Past
Grantees

Fana Fraser was born and raised on Kairi, now known as Trinidad and Tobago, and is currently living in Brooklyn on Lenape land. Her work is rooted in a contemporary Caribbean aesthetic and framed by narratives of eroticism, power, and compassion. Her performances have been presented at region(es): Central, ISSUE Project Room, Wassaic Project, Brooklyn Museum, The Knockdown Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, BAAD!, La MaMa Moves!, the CURRENT SESSIONS, Gibney, Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and Emerging Artists Theatre.

Fraser was a Movement Research Van Lier Fellow (2017), a resident artist at the inaugural MANCC Forward Dialogues Choreographic Lab (2017), the Dance & Performance Institute in Trinidad & Tobago (2016) and Dance Your Future (2016)—a project partnership between BAAD! and Pepatián. She has served as Rehearsal Director for Ailey II. A full spectrum doula-in-training, Fraser currently works as a co-director for Pepatián.

Fellowship Statement

I am guided

by spirit

animal

shadow

knowing and desire. I am from playful heat, fire and nebula

ocean, salt sweet, ferocious madness. Grounded by love and rage I dance,

embody sound and string language, to resurrect voices of ancestors

unsilenced,

I serve as a channel for remembered stories to be told.

I am opening to delightful fantasy, winding and spiraling things into wild

magnificence

in honor and as offering

to the survivors, the warriors who have come before me.

With kin, I am ready to help cast hope for the children of our children’s

children’s children,

to listen, give thanks and praise their dreams.

PaviElle is an amazing interdisciplinary artist, hailing from Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the recipient of an Upper Midwest Emmy Award as well as, a Sage Award for Dance and Choreography. She received a 2020 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Musicians and an, American Composers Forum Grant for her classical composition, A Requiem for Zula (2019) written in celebration of her Mother, Zula Young. She is known for her powerhouse vocals and for performing with an equally powerful 6-piece band. PaviElle was voted as Minneapolis City Pages “Best R&B Vocalist of 2015,” her band was named one of First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2015. She is a Teaching artist and a part of the Jazz Department Faculty at MacPhail Center for Music. PaviElle honed her craft as a teenager at Penumbra Theatre, SteppingStone Theatre and with collective, EduPoetic Enterbrainment.

Fellowship Statement

I am a composer, musician, lyricist, spoken-word artist, dancer, playwright, and actor. I am influenced by so many prolific artists, nationally and locally, however, I embody my own unique technique and sound. I am an artist who believes in alchemy and that art can be used as a vehicle to not only heal myself but, to heal others in the process as well. I have realized in this process that my niche is in combining all of my artistic disciplines to create shows with music, movement, acting, dramatic storytelling and singing. The next movement and goal for my career is creating multi-disciplinary shows and further deepening learning how to orchestrate scores for orchestras. I plan to travel to work with composer mentors, as well as, study healing sound therapies. And, I hope to tour my work from this fellowship, nationally and locally.

Eric Frye is an American composer and artist. He is known for his solo performance and installation work, which explore the dissociative and psychoactive functions of sound and image. Recently, he premiered audio-visual pieces in LA, Vancouver, Tokyo, and New York City. He has performed multi-channel works alongside central figures of experimental music including Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra (Ina GRM). His recent solo recordings include Diffusion Soliloquies (2020) and Sketches for Functional Music (2019) and sound design and voice processing for a short film, Elephant Juice, by Swiss designer Simone Niquille.  Frye’s work has been shown at HeK, Switzerland; Hangar Art Centre, Barcelona; Audio Visual Arts, New York City; Rochester Art Center, Minnesota; Variform Gallery, Oregon: and more. He has performed extensively in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.

Fellowship Statement

In 2020, I collaborated with Viennese artist Stefan Juster (Jung An Tagen). We produced two sound projects, Pulsar Acid and Variations for Computer Ashtray, with plans to work with film in the coming months. I am currently researching voice obfuscation software and ambisonics while collaborating with colleagues on a number of multi-disciplinary projects. Intertwining surreal narratives with a multi-disciplinary approach to sound, I am assembling a shapeshifting auditory scene, one that explores the malfunction of perception and how it relates to new ways of masking, or blurring the self.

