Past
Grantees

t’ai freedom ford (she/her) is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over, is available from Red Hen Press. Her second poetry collection, & more black, is forthcoming Spring 2019 from Augury Books. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

My writing grapples with all things related to my existence/non-existence in these United States. This means I'm obsessed with issues around (so-called) race (whiteness/ Blackness/otherness/mixedness), gender and sexuality (gender queering/querying, masculine-of-centering, closeted bisexual questioning), family/ancestral heritage (American/Black histories), pop culture (escapism via fantasy, public personas and invasion of privacy), and gentrification (desecration of sacred spaces, displacement, whiteness and entitlement, etc.) Currently, I'm working on a novel that explores how families and communities deal with grief and loss in the midst of gentrification. Also, I’m dreaming of ways to create multi-media works that amplify Black angst, Black joy and Black noise.

Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a mother, choreographer, performer, a collaborative artist, community organizer and a three-time Bessie award-winning choreographer and performer for her latest work, Memoirs of a... Unicorn. Marjani is an inaugural recipient of the UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship and a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. Her work has been incubated in residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center (MANCC), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Residency, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, CUNY Dance Initiative, 651 Arts and Movement Research. Marjani has produced seven award-winning works in steady collaboration with her partner and composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee) over the last ten years. Humbly, she defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving and irreverent conjurers!

Fellowship Statement

My storytelling is intended to thicken the common narratives of people of the African Diaspora, and stir up visions for human liberation. What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, look like? I commit to the work of shifting and visioning through art. I dance to tap my heart and my prolific imagination, to ignite vision or desire for ontological integrity and ascension in my audiences. In dance, I can imagine my own liberation and engage a fantasy of free-being as a plausible reality. With Memoirs of a.. Unicorn, developed in collaboration with composer Everett Saunders, I've centered on thoughtfully sharing the work such that it reflects our core values:

• To echo and affirm the work of local community organizers
• To be malleable in design for unconventional spaces and limited resources
• And to explore and affirm the complexity of blackness as a unifying, expansive, cross-cultural concept and network.

Rafael Gonzalez (he/him), better known by his stage name Tufawon (2 for 1), is a Dakota/Puerto Rican hip hop artist/activist from Minneapolis. His name represents his mixed identity. He has traveled the world through the intersection of music and fighting for social causes. He was recently interviewed on The Breakfast Club and Hot 97 promoting Indigenous People's March in DC, and he performed at the official concert. In the fall of 2018, he completed his first headlining hip hop tour in Europe with Nataanii Means and Michel Be called “Resilience.” In January 2019, he went to Cuba through Minneapolis based nonprofit US Cuba Artist Exchange with a delegation of music producers from the states to collaborate with pioneering Cuban hip hop artists. They performed at a showcase and created two collaborative songs. Tufawon has released 4 EPs: Self Care, The Homecoming, The Send Off, and Schwag.

Fellowship Statement

With hip hop being the foundation, my music is an honest reflection of my life experiences and personal struggles/growth, my hopes and dreams for the future, spirituality and connectedness to the land, love, and the realities of the world we live in. My style is an embodiment of intricate lyricism with complex vocabulary balanced by a very clear, smooth, and concise delivery. With a socially aware approach, I touch on topics such as Indigenous resiliency, politics, health, defending Mother Earth, and fighting against oppressive systems. The underlying message in my music is always connected to freedom—the continual transformation I am experiencing is profound. You can hear it with earlier works like Schwag, where there is a bit of an egotistical and raunchy element. Compare that with later releases like The Homecoming or Self Care where themes of fighting for freedom and unlearning/denouncing patriarchy are common, you see the contrast and ultimately, the growth and transformation. I aspire to bring the vibrations of his ancestral roots into his future music projects, fusing them with contemporary production styles.

Photo by Tommy Ellis.

