Past
Grantees

Sieng Lee is a first-generation Hmong American refugee. Lee graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a Master’s in Fine Arts. He is an artist, graphic designer, and community organizer. His recent achievements include being a recipient of the MAEP at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; a Cultural Community Partnership Grant from the Minnesota States Arts Board; designing and developing the We Are Hmong/Peb Yog Hmoob Minnesota exhibit at the Minnesota History Center, which won an AASLH award; and directing multiple political campaigns to elect Fue Lee, Samantha Vang, and Jay Xiong to the Minnesota House of Representatives to form the first ever Minnesota Asian Pacific Caucus. His passion lies at the intersections of our multicultural society, helping to bridge the many inequities and misunderstandings.

Fellowship Statement

My work treads a delicate line that weaves in and out of the two realms that have shaped the Hmong identity since before time: the living and the spiritual. In so doing, I introduce general audiences to the celestial mythology that shapes modern Hmong Americanism, while activating the Hmong community’s exclusive access to view, recognize, and react to their own stories on display. By using physical objects that have a spiritual, and at times controversial, significance, my work questions the performance of tradition as it has been adopted and reinterpreted from generation to generation.

Simon Liu (he/him) was raised between Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, UK and lives in Brooklyn. His films and 16mm multiple projections have been presented at film festivals globally including the Toronto, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. He has performed at institutions such as the M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, CROSSROADS at SFMoMA, Yale University and as part of Dreamlands: Expanded—an expanded cinema series presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Microscope Gallery. Liu is an adjunct faculty member at the Cooper Union School of Art and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Wave Farm and the Jerome Foundation. He is in post-production on his first feature, Staffordshire Hoard and is developing a film which imaginatively traces the passage of an ancestor who traveled from Guangzhou to Amsterdam by foot.

Fellowship Statement

In recent years my practice has centered around building a filmic catalogue from my places of origin through a body of work consisting of abstract diary films, alternative documentaries and 16mm projection performances. These works act as a storage mechanism that activate the potential for me to reconsider my formative experiences and how they relate to my position as a half Chinese, half English person who was born and raised in the former British colony of Hong Kong. I’m driven by a desire to compress fleeting exchanges into a single frame—by exploiting the material potential of “outdated” analogue formats—with the intent of relaying an exaggeratedly contemporary experience. Currently I’m working on a suite of 16mm films which call into question the ethics of image making and two feature documentaries that interrogate personal family mythologies in relation to centuries old histories of South China and the English Midlands.

Photo: Still from E-Ticket (2019) - Photo of the Artist at a WTO Protest in 2006.

Kareem M. Lucas (he/him) is a Brooklyn born and Harlem-based actor/writer/producer/director. His solo pieces include The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro, From Brooklyn With Love, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, A Boy & His Bow, and Black Is Beautiful, But It Ain’t Always Pretty. He is currently co-collaborating on the development of the immersive theatrical piece The Black History Museum...According to the United States of America, as a writer/performer with the Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative at HERE Arts Center. He recently presented his solo piece, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, as a part of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door Series, and The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro as part of his 2019 Mentor Project at Cherry Lane Theatre. Kareem received an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program. For more info follow him on Instagram @KareemMLucas.

Fellowship Statement

I feel a great responsibility to articulate what it is to be Black now. Currently, my curiosity is drawn to investigating and deconstructing the Black heterosexual cis-gendered male perspective as it functions within America’s White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. How the legacy of slavery, racism, misogyny, religion and the value of the Black body over the Black mind still insinuates itself into our modern day existences and systems, as we navigate love, intimacy, identity, and self-worth in this digital media age The greatest service I may provide through my work is to communicate on behalf of my culture, so that we may reflect, heal, inspire, take responsibility, and move forward, because this lack of self-awareness, self-care, self-love, and overall accountability has diminished our progress as a people in this land for many generations.

Photo by Stan Demidoff Photography.

Kate Marks’ (she/her) film PEARL WAS HERE has over 25 million views on YouTube. She is a 2016 HBO Access Directing Fellow as well as a 2013 Project Involve Fellow (Barbara Boyle Award winner). She directed the HBO Access pilot MANIC, which premiered in the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and received Best Drama from the New York Television Festival and Best Actress in a Drama at Series Fest. Her award-winning shorts (PEARL WAS HERE, HOMEBODY, 7 DAY GIG, and MIRACLE MAKER) continue to screen all over the world, including Slamdance, Edinburgh International, Palm Springs ShortFest, New Orleans, Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, and Cleveland International Film Festival as well as broadcast on PBS. Kate holds a BA from Brown and her MFA in film-directing from CalArts where she received the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts. Additionally, Kate is an organizer, a teacher, a stilt-walker, a bad trombonist, and a reckless dancer.