Joua Lee Grande is a filmmaker, photographer and community educator whose goal to highlight underrepresented perspectives and communities drives her work. She produces documentaries and edits the news part-time at WCCO TV 4 News. She has produced short documentaries such as Legislating from Home and Laos Girls Teen Project. Grande was a 2019 Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow through Kartemquin Films and Community Film Workshop of Chicago. She is a member of collectives such as A-Doc and Brown Girls Doc Mafia and a community educator and worker. She teaches media production and related arts at the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network and other institutions throughout the Twin Cities. She is currently in early production for her first feature documentary Spirited.

Fellowship Statement

I believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that storytelling serves as a tool to share versions of the truth. I utilize documentary filmmaking as a tool to elevate voices, perspectives and experiences from communities that are either underrepresented or misrepresented in the larger society. My work often pushes into topics that are deemed uncomfortable such as menstruation taboo and guest-daughter traditions. My goals are to build connection, draw out commonalities amidst human differences, and push viewers into places of discomfort so they can engage in conversations that ultimately lead to positive change. I am a big believer in contributing to a community that lifts others up to tell their own stories. So much of what I learn in my own journey to become a stronger filmmaker, I willingly share with others.

Prince Harvey is a New York City-based artist, musician, and producer most famously known for recording his first album in an Apple Store. In 2017, he released an EP called Golden Child, followed by Stay Bold: 100 Days 100 Songs, where he premiered a new song every day for 100 days as a protest against Trump. In 2018, Prince was an artist at HarvestWorks and a commissioned artist at The Shed where he began work on a new music album and series of short films.

Harvey’s music has been featured in The New York Times, Noisey, Billboard, VICE, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Fader, and Afropunk among many others. Upon release of his first album, PHATASS, he received notice from major music and news publications, as well as celebrities like Lil Wayne, Russell Simmons and Talib Kweli. Prince Harvey’s forthcoming album will be released in Summer 2021.

Fellowship Statement

For the last one decade through music, film and performance works, I have been creating a guide that explores nuances of black and queer culture, usually censored from the general public. My practice is emboldened by my insatiable need to charter unchartered waters. To tell stories that haven't been told. To show the surprising extent of human potential through innovation and the exploring of new and unique avenues. Growing up without certain privileges, I have learned to infuse an element of hacking in the work that I do to accelerate the results that I want. As an artist I believe my talents are best utilized by creating personal and collective narratives that challenge widely accepted views of normalcy.

Jerron Herman (he/him) is a disabled artist working in dance and text to facilitate welcoming. From late 2018 into 2019 he produced four world premiere commissions for Gibney, Performance Space New York, The Whitney Museum, and Danspace Project, and performed excerpts at The Kennedy Center. Jerron joined Kinetic Light in 2019, having been a member of Heidi Latsky Dance since 2011.

Jerron has served on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA since 2017, most recently as Vice Chair. He was a finalist for the Lark Play Development Lab/Apothetae Fellowship and received The King’s College Alumni Award also in 2017. From 2019-2020 he curated the series Access Check 2.0: Mapping Accessibility for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and writes extensively on art & culture. Jerron was named a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

My work aspires to connect disparate contexts together to reveal their cohesion. In recent pieces I’ve sampled and sourced from history, popular culture, and text. Now, I wish to use my body as a source. Growing up in medicalized contexts such as physical and occupational therapy I relied on others’ expertise of my body to will it and control it; I experienced a similar fashioning in dance, but through movement experimentation have noticed explicit choreography across my limbs. When mitigating pain or crossing my body I’ve noticed the movement is active, and has the potential to parallel contexts outside the body. I’m following the symbolism in my diagnosis to reveal the scholarship inherent in the unnoticed quakes. What can my warring hemispheres teach me?

Susanna Horng is a Taiwanese-American writer, educator, mother, and activist. Her work has been supported by a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has been published in Bennington Review, Minerva Rising, and Global City Review. She is a teaching artist for Girls Write Now and a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University. She lives with her family in New York City.

Fellowship Statement

I write about the silence of being a woman from a patriarchal culture, the silence of being a woman of color navigating white spaces, the silence of being a mother and caretaker on the second shift.

I care about word play, multilingualism, and language. How multiple or misunderstood meanings of the same word(s) trigger deeper emotional truths. What gets voiced. What gets sacrificed. The costs of trying and failing to communicate.