Stylistic polyglot deVon Russell Gray’s (he/him) compositions evoke soulful meditations, the envelopment of anxiety in a nurturing sonic cocoon. As a new music performer and mood scholar, he channels celestial fascination manifested in aural familiarity. deVon intuits through clairaudience a direct connection to our collective musical legacy, as guided by Bach, Beethoven, Threadgill, and Mumford. Born and raised in the Rondo Neighborhood, the composer is a member of Saint Paul’s hip hop stalwarts HEIRUSPECS, celebrating twenty-two years of music-making and hometown-repping, as well as a decade of funding scholarships at their alma mater Saint Paul Central High School. deVon is an omnipresence with bands, artists, scholars, and other creators. In addition, he touts music direction for new theater (Sandbox Theater’s Queens), Afrofuturistic interdisciplinary works (Joe Horton’s A Hill in Natchez), and visiting artist residencies (Cedar Cultural Center’s Midnimo Residency Program). In 2016, the Cedar Cultural Center awarded deVon funds from the Jerome Foundation to create a work for a quartet of violas and cellos plus electronics called Fractious Child, Op. 1 No. 1. In 2017, he became a McKnight Foundation fellowship recipient.

Fellowship Statement

The novelist Annie Dillard says, “How can you as a writer expect to create extraordinary work on what is likely an ordinary Tuesday?” I don’t know, yet that’s who I am. A seeker of the extraordinary. What I know, is that revelations and epiphanies come when they’re needed, no sooner.

I’ll use my skills. I will continue to create artful music that allows listeners to dream, to feel rooted, and to access the cosmos. In my art and life I aspire to achieve a level of clarity that allows me to answer simply simple questions such as, “Who are you as an artist and what do you aspire to do in your work?” Truthfully, I’m a pretty heady composer that’s always trying to dress it down. Ultimately it’s the blues. Earthy, music of the dirt. Comprised of basic elements. I will continue to keep a keen eye on my mentors where joy and mental health are concerned. This work can take its toll.

Presently and for a while now, I’ve been dreaming up an opera.

Photo by Katie Mae Dickinson.

Kathryn Haddad (she/her) is a writer, teacher and community organizer whose work explores contemporary Arab American experiences and reflects on the political reality of life for Arab Americans. Kathryn founded Mizna – one of the few Arab American Arts and literary organizations in the United States and served as Artistic/Executive Director for twelve years. She’s a recipient of a Bush Fellowship for work with the Arab American community and received three Playwright’s Center Many Voices Fellowships. Her plays have appeared in various venues, including the anthology, Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. Kathryn was awarded the 2018 Kay Sexton Award at the Minnesota Book Awards for her literary impact on the State of Minnesota through her work with the Arab American community.

Fellowship Statement

I strive to tell Arab and Arab American stories through theater - reflecting on the social and political climate at home and abroad. Immigration, family life, political struggle, colonization, religion, and bicultural experience have all been subjects I have explored. This award will give me the opportunity to work with community to continue the dialogue and conversation through art. The fellowship will allow me time to work on my craft as a playwright and strengthen my writing through study and practice. I would like to make new connections and collaborations with theaters, individuals, and communities that share a common vision, and I hope to reach new audiences with my work.

LaMont Hamilton (he/him) is an autodidact interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Hamilton uses lens, performance, writing and sound amongst a variety of other mediums to negotiate between the material and the conceptual. His practice as an artist is considered visual art, but he strives for synesthetic engagements that decentralizes the ableist assumption of the “visual” and considers how bodies engage with work.

Hamilton has been the recipient of several residencies, fellowships and awards including the Jerome@Camargo residency in Cassis, France, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, MFAH CORE program in Menerbes France, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Artadia Award, ArtMatters Grant, Artist in Residence at Duke University’s African and African American Studies, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art amongst others. Hamilton has also showed at institutions such as MoMA, The Kitchen, ISSUE PROJECT ROOM, Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomburg Center, The Drawing Center and The Sculpture Center.

