Past
Grantees

Catina Bacote grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Kweli, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, The Common, Prairie Schooner, December Magazine, Southern California Review, and in the anthology, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Her work has been supported by residencies at Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony, Willapa Bay AiR, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony where she received the Ann Cox Chambers Long-form Journalism Fellowship, and the Ragdale Foundation where she received the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship. Bacote holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was admitted as a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow and subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in how the writer’s voice acts as an ethical pointer in a world where poverty and excessive wealth, political repression, gun violence, racial segregation, and mass incarceration persist. My nonfiction writing depends on collecting personal testimony and attempts to uncover intimate stories that have not been told or retell those distorted by the realms of politics or entertainment. However, some tales feel dangerous to share because even the people they touch have kept silent. But as an artist, I aspire to step into uncharted territory and gently bring others along with me. I engage in this work not as a distant observer or objective researcher but as a Black woman whose life has been shaped by racial and economic injustice. Presently, I am working on my first book-in-progress, Eastern Circle, which chronicles the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on my family and community.

Leslie Barlow (she/her) is an artist and educator working in Minneapolis, MN. Barlow uses figurative oil painting to share stories that explore the politics of representation, identity, otherness, and race. Barlow earned an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2016) and BFA from the University of Wisconsin- Stout (2007). Recent support of Barlow’s work includes: 2019 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, and several Minnesota State Arts Board grants. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota, helps run the organization MidWest Mixed, is a member of the mural collective Creatives After Curfew, and she also supports emerging artists as the Director of Studio 400.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in examining and reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. My life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Working within the tradition of figurative painting provides a platform and space to challenge the norms and hierarchy of who is painted, what stories are amplified, and by whom. The work is created from places of vulnerability, nuance, community conversation, and personal experience. What results from my work is not the desire to simply have dialogue, but to manifest the power of images. My current body of work-in-progress is 3 years in the making. Titled Within, Between, and Beyond, it combines painting and video documentary and will be exhibited in 2021 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Lexie Bean (they/he) is a queer and trans multimedia artist whose work revolves around themes of bodies, homes, cyclical violence, and LGBTQIA+ identities. They're a member of the RAINN National Leadership Council and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Written On The Body, centering fellow trans survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, and served as a keynote speaker for MaleSurvivor and universities around the United States. Their experimental and animated short films, Full, Trans Boy Remember, and The Ship We Built, which later became an #OwnVoices, Kirkus Starred novel with Penguin Random House and a feature-length film script, have played in festivals globally. Their latest writing, A Scavenger Hunt For People Loneliest In Their Own Homes, was commissioned by Price Hill Will. Their work has been featured in Teen Vogue, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Feminist Wire, Ms. Magazine, Them, Logo’s New Now Next, Bust Magazine, Autostraddle, and more. www.lexiebean.com

Fellowship Statement

I’m interested in creating for those who blame themselves for falling into the same mistakes again and again; people who can't hold their own bodies. I want to create for those struggling with shame, developing new vocabularies, and forming families; people who are afraid of change. Queer folks surviving the Midwest, where I'm from. I’m interested in developing narratives where there is danger in forgetting, and remind us all that there is resilience in imagination.

I am currently working on several personal projects relating to these themes: a television pilot, Flyovers; my first Young Adult novel, All My Good Memories Of That House Were With You; my first auto-fiction novel for adults, Across From You; continued building and collaboration for the screenplay version of my debut novel, The Ship We Built; as well as collaborative pieces, like What Will I Become?, through documentary and anthology curation.

Vie Boheme, a Motown native who blossomed creatively in Pittsburgh and refined in Minneapolis, is a multimodal artist, choreographer, dancer, and singer. Her choreographic work has been presented at Intermedia Arts, the Guthrie Theater, the Southern Theater, the Walker Art Center, Dance Alloy Theater, and the Kauffman Center.  She received a Cultural Community Partnership Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board in support of her most recent work, CENTERPLAY, and is a former co-creative director, vocal artist, and choreographer for Stokley Williams, founding front man of Mint Condition. She was a founding member of The August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble (Top 25 to Watch, Dance Magazine, 2012) and also a former dance artist with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and TU Dance. Boheme’s recent TedxMinneapolis talk, Is Performing Art Worth the Struggle?, is available for viewing. She is a Vinyasa, Yin and fitness yoga instructor with her own signature teaching philosophy, CoreKinetics Yoga; and a Teaching Specialist in the Dance Department at the University of Minnesota.

Fellowship Statement

I am a multimodal artist; a choreographer, singer, dancer, actress, poet and a writer. I design theatrical performance experiences that weave all of these mediums. I bring athletic agility to vocal performance by singing and dancing in unison, eliminating the boundary between the visual and audio experience. I also weave sentiment and storytelling through poetry and monologues. Each performance piece is designed to give a glimpse into the sometimes dark and complex emotional spaces people experience that seem elusive and ever present.

