experience of having two or more great and contradictory feelings, identities, and beliefs in one body; the moment an hour feels like a year and a second; the worst consequences of an ecstatic high. In between the various sensations I make work about what I think is the essential experience of being a person. I make work about the in-betweenness itself. I am deeply compelled by the social experiment of theatre. Text, movement, and aesthetics are deeply intertwined versions of each other. The text is a hypothesis: a manifesto on gathering and assembly. The room, the rehearsal, is the proof and complication of the hypothesis, the manifesto in action. This involves facilitating self-recognition, vulnerable self-disclosure, groupthink, and hyper individuation.

I am currently working on my plays Bowl EP, about two lovestruck skater boys, VANTABLACK, a performative exploration of the hopelessness of reparations, and Untitled (1-5), a choral text performance that turns sensation into language.

Sequoia Hauck (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, trans, Anishinaabe and Hupa multidisciplinary artist creating film, poetry, and performance art that decolonizes the process of art-making. Their work weaves together Indigenous epistemologies, queer and trans identity and the exploration and possibilities of Indigenous futurism. They make art surrounding the narratives of continuation and resiliency among their communities. Their films have been in the Minnesota International Film Festival and the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. They are a Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) New Angles 2020-2021 Fellow, as well as a recipient of the SPNN Fresh Vantage Post Production grant supporting their upcoming documentary series They Didn't Deserve to Die. www.sequoiahauck.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am finishing my upcoming film They Didn’t Deserve to Die, a six episode documentary about six Native families across Turtle Island sharing their heart-wrenching stories of loved ones lost to police brutality. Through memories, stories, and home videos these families honor the lives their sons and brothers lived, not just the day they died. I plan to tour the film to the communities who contributed and shared their stories. This will be the first audiences of the film as a way to honor and celebrate the lives of those we have lost. I believe filmmaking is a powerful form of storytelling. I will take this time during my fellowship to intentionally further my artistic practices. To weave and connect more with ancestors and relatives. Learning from my queer, trans, indigiqueer, two-spirit kin to honor what they have to share and soak up the knowledge they are willing to gift.

Tahiel Jimenez Medina (he, him his; they, them, theirs) is a Colombian first-generation immigrant director. In dedication to his mother and immigrant mamas who escape generational violence, he presents Colombian immigrant identity through a lens that celebrates ever-evolving emotional and ancestral journeys, memories, and dreams. His visions about immigrant and Colombian identity are culture catalysts to decolonize, remember, and heal ancestral cycles. Medina has premiered films at national and international film festivals including Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, New York Latino Film Festival, and Provincetown International Film Festival—and in local parking lots for his community to gather and imagine new worlds. His documentary about Colombian immigrants in Minnesota, Día a Día 2020: One Day at a Time, is available on PBS online channels (pbs.org, PBS Video App). Recent recognition includes The TPT PBS 2020 Project, The Next Step Grant, The Apichatpong Weerasethakul PlayLab Workshop, and The McKnight Artist Fellowship.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

For this fellowship, I will tend to my creative spirit and relationships to family, friends, and collaborators. It will be a time to be radically honest about what kind of films my soul yearns to create and with who I co-create this path forward. I will rest, focus, and reflect in preparation to develop my first narrative feature film. This film will bring to light the stories of my community and ancestors who shine through me.

For part of my fellowship, I will collaborate with my aunties and my mother to record and make films of the stories of our lives. Their magical journeys tell of spicy romance, unbroken courage rooted in love, and unfathomable lived tragedies. Their narratives will inspire generations far into the future. I dedicate this fellowship to them, in all their undeniable beauty, in their profound wisdom, and unparalleled presence.

Raven Johnson is an award winning, Liberian-American filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work deals with the realities of Black experiences in predominantly white spaces around the American Midwest. Raven graduated with her MFA from NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film program and is the current filmmaker-in-residence at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Raven is a 2022 Locarno Film Festival resident in Switzerland, a recipient of Jerome Foundation’s 2021 MN Artist Development Grant, a 2021 Jerome Emerging Artist-in-Residence at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and a 2019-2020 Cinéfondation resident in Paris. Johnson is currently in development with her debut feature film, RUBY: PORTRAIT OF A BLACK TEEN IN AN AMERICAN SUBURB which has received support from SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a filmmaker, I am deeply committed to telling stories of the African diaspora that focus on Black Joy and Black Liberation as its central source of healing. My goal is to create films that are thought-provoking, emotionally resonant, and which tackle complex issues about the intersectionality of race, gender, and class with profound nuance and astute sensitivity. My hope is that my work will provoke deep and meaningful discourse for a worldwide audience.

Founder & Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks, Tish Jones is a writer, educator, organizer and cultural producer from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people, arts & culture, youth development, and civic engagement. As a performance artist her work has been shared in venues throughout the United States. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center, 2020), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015) and more.

Jones has been awarded fellowships from the Arts Matters Foundation, Springboard for the Arts, The Intercultural Leadership Institute, and more. She is grateful for the grants & awards that have allowed her the space to continue her creative and community practices, respectively. For more on her personal praxis, see Jones’ TEDxMinneapolis Talk on “Spoken Word as a Radical Practice of Freedom.”

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will utilize my time as a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow to research, write, produce and publish my first poetry manuscript.

Lea Kalisch is a Swiss Jewish singer, actor, entertainer and creative producer. Lea makes multi-cultural, multilingual art that brings together music, dance, drama, and comedy, on stage and on screen, always leading with Yiddishkayt (Jewishness). Some know her as the Eshet Chayil of Hip Hop, others as Rebbetzin Lea with her Yiddish comedy skits.