Fellowship Statement

I see myself in the tradition of those who view the role of “the artist” as a specific calling. One doesn’t simply choose to be an artist but is moved, deeply, into this space of wonder. We are all born with (various forms of) antennas which we use to perceive the world, but the artist is ignited to make sense of this perception. This (re)imagination is at the crux of the current direction of my practice. Whereas before my commitment was to the historical, in a pivot, I am now fully invested in art’s capacity for deep meditation, transformation. I am engaged in two working principles—Transrealistic poetics and Barulhos—first presented by poets Norman H Pritchard and Ferrier Gullar (respectively), to provide an open-ended structure for this investigation.

Carrie Hawks makes art to investigate gender, sexuality, and race in order to promote healing. Their works have been exhibited at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, CinemAfrica (Stockholm), Cape Town, and Tokyo. Animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, doll-making and performance are all vital parts of their art practice. They harnesses the magic of animation to tell stories. Their film black enuf* won numerous awards and had its broadcast debut on American Public Television’s World Channel in 2019. The film was funded in part by the Jerome Foundation. They have performed with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter and participated in the Set on Freedom Artist Residency at the Queens Museum. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University.

For the Camargo residency period, Carrie will focus on three areas of research: self-injury, breasts and femininity, and animation techniques. They will investigate self-injury and self-harm in religion, history, and current psychology. The research will also concentrate on recent studies of self-harm unrelated to religious affiliation, and the varied responses to these similar practices. Self-injury is often met with hostility in the American health industry, so they are curious to find the differences in Europe and what treatment methods are applied.

They will investigate the relationship between femininity and breasts to explore gender non-conforming people, and histories of going outside of the gender binary in other cultures. They will also use the time to explore animation techniques and take in works at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

Carrie Hawks (they/them) makes art to investigate gender, sexuality, and race and promote healing. Their works have been exhibited at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, CinemAfrica (Stockholm), Cape Town, and Tokyo. Animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, doll-making and performance are all vital parts of their art practice. They harnesses the magic of animation to tell stories. Their film black enuf* won numerous awards and had its broadcast debut on American Public Television’s World Channel in 2019. The film was funded in part by the Jerome Foundation. They have performed with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, and participated in the Set on Freedom Artist Residency at the Queens Museum. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University.

Fellowship Statement

My art confronts self-imposed and external assumptions about identity in order to promote healing, particularly in relation to race, gender, and sexuality. My work highlights stories that are not being represented enough. My practice presents alternate ways of connecting through a variety of media including animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, and performance. I also incorporate humor. In performance, I have asked participants to tell me about their nemeses so that we could destroy them on paper. In film, I’ve asked “if I am Black enough” for my peers and myself, and what Blackness is. I search for strategies to address being an outsider and holding self-love. My art exudes strength in its honesty, craft, and visual metaphors. I draw upon my insecurities, confusion, and fear and invite the audience to reflect on theirs. My current project, Inner Wound Real, focuses on people of color and their experiences with self-injury.

Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Jasmine Hearn (she/they) is a performer, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist. A native Houstonian, she graduated magna cum laude from Point Park University with her BA in Dance. She currently collaborates with filmmaker and visual artist, Alisha B. Wormsley. Jasmine has worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin (UK), Solange Knowles, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jenn Meridian, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Nick Mauss (as part of the performance cast of TRANSMISSIONS—an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art). Jasmine is a 2018/2019 Movement Research artist-in-residence, was a 2018 Dancing While Black fellow, and was awarded a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance as a part of Skeleton Architecture. They also received artist residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, and Dance Source Houston. Jasmine is a vessel and storyteller using dance and sound as materials to make, teach, and perform around the world.