Fellowship Statement

I come from a long line of tricksters. My grandpa was famous for his epic pranks and my dad was a legendary wild man. Telling tall tales is in my blood and (like a good trick) my films use comedy, surprise, and spectacle to take you somewhere unexpected. My stories feature oddballs, misfits, and losers and I love experimenting with tone, mining humor out of dark situations. I am currently working on my first feature, THE COW OF QUEENS. In the final days of her father’s illness, Sonya and her dad, Del, go on one last adventure to usher an escaped slaughterhouse cow to freedom through the streets of New York. It’s an off-kilter love story about a dad, a daughter, a cow with a dream, and the good people of Queens.

Photo by Jamie Milner.

Dustin Maxwell (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer and visual artist originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, now based in Brooklyn, New York. In New Mexico he trained in Graham and Limon with his dance “mother,” Joanne Emmons. He has a BA in Dance from the University of Minnesota and extensive training in Yoga and Butoh. As a freelance dancer he has worked with Aniccha Arts, Chris Schlichting, Morgan Thorson, and many others. His choreography and performance installations have been shown in galleries, theaters, basements and alleyways in Minnesota, New York and Germany. He was a nominee for the 11th Annual Sage Awards, Outstanding Performer.

Fellowship Statement

I work primarily within the modalities of somatic improvisation and butoh. Being born queer into a Mormon family of eight has shaped my perspective in many ways. Sexuality, spirituality and the experience of otherness are major themes in my work. My choreography is highly visual and minimal in movement relying on the innate history, ancestry, cultural identity and politics inherent in the body. My body is a field for knowing that which is seen and unseen; that which lies beyond the boundaries of the mundane. My artistic endeavors use performance as a method for connecting with others at this essential level and perhaps provoking “awakeness.” I believe this expands the limits of consciousness which is a radical and subversive action.

Photo by Justin Hickman.

As a media composer and installation artist, Kathy McTavish (ze/hir) creates chance-infused, open systems. Ze uses generative methods to build networked, multichannel video and sound environments ::: cross-sensory, polyphonic landscapes which flow from the digital web (the cloud) into physical spaces.

Kathy has a background in cello performance, mathematics, ecology, music theory and code. The confluence of these disciplines informs hir work as a composer and multimedia artist. As both a musician and a mathematician, Kathy likes multi-threaded, dynamical systems and chance-infused, emergent patterns. As a queer artist, ze is interested in the ways we construct personal stories / myths and the infinite, bendable between.

Kathy’s current work explores the porous, intimate boundaries between humans and machines ::: the erotic dynamics of tapping glass ::: the carbon cycle ::: the cyborg body ::: the fragile electric body ::: the resistance cyborg ::: the networked, digital hive mind ::: the swarm.

Fellowship Statement

I like patterns but my work explores chance & improvisation. Mathematical models are a score. They are a blueprint to draw contours of change and movement ::: convergences, divergences, emergent patterns and cascading, system-level impacts.

Chance is a frayed thread, a stochastic cloud, a pointillist field, a complexity, an uncertainty, a ragged line. Chance is a prayer ::: a slim window of chance to survive this time of profound climatic change. Evolution requires fruitful deviation. A system's ability to adapt to change depends on its ability to mutate ::: on trial & error & improvisation.

I am interested in the poetics of code ::: the networked (i) ::: a deviant, queer learning machine ::: aerial artist ::: (m)bodied cloud ::: burlesque, cybernetic ze ::: beat poet of electricity ::: a honey ::: a lure ::: a torrent.

Photo by Magic Box Photography, Duluth, MN.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, Glendalys Medina is an interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Hunter College. Medina’s work has been presented at such notable venues as PAMM, Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Medina is a recipient of a Bemis Center Residency (2019), an Ace Hotel New York City Artist Residency (2017), a SIP fellowship at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2016), a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist residency at El Museo Del Barrio (2015), a residency at Yaddo (2014, 2018), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2013), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), and the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency (2010).

Fellowship Statement

At age 7, I decided I wanted to be an artist–not really knowing that it was much more than making beautiful things. Today, I am an artist to give a voice to those who have been silenced and create cultural equity.