My work is acknowledgement and expression of the experiences of African American women. Multilayered, interwoven, shining light filtered through many cultural layers.

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from Southern France. After earning a degree in Cello Performance from the Conservatoire National d’Aix-en-Provence, she pursued studies in Experimental Music at Bard College under the mentorship of Marina Rosenfeld. In 2012, she moved to Brooklyn as a dedicated improviser where she became an active collaborator and “rising figure in New York’s Improvised music scene” (The Chicago Reader). In 2019, she released her debut solo LP Headflush, a “real abstract gem” (Boomkat) that “bears the authority of someone who has put many hours of thought and practice into creating her own sound” (Bandcamp).

Bordreuil received composer commissions from the French Embassy at Lincoln Center, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, the French Alliance, Sounds of Stockholm Festival, GRM (Paris) and the American Symphony Orchestra. She is a 2020 artist-in-residence at the GRM, Paris. Past residencies include the McDowell Colony, ISSUE Project Room and E.M.S, Stockholm.

Fellowship Statement

My music draws from Noise, Free Improvisation, avant-garde and other experimental traditions, but adheres to no single genre. Cross-pollination is at the center of my work, both aesthetically and in practice. In my cello performances, I mix my instrument’s culturally inherited melancholia with cathartic harsh noise walls, creating “steadily scathing music [that] favors long and corrosive atonalities” (New York Times). My compositions create immersive environments that enhance psychoacoustic happenings and heighten subjective perception, supported by neuro-scientific research. Often incorporating site-specific resonance, I craft musicality out of an organized awareness of natural sound phenomena. My chamber music pieces are presented at prestigious concert halls and DIY basements alike, in an effort to permeate barriers of musical genre and scene.

During my fellowship I will create large ensemble pieces, study light art to expand my work with perception, and use the resources that Jerome Foundation provides to support the creation of DIY community art spaces after the pandemic.

J. Bouey is out here doing their best, damnit! Currently moving on pandemic timing and prioritizing rest, Bouey is a dance artist who daringly explores trauma and mental illnesses from their Black american, agender, and sexually queer perspective in their creative practice. Bouey’s work has been shared through live performance and film.

Living with depression and severe anxiety, Bouey is finding their way back to joy with a determination to manifest the dreams dreamt from their youth. These dreams sustained them when the sun didn’t shine or shined too bright to see.

Fellowship Statement

Yo, what's up?! This fellowship has found me knee-deep in grief research! The onset of the pandemic prompted me to study grief to equip me with the knowledge to support Black folx who've experienced death and loss due to covid-19. The research led me to reckon with my underexplored grief.

Joseph Buckley (he/him) is a Black British Sculptor living and working in New York City. Recent solo shows include Letter from the Home Office at Lock Up International in London; Cousin Table at Cuchifritos, NYC; Traitor Muscle at Art in General, NYC; and Brotherhood Tapestry at The Tetley in Leeds, England. Recent group projects include I don't Know Whether The Earth is Spinning or Not... at the Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (for the VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art); and Cellular World: Cyborg-Human-Avatar-Horror, at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2018).

Fellowship Statement

I have found myself preoccupied with the mechanics of objectification and dehumanization, and with a continuum I perceive that goes ‘corpse—slave—human—statue—sculpture’ and back again.

I am interested in the way that systems of abuse replicate themselves, at different scales, across our society. On the topic of replication, I am heavily invested in mold-making and plastic casting: I am interested in the connotations of industrial production, and the violence such industry implies.

Of late, I have been trying to work towards the topics of fascism and its contemporary manifestations. Some of my sculptures are of fascists and are ‘about’ fascism but, gendered as they are, they have also served as a way to focus my thinking surrounding the eternal font from which fascism metastasizes: a swollen, toxified, and entitled masculinity... a boil on my soul’s ass I must continuously lance and drain.

Raised on the verge of several musical streams since her childhood, award-winning violinist and composer Layale Chaker received her musical training at the National Higher Conservatory of Beirut in her native Lebanon, at Conservatoire de Paris and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Layale’s musical world lies at the intersection of classical contemporary music, Jazz, Arabic Music, and free improvisation. She has received commissions and presented performances and projects around Europe, the Middle-East, North and South America and Asia, and has collaborated with Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Johnny Gandelsman, Holland Baroque, International Contemporary Ensemble, Oxford Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Babylon Orchestra, performing at the London Jazz Festival, Junger Kunstler Festival Bayreuth, the Lucerne Festival, and concert halls such as The Berlin Philharmonic, Abbaye de Royaumont, National Sawdust and Wigmore Hall. Her debut album with her ensemble Sarafand, Inner Rhyme, was released on In a Circle Records, and listed as “Top of The World” by Songlines with a 5-star review, NPR 10 Best Releases, and has received praises by the BBC Music Magazine, The New York Times, The Strad, Strings Magazine, Jazz World among others.