Fellowship Statement

The body of my work is rooted in the belief, born of language from my work with Marjani Forté-Saunders, Tara Aisha Willis, and Staycee Pearl, that I am a vessel for ancestry and spirt to speak through. I offer work that remembers and honors past, speaks of present, and prepares community for future. As a choreographer, dancer, sound-maker, and performer, I am investigating how the body is able to use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth. I use dance and sound as materials to conjure an environment to be experienced. I ask, “How can the body and voice act as bridges that connect communities with their individual truths and how these truths live together. Working as a freelance artist, I have had many opportunities to engage with community—teaching dance and movement classes, facilitating spaces for movement/sound exploration, performing in multidisciplinary projects, and creating intimate, immersive performance experiences. I am committed to the facilitating environments that gives space for folks to connect with their fantasies and feelings.

Photo courtesy of Whitney Browne Photography.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the winner of Bomb Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. Helal has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Fellowship Statement

My first full-length collection, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), is the launch pad for my next work: intimacy v. isolation, exploring the impact of migration, trauma, and technology on Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development. I believe in my work's potential to disrupt old ideas and catalyze conversations that create solutions. Just as “poem to be read from right to left” created a robust discussion around colonial structures in the English language, my genre-defying narrative points directly to the inherent systemic abuse in the U.S. immigration system. This fellowship will support me as creator and teacher. Emerging means forging a path from the margins into the center, where productive conversations around craft and genre intersect with necessary discussions around race, identity, nation-making, and immigration policy, while we continue to make room for new thought; solutions.

Jonathan Herrera Soto is a print-based studio artist originally from Chicago, IL, and currently maintains a studio practice in Minneapolis, MN. He graduated with a BFA from the Minneapolis College in Art and Design in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions of Jonathan’s work include Querida Presencia at the Duluth Art Institute in Duluth, MN, and Entre Rios y Montañas at Annex Gallery in Chicago, IL. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; 33 Officia Creativia, Toffia, Italy; Spudnik Press Cooperative, Chicago, IL; High Point Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and Epicenter, Green River, Utah. Herrera Soto was a 2018 recipient of the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant.

Fellowship Statement

I construct print-based objects, installations, and environments that echo lived experiences of those who are no longer with us. My print-based processes of producing tracings and impressions translate the content through the symbolically revealing the act of remembering. Slicing open wounds into wood, burning the surface of limestone with acid, and the crushing of ink on paper under immense pressure, re-animates acts of violence that carries through an art-object’s final presentation. I research, explore, and unpack ideas within a framework of praxis--the simultaneous conceptual framing and physical compressing of ideas through work in order to examine the spaces left behind by others. I am currently working on a series about love’s influence on ethnic bodies in constant movement—the love that guides mothers that flee their homes with their children in search for asylum, the rebels that fight against oppressive regimes, and friends that search for their missing comrades.

Joe Horton (he/him) is a rapper, artist, and founding member of FIX music and arts collective. His interdisciplinary work spans medium and genre, but always features a signature blend of futurism and mysticism. The best example of this is his latest work, A Hill in Natchez, is a surreal work that combines elements of dance, visuals, and music. Joe is currently working on a new album produced by Anatomy (Kill the Vultures) as well as VESSEL, a visual and musical work that will premiere at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Fall 2019.

Fellowship Statement

I owe as much to the mystical tradition as I do the artistic. I am interested in nurturing vital knowings that come directly from the Mystery. I want to marry ancient techniques of ecstasy and forward-thinking technologies. I want to sing to the moment as it passes.

Su Hwang’s (she/her) debut poetry collection BODEGA is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in October 2019. Born in Seoul, she called New York City and San Francisco home for many years before transplanting to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota’s MFA Program in poetry. Su has been awarded the Loft's Emerging Writers Grant, the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, as well as fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others. She co-founded Poetry Asylum with poet/activist Sun Yung Shin, and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

My creative practice is constantly evolving to keep pace with current events, but I also strive to acknowledge and bring to light the fraught, complex nature of our collective histories. Language is political, now more than ever––and I believe the act of writing poetry is a concrete form of resistance. My debut poetry collection BODEGA is forthcoming and I will start my second collection ROOST in earnest at Hedgebrook this summer—exploring madness, mass incarceration, and metaphors of containment. I will continue working with incarcerated writers and co-direct Poetry Asylum with poet/activist Sun Yung Shin. Our goal is to highlight and dismantle stereotypes as well as underscore concepts of invisibility in the visible, forced displacement, and transference of violence and discrimination. I aim to produce fearless work that advances my social justice goals through community building, collaboration, activism, advocacy, and open dialogue.