I am finishing a collection of linked stories that examines the success and failures of the American Dream, the sorrows of living in one of the largest Chinese diasporas, and the loneliness of being the perpetual outsider. I am also working on a novel about privilege, class, and equity.

Phillip Howze is a playwright and theater maker whose works include Self Portraits (BRIC-Arts Media) and Frontieres Sans Frontieres (Bushwick Starr). His plays have been seen and developed at American AF Festival, Bay Area Playwrights, Clubbed Thumb, Lincoln Center Education, New York Theater Workshop, Page 73, PRELUDE, Public Theater/NYSF, San Francisco Playhouse, Sundance Theater Institute, Theatre Masters, and Yale Cabaret. He is currently a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3, and was recently named Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University’s new Theater, Dance & Media program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Fellowship Statement

Fellowship is a noun. Among its meanings are communion and companionship.  In a year of unfathomable loss, collective grievance and individual grief, when we have been necessarily distanced from each other, thoughts of fellowship could rightly feel like a throwback, or frivolity. Often for theater artists, fellowship has served as a friendly harbinger: a herald of hope, company and good humor. How might fellowship serve this same cause today? Not to commiserate with the times, but to imagine and commune in renewed ways. To wonder and refashion old words into new worlds. Together, to remember the meaning of things.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist. Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and in Film Festivals such as True/False, New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa, and Blackstar Film Festival. She was named to Filmmaker Magazine's 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List” and is the recipient of a 2020 San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, as well as a finalist in the 2020 Venice Film Festival’s prestigious film lab the Biennale Cinema College. She received a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO Fellowship, a 2015 TFI Future Filmmaker Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in modes of filmmaking and remembering that are liberatory for black women. My work deconstructs the default conventions of representation that we have been taught, weaving together non-fiction, theatrical performance, narrative intervention, and fantasy. The result is a style of storytelling where the past is always present, and time is not linear but in fact a constant weave.

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Bushwick-raised artist and educator. He was the 2015 Hispanic Organization of Latino Artists (HOLA) Best Ensemble Award Winner, ATI Best Actor Award Winner 2016, HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer 2017 and 2016 Princess Grace Honorarium in Theater. He has taught theater and poetry in NYC Public Schools for ten years. He has toured internationally and appeared on TEDxBushwick, performed in Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals, Richard Maxwell’s Samara, Kaneza Schaal’s JACK &. and Victor Morales’ Esperento. In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater’s UTR Festival for ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn.

Fellowship Statement

I am currently working on Taxilandia, a culmination of my work over the past 9 years that serves as a living collection of the people, spaces, and stories from my community. After the virtual run with La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and The Tank in NYC, when Covid-19 rules permit, I will start the groundwork for a live production with New York Theatre Workshop and the Bushwick Starr. After the city-run, I will use Taxilandia and what I've learned from my years of collaborative creation in New York City to lead conversations with displaced people across America. I want to collaborate with local artists and theaters to adapt the show for their own communities. The 15 years of teaching artist work and cataloging gentrification I’ve done within Bushwick will inform the artistic conversations I’ll have with communities across America.

Herb Johnson III (aka JDot Tight Eyez) graduated from Perpich Center for the Performing Arts in 2010 and studied 3 years at the Lundstrum Center for Arts. Johnson is now an an Urban & Street dance instructor at the University of Minnesota. He choreographs and performs solo and in groups 612 Crew, DeadPool, and Mixtape. Professional work includes iLuminate from America’s Got Talent, choreographing G-Easy's Halftime Show 2018, and Super Bowl 52 Halftime Show 2018 with Justin Timberlake. Johnson was a 2017 McKnight Dancer Fellow and received a 2018 Momentum: New Dance Works commission and a grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Additionally, he received a Jerome Travel/Study grant in 2018 to travel to Dusseldorf, Germany to attend European Buck Session’s annual Krump dance event.

Fellowship Statement

Herb Johnson III is a multi-disciplinary artist and Krump Scholar. As a leader of the Krump dance movement in Minnesota, he aspires to continue to build and bring visibility to the community through training within the style and event organization.

Gamin Kang, simply known as “gamin,” is a New York City-based multi-dimensional artist performing across the genres of traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations worldwide. Ralph Samuelson, a senior advisor of Asian Cultural Council, once praised gamin as “a true pioneer and innovator, leading traditional instruments in exciting new directions.” Gamin plays 3 types of Korean winds and is a designated Yisuja (Senior Diplomate), official holder of Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for Court and Royal Military music. Gamin earned her Doctorate in Korean Musical Arts at Seoul National University.