Lea had multiple appearances in the US and Switzerland with her one woman show In love with a dream! Lea released her first solo album of the same name in 2022. She’s performed solo concerts in NYC, Boston, Munich, Zurich and Vienna and has played leading roles in various Off-Broadway productions and regional theaters such as The New Yiddish Rep, The Six Points Theater, National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, HERE Arts Center. Lea is also the 2020 recipient of the Omanut-Zwillenberg prize which awards Swiss Jewish artists.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

It is my mission to share the rich Jewish culture with ALL people by creating new, deep and entertaining Jewish content that CLASHES with other cultural traditions. As a Swiss polyglot living in the US for many years, I see myself as a citizen of the world, building bridges across different groups of people connecting Europeans and Americans, Jews and non-Jews.

The stories I tell are rooted in reality. I focus on Judaism, women, sexuality, the female body, the roles of men and women. My work often questions beliefs, religion, identity, sexuality, and dreams.

I will dive into my project Tango- A Prayer For Two, a film and/or a stage play, that brings together Yiddish and Tango. Through music, dance, and dialogue I will tell the incredible, tragic, and true story about Zwi Migdal, a Jewish mafia who brought women from Eastern Europe to brothels in South America. Where do I fit in the story? You will see…

Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture Woman Filmmaker Fellowship and Sisters in Cinema Documentary Fellowship. Kayiza is the recipient of the 2022 Documentary Development Initiative grant in partnership with HBO Documentary Films and The Gotham. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Crystal was the winner of the 2020 Tribeca Through Her Lens grant with her film Rest Stop, which premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and was selected for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. She is currently working on her first feature film, which received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a filmmaker, my work has been defined by exploring the in-between. The space between scripted and non-fiction cinema, the western world and the African Diaspora, all of the lines separating communities in my hometown in Oklahoma, the interior of my home as a child of immigrants and my access to space as a US citizen. The emphasis on location, memory and time in my work is largely rooted in a desire to define this gap and to make this nuance more legible. I am interested in how all of these things intersect with the most mundane elements of our lives. The everydayness that we often overlook, particularly within the inner lives of Black folks, is what I find most compelling. During the fellowship period, I plan to continue to work on my first scripted and non-fiction feature projects as well as pursue joy and rest in the most unremarkable and quiet parts of my daily life.

Sam Kebede is a first-generation Ethiopian/Eritrean-American writer/actor/comedian. He's performed at/had his works presented at venues including The Public, Ars Nova, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the Venice International Film Festival. His award-winning play ETHIOPIANAMERICA premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago (produced by Definition Theater Company), and he currently writes for the show Tough Bobas, an anti-CCP series shot and produced in Taiwan. Sam also loves to perform stand up, and has an hour long set titled I’m Ostracized because I'm Ostrich-Sized. You can also stream his solo show Lack History through Ars Nova Supra, or catch a production at Caveat on the LES.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The goal of my fellowship period is to further develop my show Lack History, which is a comedy variety game show about the history we ignore and ramifications of that ignorance. Through a combination of games and stand up, I bring the audience on a journey to confront the ills of our past through comedy. They are asked to complete tasks/answer questions to earn money for non-profits that attempt to address those ills. The long-term goal for this development is to make three tiers of shows. The first form would be a complete non-profit model that creates a set production that can be performed continuously. The second is a form of the show that is freshly made on a regular basis that examines our current historical moment for schools or communities throughout NYC/the tri-state area. The third form would be a for-profit version of the show that markets itself to corporations as a DEI event. Companies could pay for an in-office show that would include a talk-back afterward to unpack how their company can do more to benefit their immediate communities.

Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn. Her videos, installations, and performances center on the formation of political ideology, historical mythologies, and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Through poetic intervention into archival sources and legal documents, her work seeks to unsettle foundational national myths. Her practice is grounded in collaboration, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, as a way to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries.

Keren’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Eyebeam, New York; The James Gallery, New York (forthcoming); The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv; Goethe Institute, New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park among others. Her projects received support through fellowships and awards from Artadia, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Artis, Socrates Sculpture Park, A-Z West, ISCP, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

In this ongoing moment of crisis, I ask myself what it means to be a cultural producer? How can re-telling of history and collaborative artmaking counter hegemonic narratives while having a transformative potential?

I often think about these questions from a comparative, transnational lens. I moved to New York from Jerusalem in 2014 at moment of rising populism and ethnonationalism in the world. This geographical shift allowed me to look at the overlapping messianic political power structures and settler-colonial imaginaries which connect Israel and the United States. Through immersive and participatory environments, I try to render how state-violence is often disguised under a veil of beauty and mythology. Each project sends me on years of archival research and filming, resulting in an exhibition that becomes a space of collective inquiry, counter-narratives, resistance, and an investigation of political imagination.

Halee Kirkwood is a poet, teaching artist, and bookseller living in Minneapolis. Kirkwood earned their MFA from Hamline University. They are an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) fellow, a Loft Mentor Series Fellow, a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a recent artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Artists, published with Poetry Northwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Kirkwood is the faculty editor of Runestone Journal, a national undergraduate literary annual. Originally from Superior, Wisconsin, they are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My primary concern as a writer is to radically redefine nature and place-based poetry. Rather than poetry that presents a static, passive portrait of nature and place, I am invested in writing that embodies living ecologies and histories, poetry that necessitates deep attention, specificity, humility, justice, and action. I am currently focused on two landscapes in my work that I plan to continue work on during my fellowship period. First, I plan to continue my poetry manuscript-in-progress on collisions of class within manufactured ecologies, braiding my experience as a life-long retail worker from a low-income background with a sense of scientific observation. Second, I plan on advancing my writing on the Lake Superior region by beginning a lyric essay manuscript, tracing the Ojibwe migration path along the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river areas. Through this nascent project, I want to explore what it means to be a mixed white & Ojibwe traveler through prose, inviting in periods of research, interview, and lyric immersion.