Photo by Jeffrey Forston Photography.

Khary Jackson (he/him) is a poet, playwright, dancer and musician. He has written several plays, one of which (Water) was produced in 2009 at Ink and Pulp Theatre in Chicago. As a hip hop/street dancer he was fortunate to create and perform a piece at the 2018 Choreographers’ Evening at Walker Art Center. He has been a recipient of several generous grants, including the 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Writing, the Minnesota State Arts Board’s 2012 Cultural Community Partnership Grant and 2010 Artist Initiative Grant for Poetry, the Many Voices Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center in 2005 and 2007, as well as the 2009 VERVE Spoken Word Grant from Intermedia Arts. He is an alumnus of Cave Canem, the esteemed writing fellowship for black writers. His first poetry book, Any Psalm You Want, was published with Write Bloody Publishing in the spring of 2013.

Fellowship Statement

It is my aim to use multiple artistic mediums in the service of a greater, unifying idea. After years of focus on individual areas of arts composition and performance, this feels like the time to bring them together, and create artistic experiences that can speak to someone on multiple levels of engagement. I am looking at poetry/creative writing as the grounding element in a collaboration with dance, music, video and visual art. I want others to hear more of what I’m hearing, see more of what I’m seeing, and, perhaps, move with me in whatever ways they can.

Photo by Erin X. Smithers.

Jessica Jones (she/her) leads the pianoless group, the Jessica Jones Quartet, which features her original music and has several critically acclaimed recordings. The group has played festivals and major clubs on the East and West Coasts of the U.S. In addition, Ms. Jones is active as a sideman and has worked with Joseph Jarman, Cecil Taylor, and Don Cherry as well as a variety of Haitian, Caribbean, and African bands. She composed an opera with poet Arisa White, as well as a varied body of additional compositional work. Jones is an innovative jazz educator and consultant, working with children on improvisation, composition, and oral traditions for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stanford Jazz Workshop, the Vision Festival, Brooklyn Friends School, and others. Currently, Jones is an Artistic Director for REVA, Inc, a non-profit created to use creative arts to inspire, educate and heal people and communities.

Fellowship Statement

I play tenor saxophone and compose. My primary body of work is for my two-tenor saxophone, pianoless jazz quartets. I write for the strengths of the band, creating frameworks for free improvisation. This celebration of diversity represents my deep belief in listening for the strengths of individuals as a key to stronger unity. Voices are a strong influence on my compositions, which often incorporate spoken or sung music, or lines that are phrased based on speech patterns. I am currently working on a “poetry opera” with poet Arisa White, as well as continuing to expand my compositions for vocalists in a jazz context, and continually developing repertoire and rapport with my Quartet. I continue to study deeply in the jazz tradition, mining the great jazz improvisers and composers to strengthen my skills as a player and composer.

Photo by Cheryl Richards.

Anthony Jones (he/him) grew up in a hotbed of jazz education in Berkeley California where he was steeped in music at home and trained in some of the earliest jazz education programs in the nation, including Berkeley High School and UC Berkeley’s Young Musicians Program. While still in high school, Jones was part of an innovative cooperative quartet that performed bold experimental music around the Bay Area and on an East Coast tour where they were exposed to the still thriving loft jazz scene. Jones co-founded the Jessica Jones Quartet and the Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness Trio and subsequent configurations with Charlie Burnham; both groups record and perform extensively. He has appeared as sideman with Don Cherry, Muhal Richard Abrams, Peter Apfelbaum, and Joseph Jarman, among others, including in national and international jazz festivals.