Re-inventing new sonorities from ancient, somewhat restrictive, musical systems, gamin has received several cultural exchange program grants, including Artist-in-Residence at the Asian Cultural Council, and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism of the Republic of Korea. Gamin has collaborated in cross-cultural improvisation in NYC with world-acclaimed musicians Jane Ira Bloom, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Jen Shyu, presenting premieres at Roulette, New School, and Metropolitan Museum. Gamin was a featured artist at the Silkroad concert, Seoul, 2018, performing on-stage with Yo-Yo Ma.

Fellowship Statement

I play three winds: piri (double reed bamboo oboe), taepyeongso (traditional oboe), and saengwhang (mouth organ). I am now on a journey to explore musical identity, discover new connections, and collaborate with artists from different backgrounds and cultures. Our common thread is communication and self-expression. My quest begins by studying other arts and music traditions, to discover how to best express these different strains through sound and composition.

In 2011, I began participating in musical activities outside of Korea, where I was born and educated. I have since devoted my career to intercultural music-making, working with western artists and those from East Asia, particularly in projects that bring together traditional instruments with digital sound sources.

Tradition is continually transformed by new generations of artists. My compositions merge Korean tradition with modern perspectives from audiences and environments. I am developing projects based on inter-disciplinary collaborations with an interest in humanity and history.

Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator of Liberian and Kenyan heritage. Raised in the southern U.S.A. and based in New York City, her work engages themes of hybridity, diaspora, and belonging. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. Her work has been presented in spaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem, BRIC, MoMA PopRally, the Museum of the Moving Image, and IFC Center. Past residencies include POV Spark in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture (NYC, DC, and Venice, Italy), Red Bull Arts Detroit (Detroit, MI), the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa), and the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE). She received the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant administered by Queer|Art.

Fellowship Statement

Born in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, I grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces, which informs my interest in hybridity and layered imagery and content. I work with still and moving images, the voice and body, language, objects, space and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Recent work traces a performative and experimental impulse through sculptural sound and video installation.

During the Fellowship, I will expand my ongoing research and creative production though historical, contemporary, and speculative relationships between the U.S. and Liberia - the West African republic founded in the 1800s with formerly enslaved Black people returning to the continent from the Americas and newly occupying positions of power. This project explores questions around hierarchy, Indigeneity, multiplicities and complexities of Blackness, cultural fragmentation, and the deep and steady yearning for the reparative.

Amoke Kubat remains curious about self, the natural world, and the Sacred. She reclaims African Indigenous Spiritual sensibilities to reconnect to the first worlds, Spirit and Nature, as practice for holistic wellness. Self-taught, Amoke uses artmaking and writing to continue to heal herself and hold a position of wellness in an America sick with social injustices.

Amoke is an accidental playwright. Her play ANGRY BLACK WOMAN & Well Intentioned White Girl began as a conversation with a friend. Amoke expressed her annoyance with being called “angry black woman.” Her friend responded, “Like the well intentioned white girl'”? This play continues to tour as public readings in Minneapolis and rural Minnesota cities, and is available on Vimeo. As a Naked Stage Fellow, her second play, Old Good Pussy and Good Old Pussy, was performed at the Pillsbury House Theater in 2020. This play explores aging, ageist stereotypes, sexuality, and the social interpersonal tensions between intergenerations.

Fellowship Statement

My artistry is a tapestry of growing relationships, that has been woven from a motherless life, non-traditional black experience, discovery of the self through pain and tribulations as I strive to live my fullest life. I draw upon the strengths of diasporic African peoples and my Ancestors.

In 2020, in the time of COVID and World Wide Socio-political UNRESTS, I fought past, present and future. It was the battle to proclaim and be heard that, MY LIFE MATTERED when growing old is disdainfully feared. Old and aging peoples are more vulnerable and at risk and sometimes seen as collateral damage.

My new work will explore Black women's UNSAIDS about AGING; mind, body, and sexuality. But what if old black women, upon turning 100, revealed themselves to be Goddesses?