Fellowship Statement

As I have navigated through a succession of different places to call home throughout my life, music was one of the few constants that grounded me through these changes. It quickly became a familiar territory, and my way of relating to the world.

That feeling of finding one's home and voice in artistic practice soon turned into one of the main forces behind my work. Today, my communication with the world through music rises from a need and desire to create a haven of belonging, inclusion, visibility and communion for peoples’ histories and narratives through sound, and beyond words.

During the course of this fellowship, I hope and aspire to continue this focus on understanding and querying estrangement through my practice. This will be embodied through the way I conduct research for my various projects, through the development of my musical and artistic language and expression, and through the different works I intend to carry and create.

Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand have been collaborators for ten years since film at NYU. Latent in their films are issues of intimacy and connection, two feelings that are increasingly difficult to discern and cultivate in our technologically mediated present. For them, collaboration is one way of dealing with this alienated condition. It is also a political decision that not only acknowledges filmmaking as a collaborative effort, but also strives to move beyond the idea of an artistic genius with its attendant ideas around gender, race, and sexuality. Their work has been shown extensively in the U.S. and abroad including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, White Columns, 47 Canal, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Parish Art Museum, and MoCA LA. In Spring 2020, they were fellows at MacDowell.

Fellowship Statement

We are currently finishing a trilogy of films that we describe as showing the internet without showing the internet. By this, we mean that instead of relying on literal translations of technology and social media, we strive to show how the internet makes us feel and how our digital selves and physical bodies are intimately intertwined in our current moment. The trilogy started with First (2019), a film that follows a teenage girl who interacts with friends and strangers, receiving messages both benign and threatening. The second, Negative Two (2020), revolves around a twenty-something gay man navigating loneliness and the city through gay hook-up apps. We are currently in post-production for 38 (2021) which tells the story of a 38-year-old woman who obsessively watches the social media accounts of the young woman who broke up her marriage.

Ama Codjoe (she/her) is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize and Bluest Nude forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in Fall 2022. Her work has been awarded support from Cave Canem, Jerome, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations, as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Crosstown Arts, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell. Among other honors, Codjoe is the recipient of a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2020 BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.

Fellowship Statement

I want to continue to learn about the world and about myself through the practice of poetry in the hopes of making true for myself and others Adrienne Rich’s lines from Dreamwood: “that poetry/ isn’t revolution but a way of knowing/ why it must come.” I want to be led into poems by color, music, serendipity, research and travel. Currently, I am revising and shaping my first full-length collection Bluest Nude.

Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr. is a filmmaker. His short films Shinaab and Shinaab, Part II premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and 2019 and the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and 2018. He was supported at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab in 2017 and 2018. He has been a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from the Sundance Institute, McKnight Foundation, Time Warner Foundation, Maryland Film Festival, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. His first feature, Wild Indian, will premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Corbine is one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch for 2021.

Fellowship Statement

While I love making ambitious personal films like the Shinaab series and my first feature Wild Indian, I want to pursue making genre films that are accessible and for everyone. I am currently working on a number of both types of projects. Stay tuned...

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist, designer, and curator interested in how migration affects ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has had her work supported through Create Change fellow at the Laundromat Project (2018-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), and Center for Books Arts (2020-2021).

Fellowship Statement

For the past two years, I’ve been conceptualizing a piece titled Citizen Clock that looks at the path to citizenship, as well as, work around the legal process of migration. The Jerome Foundation fellowship will provide the support to develop this work and to collaborate with fabricators to bring this idea to life. It will also provide a space to expand my participatory practice into more conceptual objects that archive these processes. I’m excited to be part of this community and learn from all the different fellows.

DejaJoelle is an African Centered artist that focuses on the Healing and Liberation of Black Communities across the globe. DejaJoelle does not find comfort in highlighting where she’s been or what she has “accomplished” but has accepted that life is an everlasting journey that is worth being present for. Give Thanks.

Fellowship Statement

I am an African Centered - Healing Artist, Choreographer, Director, and Cultural Healing Curator. I believe Dance serves as our connection to ourselves, our communities, and our overall Divinity. I create intentional spaces for Black, LGBTQ2, and Deaf community to discover their own practices toward Healing using Dance, Body Reclamation, and other Healing practices. As the world experiences collective hurt and grief, I trust that our greatest act of REVOLUTION and REBELLION against hatred and corruption is Self-Love and Healing through Dance. I refuse to fuel the fire of destruction and heinousness and instead focus my Art and energy on properly handling Black people who continue to be mishandled.