Fellowship Statement

There is a natural geometry and architecture to my hearing that I try to explore and reveal through my improvisation and composition. The use of contemplative silence and restrained placement by the musicians is the kind of language I am developing with my band as a unit, and what I am exploring in my compositional direction. My compositions and playing call on all aspects of the African-American music continuum, including the intersection of free improvised music with R&B and jazz. The resulting music has an exploratory, modern searching bent. The current focus of my work consists of the use of certain musical phrases, gestures, and forms from, but not limited to, this music. I seek to develop this both as a composer and a player, in different ensembles but with a particular focus on Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness.

Photo by Marc Greene.

Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly (he/him) is the artistic director of New Brooklyn Theatre. In 2009 he founded the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. The two companies merged in 2018. Raja has been awarded a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and, twice, the Princess Grace Award (2017, 2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a BA in Dance and English from Connecticut College. Raja has been awarded a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award, a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard, a DanceWEB Scholarship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, a HERE Arts Fellowship, a 2018 Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

Fellowship Statement

I am obsessed with the development of popular culture over the last thirty years. My work unabashedly appropriates the structures, themes, and aesthetics found in reality television, celebrity culture, and social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook), then deconstructs it into new works which combine dance, theatre, and visual media. My aim is to challenge audiences to recognize their own implication in popular media: how media has trained and molded their desires, relationships, and identities. My movement-based performances combine fashion shows, gallery exhibitions, drag, stand-up comedy, minstrel shows, and stage-plays into a single, overwhelming, over-saturated Gesamtkunstwerk in which artists and audiences experience their shared humanity. I rehumanize our over-mediated experience of reality.

Photo by Thomas Dunn.

Adam Khalil (he/him) and Zack Khalil (he/him) (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and are currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). They both graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College and are UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows and Gates Millennium Scholars.

Fellowship Statement

Our work centers indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—while subverting traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative nonfiction practice. With a practice that includes experimental filmmaking, documentary, performance & curation, we are charting out a critical & unconventional space for situating & interrogating ideas of indigeneity today.

Photo by Bayley Sweitzer and Sam Richardson.

Hasabie Kidanu (she/her) received her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2017. Her film Mal-Fekata was most recently screened at the 48th Rotterdam International Film Festival as part of the Bright Future program. She has been a member of the Blackburn Printmaking Studio in New York since 2013. She was most recently a guest lecturer at Addis Ababa University. Since 2014, she is an Arts and Culture writer for TADIAS Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

I work with printmaking, film, and text. I was raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and often reference the city as a site of my research. I engage specific works of literature to ground and challenge my understanding of history and modernity. Currently, I am producing a film alongside a reading of Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly. Through the back and forth of reading and production, interpretation and application, I hope to produce a site/work that is of, and apart from, my understandings of early cinema and African literature.

Naomi Ko (she/her) is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and cultural producer. Her TV pilot, NICE, was an official selection at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Naomi created, wrote, and starred in the half-hour pilot. Naomi also played Sungmi in the 2014 Sundance award-winning feature film Dear White People, is a Moth StorySlam winner, and a featured performer for Mortified. Naomi performs with Funny Asian Women Kollective (FAWK) around the country and her comedic writing and performance can be seen in Episode 5 of The Mortified Guide, now available on Netflix. Naomi is the co-founder of the APIA MN Film Collective and has won multiple grants, awards, and fellowships for her work. Naomi is currently in pre-production for an upcoming short film she is directing and she is developing her feature film Good Genes.

Fellowship Statement

My work primarily focuses on creating unapologetic and raw film and TV narratives that feature fearless Asian American women. Even though the genres I play with can span from a raunchy sports comedy to a historical drama, at its core, each story explores the diversity of spirit, personality, and interests of Asian Americans in a grounded and humanistic lens. Currently I am exploring the ways in which Asian American women exercise their agency through my next feature film, Good Genes. It is a black comedy about a group of scientists of color who create their own personal genetics ancestry company to alter the genetic ancestry of known racists and white supremacists.

Photo by Katherina Vang.