LeilAwa [Leila Awadallah] is a Palestinian, Arab-American dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and cultural activist based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and Beirut, Lebanon. She holds a BFA in Dance and minor in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota. LeilAwa founded the project: Body Watani (body-as-homeland) and is developing an offering of Arab Rooted Contemporary dance, both of which engage with dance forms, rhythms and rituals of SWANA, ancestral memories, and embodied reflections on settler-colonial occupation and indigenous resistance.

LeilAwa’s work and research has been supported by Jerome Foundation, Springboard for the Arts, Arab American National Museum, Mizna, Lebanese National Theatre, Amalgam, Camargo Foundation, Cedar Tree Project, Walker, Rhythmically Speaking, Threads Dance Co. and SAGE. Leila danced with Ananya Dance Theatre, performing locally, nationally, and internationally in Ethiopia, Palestine and India; is a founding member of Kelvin Wailey, 3wadallahs and Solidarity Rising; and a collaborator with Theatre of the Women of the Camp.

Fellowship Statement

LeilAwa (lay-luh-wuh) merges my gifted name, لیلى , with my family lineage, عوض اللھ , to embody a self that is both rooted in histories and becoming into futures. I dive deep into intersections of arts and activism, beginning with body and breathing outwards to examine the ways dance engages with human rights, invites healing, invokes critical thinking, and physicalizes practices of decolonizing our bodies / lands through re-membering and re-imagining. This emerging project: Body Watani is a pathway, a container with soft edges, space for artists / peoples to reflect on this notion of body as a site of living homeland. Through this fellowship, I will take steps to establish Body Watani as a project-based dance company split between Minneapolis and Beirut, building community, creating workshops, growing collaborations, and initiating the company’s first full piece, Terraena: hakawati of the sea. As well as prioritizing Arab, SWANA, and Mediterranean dance / cultural / political studies. SWANA [South West Asia and North Africa] is a decolonial term used when referring to the ‘Middle East’ or ‘Arab world’ (which is not all Arab) to locate geographically rather than ethnically.

Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work hybridizes theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play by employing consumer technology—such as VR, GoPro and GPS—and featuring diverse, multi-generational performers. Emily Harvey Foundation (NYC) has presented Liu’s projects in numerous solo showings (2014-2017). In 2017, she staged HANG OUT, a site-specific, episodic play in Manhattan Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park. MAKE A FOUNTAIN, an extensive catalog documenting those performances, was released in 2018. Liu was a resident artist at LMCC 2018-19 and ISSUE Project Room 2019, and a fellow at Institute for Public Architecture 2020. Her recent projects included PLAYDATE, a neighborhood-wide play in and about Downtown Brooklyn, and PIGTAIL–A Swivel Stool Dance™—both commissioned by ISSUE Project Room.

Fellowship Statement

Highlighting the shifting, participatory nature of viewership, mediated in real time by everyday use of technology, my practice reveals how experimentation is most fruitful when it escapes predetermination. My projects have included collaborations with bankers, construction and municipal workers, sociologists, psychotherapists, dog walkers, and scientists—sometimes all in the same performance. Poking at the traditional boundaries of media-based art, and often smashing the 4th wall between performer and spectator, I stir together contradictory forces of memory, spatiality, and the inherent friction and great possibilities of sociality. My second book, Heavily Prescribed Good Times, on PLAYDATE and PIGTAIL, will be released in 2021.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Albany, NY, Lloyd graduated from The College at Brockport where he performed works by Maura Keefe and Alexandra Beller. He has collaborated with and performed for Karl Rogers, Netta Yerushalmy, Tammy Carrasco, Monica Bill Barnes, Catherine Galasso, Laura Peterson, Ambika Raina and David Dorfman Dance. His teaching practice has brought him to Rutgers University and Mark Morris Dance Center, and his work has been produced by New York Live Arts, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, The Center for Performance Research and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. He was selected as a 2019 Center for Performance Research Artist in Resident and is a recipient of the 2019-21 Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency Program at New York Live Arts. For more please head to jordandlloyd.com

Fellowship Statement

My approach to making is visual and imaginative, using movement as a tool to manipulate time and space and to stretch the edges of the collective experience. I work intuitively when generating material and focus on formal elements such as shape, color and texture to arrive at a place of cohesion. My work is home to considerations of place and moments in the world, teetering along lines of fantasy and vast, radical imagination. By rooting my work in compositional specificity and performative intention, I aim to muddle interpretation and complicate association, keeping the viewing experience active and participatory. Movement, to me, can act as a portal into memory, ancestry and a deeper level of feeling that widens the possibilities of what a moment represents. In many ways, my work seeks to sustain attention, evoke questions, and stimulate opinions while bringing communities together to share a specific moment in time.