Cy Dodson, owner of Minneapolis-based, Triumph Pictures, is focused on producing award-winning documentary content. Dodson combines his use of cinematography and editing to craft compelling tales of the human spirit creating memorable, gripping productions. His latest film Say His Name: Five Days for George Floyd was commissioned by Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) for their 2020 Project, premiering in April 2021. His third film, Emmy-nominated Beneath the Ink (2018) hits on complex racial issues in his Ohio hometown that highlights human stories of forgiveness and redemption. The film won numerous jury and audience awards at festivals worldwide including DocEdge (Academy qualifying), BendFilm, and Palm Springs Shortfest. Conde Nast acquired the film for their GQ Stories platform and it was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick. Dodson is also the recipient of a 2020 McKnight Media Artist Fellowship, administered by FilmNorth and funded by the McKnight Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

I am unassuming by nature, introverted even. My quiet personality allows me to connect with my subjects. They find the freedom to confide intimate stories with honesty and sincerity. My path to documentary filmmaking was not immediate, but now I feel it’s my purpose. For example, with the recent unrest in my neighborhood in Minneapolis, I was compelled to tell my community’s story with Say His Name. My duty as a documentary filmmaker is to continue be there, letting voices be heard in the name of social justice and reform. I seek out stories that are unique yet universal, that have multiple layers of complexity yet make a direct, personal connection to viewers that can be reflective and change perceptions. My responsibility is to exercise my craft––as a cinematographer and editor––in such a way that voices are heightened. Their voices, in turn, are my voice, and my art.

Ayana Evans is a New York City-based visual performance artist. All of her video, lithography, screen-printing, watercolor mono-prints, installations, and projection extends from her performance work. She received her MFA in painting from Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. Evans has performed at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Newark Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the Queens Museum and countless public locations for her guerilla-style performances. Her international work includes shows at FIAP performance festival in Martinique, Tiwani Contemporary in London, and Ghana’a Chale Wote festival. Evans was a 2018 Fellow at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art, 2018 NYFA Fellow, and 2019 Savage Lewis Fellow with Art on the Vine. Her recent press includes The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Hyperallergic, and CNN. Evans is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University.

Fellowship Statement

I am a NYC-based performance artist, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The sensibilities of both locations heavily influence my work with the body, race relations, and gender bias. My on-going performances/public interventions include: Operation Catsuit, I Just Came Here to Find a Husband, and a new series of collaborative works with artists of diverse backgrounds. These performances map how my body is perceived and treated as it operates in artistic and social spheres. Roberta Fallon, co-founder of Artblog, describes me as, “One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur.” And writer Seph Rodney of Hyperallergic and The New York Times wrote: “I have seen [this] artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor-length lace gown, a dollar-store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips — risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement.” During this residency I will continue the Operation Catsuit series via experimental film and costuming.

Carson Faust is a queer writer, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. His writing has received support from the Tin House Writers’ Workshops as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Waxwing, AnomalyJournal, Passages North, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member for 826 MSP—a nonprofit organization that provides literacy- and creative writing-based programming for underserved K-12 students in the Twin Cities area. He is represented by Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary.

Fellowship Statement

My novel-in-progress—A Bible Or A Knife—utilizes the genre of horror to grapple with the ways in which Indigenous and queer identities are represented, misrepresented, or erased within the canon. Canonically, queer folks and people of color are often confined to antagonistic or secondary roles; Native American stories and histories are used as tools and backdrops within horror narratives. My work aims to turn these banalities on their heads: When Indigenous people maintain their hold on and connection to their homeland, how might the lingering shadow of colonialism persist? What does it look like when land is haunted by the colonizers who failed to remove Native American communities?

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned an MFA from Hamline University. She is the author of Soft: A Memoir and is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, and SASE/Jerome Grant. She was a Loft Mentor Series winner in Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Playwright Commission Award Winner, and was selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative. Her poems and essays appear in New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, the minnesota review, Rain Taxi’s-Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Poems in the Wake of Racial Justice, and the anthology, How Dare We! Write, among others. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with writer and performer Lisa Marie Brimmer in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Library.

Fellowship Statement

There were glimmers of hope at the start of the 20th century for my Afro-Cubans ancestors who worked in the cigar factories in Hillsborough County, Florida and lived in planned communities designed to stabilize the lives of workers who created enormous wealth for the factory owners. There was a lot to negotiate. They were black men and women in the south experiencing the horrors of that time, and they were sometimes welcomed and sometimes unwelcomed members of the Cuban community. My fellowship goal is to complete my work in progress, Here Before, a hybrid of prose and poetry. I am a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to Barbados and Cuba, and the southern states of Georgia and North Carolina. I want to resurrect my dead and have them tell a truth beyond prolonged disenfranchisement, especially as it relates to their spiritual lives.