I am interested in patterns, how they are formed and give meaning. Humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines with the ability to detect their disruptions or “recursive probabilistic fractals” according to inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil. I investigate existing patterns in order to understand how to form new patterns of behavior, thought, structure and meaning. Patterns dictate our understanding of life and who we are, and to change these meanings, we must disrupt them and make new concrete goal-oriented patterns in order to create social change.

The style of my work is heavily influenced by systematic structures, the cadence of Hip-Hop rappers, the affirmations and visualization exercises of New Thought ministers and authors, the signatures of graffiti writers, the moves of break-dancers, and traditional Taíno motifs.

The questions I grapple with in my work are how can I create new resonant forms, architecture, actions, and movement to invoke in my viewer emotions of love and curiosity for a broader perspective of the world.

Photo by Carlos David.

Kelley Meister (pronouns: ze/hir/hirs) received an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008 and continues to live and work in Minneapolis. Kelley’s work has been shown throughout the US, including at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis; Counterpulse Festival in San Francisco; and Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Hir work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Kelley also works as a teaching artist in schools, libraries, museums/cultural production centers, and community centers throughout Minnesota with COMPAS and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Kelley is a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines drawing, sculpture, video, and performance into multimedia installations and films. Kelley’s body of work investigates and calls attention to this moment in geological history where the planet is shifted by the indelible touch of humans. This work centers on a search for empathy for those whose lives have been irreversibly impacted by climate change, war, famine, and other challenges. Kelley utilizes the process of scientific observation of the world around us, yet as a queer artist, ze chooses to infuse this observation with the emotional responses that come up rather than stifle them to present a neutral position. Hir work interrogates the cultural acceptance of our trajectory and raises questions about our effects on our ecosystems and future generations.

During Kelley’s Camargo residency, ze will spend time synthesizing hir research and developing new work as part of the multi-part project Last Vacation Before the End of the World. Utilizing the research from hir Jerome Travel and Study trip to nuclear test sites and waste depositories in Nevada and New Mexico last spring, this new work is a multimedia response to our ongoing nuclear arsenal, questions of containment and disposal of nuclear waste, and the tourism industry that surrounds our nuclear production and history. A site visit to France’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor nearby will be a part of hir residency at Camargo.

Composer/Pianist/Producer Migiwa Miyajima’s (she/her) career path began on a very different trajectory from composing music—she worked as a director of real estate ads, an IT engineer, and an editor-in-chief of a travel magazine in Tokyo. But in 2004, at the age of 30, she decided to become a musician. Five years later, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, a historic New York-based ensemble, invited her to join their team. She was associate producer for two Grammy Award-nominated albums by the orchestra in 2011 and 2014. In 2012, having received a Japanese government scholarship as a composer and a Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship, Migiwa made her move to New York. Her ensemble Miggy Augmented Orchestra’s debut album Colorful was released by ArtistShare in 2018. She composes for various artists and media outlets, such as saxophonist Steve Wilson, The Birdland Big Band, as well as nation-wide Japanese radio station Nippon-Hoso-Broadcast.

Fellowship Statement

Experiencing the massive 2011 earthquake in Japan transformed my approach to my life’s work as a composer. I witnessed the inconceivable ability music has to speak to us as a people during chaotic times. Since then, I am most interested in music as a language that speaks to our emotions directly. After moving to the United States and seeing fear and lack of happiness turned into hatred and division, it feels that this is the time for me as a composer/musician to cultivate what I learned in Japan. In my upcoming project, I am practicing how to make my music work on fear or insecurity and how to cultivate positive energy through it. I am delighted to be inspired by this amazing community while I am tackling this profound theme.

Photo by Hayato Sakurai.

Alicia Hall Moran’s (she/her) critically-acclaimed albums (Heavy Blue, Here Today) embrace Opera, Soul, Jazz, Theatre, and Visual Art. Shows/explorations include “the motown project”; “Black Wall Street: Tulsa Race Riot of 1921”; and “Breaking Ice: Battle of the Carmens.” Further collaborations live inside the artworks of Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Simone Leigh/Liz Magic Laser, Carl Hancock Rux, and Ragnar Kjartansson, and are exhibited worldwide. Residencies/commissions include Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, National Sawdust, MoMA, ArtPublic, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, The Kitchen, and River to River. Her contemporary sensibilities were tapped for Broadway’s Tony-winning Porgy and Bess, starring as Bess on National Tour. Her artistry with husband/pianist Jason Moran has yielded Bleed/Whitney Biennial, Work Songs/Venice Biennial, Two Wings: Music of Black America In Migration/Carnegie Hall; and the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship. Ongoing, Alicia balances composition with solo vocalism in symphonic works: through 2020 in Gabriel Kahane’s emergency shelter intake form and Bryce Dessner’s Triptych.