Ifrah Mansour is a Somali, refugee, Muslim, self-taught multimedia artist and an educator based in Minnesota. Her artwork explores trauma through the eyes of children to uncover the resiliencies of blacks, Muslims, and refugees. She interweaves poetry, puppetry, films, and installations. She's been featured in Middle East Eye, BBC, VICE, OkayAfrica, Star Tribune, and City Pages. Her critically acclaimed How to Have Fun in a Civil War premiered at Guthrie Theatre and toured to cities in Greater Minnesota. Her first national museum exhibition, Can I Touch It!? premiered at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her visual poem, I am a Refugee, is part of PBS’s short Film festival. Mansour’s installation, My Aqal, Banned and Blessed premiered at Queens Museum in New York. Learn More: facebook.com/ifrahmansourart

Fellowship Statement

My artwork is informed by my lived experience, and that of my community of Muslim, refugee, black, and Somali immigrants. I create art out of my most painful experiences to connect communities, spark conversation, and create meaningful relationships between refugees and Americans. As a refugee, I didn’t see my story represented on stage or in cinema. Now, I am a self-taught multimedia artist blending poetry, puppetry, sculptural installation, and films to stage resilient refugee stories. I am also an educator to East-African elders that often are learning for the first time. They teach me so much about Somali life and culture. My proudest work, How to Have Fun in a Civil War, is a play about Somali history seen through the eyes of children, has given me such an insight to bringing out the hidden complex identities, and resiliency of minorities in Minnesota. With my fellowship, I hope to learn what it takes to write, develop, produce and distribute powerful refugee and new American stories in cinema.

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. She works at the crossroads of mediums - music, visual art, dance, theater and performance art, and has been a creative force for artists such as William Parker, Daria Faïn, Shelley Hirsh, César Alvarez, Steffani Jemison. Maviel is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction of cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing and transformative act. She performs and teaches extensively in New York, throughout North, South & Central America, and Europe. Both solo albums hOULe and in the garden, were released on Gold Bolus Recordings and received international acclaim. Lastly, Anaïs Maviel was the 2019 recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship to generate new works at Roulette Intermedium in New York City, and of the 2020 American Composers Forum Create commission for new work with the Rhythm Method string quartet.

Fellowship Statement

My work wants to hold space for weaving and disentangling narratives of self in relation to society, earth and cosmos. Despite globalization and refined technologies, individualized lives scarcely embrace interdependence. Yet the uniqueness of each being— this one thing that we share —is in fact our livelihood, both for one and many. The relational complexity of this Creole (not quite postcolonial) anthropocene era, is the field in which I operate. Music, as a form of communication prior to articulate language, is fundamental to the human experience and for the capacity to conceive of oneself in relation to one’s environment. I shape sensory experiences made of what I hear from the world, bridging the fragmented and envisioning harmony in the sensible. I hope to light the desire in everyone to re-create ways to relate, so that actualizing one means actualizing all. Transformation is an alchemical phenomenon, a leap connecting ancestral wisdom to utopian futures.

Benjamin May’s directorial debut, The Legend of Swee’ Pea, premiered at DOC: NYC and played at over 40 festivals worldwide, winning five Best Documentary Feature awards and two Best Director awards. His second feature, Wet House, an immersive film about the largest harm reduction facility for chronic alcoholics in the US, is distributed by 1091Pictures and Saboteur Media. Ben's work has been funded by grants from the McKnight Foundation, St. Paul Cultural Star, and the Jerome Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

As a documentary filmmaker, I am most interested in subjects and environments we might consider strange or remote—not because they are inherently more interesting or offer more conflict—but because I believe we are all a lot more similar than we are different. Everyone is susceptible to abandonment, failure, and loss. And because film is a deeply intimate endeavor it is the ideal medium to probe our proximity, question our biases, and examine the constructions we take for granted.

Humans are robust, but life is fragile. Working as a neuroradiologist for the past ten years, I have learned that, despite our powerful tools to observe the nature of life, truth is elusive, and certainty is non-existent. As a physician and a filmmaker, I find this idea both terrifying and inspiring and it is the crux of my work.