Fellowship Statement

As a mezzo-soprano and composer, my sense of harmony, evidenced in film, recorded output and stage performances, both entices and subdues established notions of Performer and Performance. Profound historical divisions are the jump-off points for my previous musical investigations. Class difference in the review and catalogue of Black Music is another interest. My practice is non-hierarchical and plainly observes the music of the West. In my forays, textual and sonic, Voice itself is an embodiment. My aim has been to find a new harmony inside of my work between Performance, Performer, and Practice. The Jerome Fellowship enables deeper exploration of venues previously off limits, collaborations too impractical to previously entertain, and visual realms that were technically unavailable. Traveling to Natural settings will sharpen specificity in my work. I will re-engage my recent work on ice to continue the investigation: metaphors for expressions of fragility and civility in critically trying Times.

Photo by Charles Roussel/Prototype Festival.

Patricia Park (she/her) is the author of the acclaimed novel Re Jane, a modern-day reimagining of Brontë’s Jane Eyre set in Queens. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, The Center for Fiction, American Association of University Women, and others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Salon, and others. She is at work on a second novel which explores the Korean community in Argentina during the Dirty War. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at American University. A native of Queens, she lives in Brooklyn.

Fellowship Statement

I write about minorities within minorities. I was born here but have family from Korea and Argentina. When I was growing up, mainstream America always lumped me into the “Asian” category. But ironically enough, within the Korean community in Queens, I didn’t always feel that I belonged. In my fiction, I challenge our assumptions of the “monolithic minority.” I give voice to anyone who has felt that same loneliness; to anyone who has similarly occupied a culturally confused space. My first novel, Re Jane, is the story of a mixed-race Korean American orphan from Queens that uses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as a loose template to raise questions of identity and “homeland.” My second novel-in-progress, El Chino: A Novel in Four Movements, is about a boy named Juan Kim who falls in love with jazz, and the music becomes his freedom of expression during the backdrop of the Argentine Dirty War.

Leslie Parker (she/her), a contemporary dance artist, performer, maker, improviser and educator, holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company. Leslie has a rigorous research and practice in dance forms derived from the African Diaspora. She designed the “Moving Dialogue for Non-Violence” dance for social change platform used at Broadway Women’s House Shelter in Brooklyn, New York and at The Family Place in Saint Paul, MN. She is a 2017 Bessie award recipient and a member of Skeleton Architecture. The Leslie Parker Dance Project, her foundation to envision and make dances, has presented at Walker Art Center, Theatre, Center for Performance Research, Performance Mix Festival, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, Painted Bride Arts Center, Roseville Women’s Correctional Facility, Movement Research at Judson Church, “late nite series” at Pillsbury House Theatre, Harlem Stage’s Emoves13, and New York Live Art’s Fresh Tracks Artist-in-Residence 2013-14. Currently, she is lecturer in dance at University of Minnesota Theatre Arts and Dance. She will present a new work in Momentum: New Dance Works at St. Catherine’s University in Summer 2019.

Fellowship Statement

I am a dance artist, performer, dance maker, educator and improviser, trained in and experimenting with an aesthetic rooted in the Black experience. I make dances that explore spirituality, identity and social justice to spark questions and conversations with and between people.  As an improviser, I invite observers to a real-time exchange through movement, sound, space and the body. Described by choreographer Bill T. Jones as “haunting,” former Director of Quixote Foundation, June Wilson describes the experience of “watching Parker’s work is like being a voyeur; the intimacy and emotional energy of her movement makes you want to look away and yet it’s impossible to stop watching.”

Photo courtesy of Leslie Parker.

Ronny Quevedo (he/him) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and now lives in the Bronx. He works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo has had several solo exhibitions including no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017); Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, Bronx, New York (2015); and Ulama, Ule, Olé, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami (2013). In 2018, Quevedo was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s group exhibition, Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003. He is currently artist in residence at Smack Mellon.

Fellowship Statement

The effect of relocation and displacement generates works about adaptation, memory and transformation. The movement and action within sports is a metaphor for an insistence on survival and constant adaptation. This use of play is a subversive transformation to the rules and capabilities placed upon people when the conditions of a society become oppressive. By incorporating these games, I invoke an architectural and narrative space—where boundaries are malleable, limits are negotiable and competition is a generative force for evolving identities. The parallels between play and migration generate from indoor soccer leagues in New York City. Played on weekends at local public schools, these leagues are coordinated and operated by migrant Latin American and Caribbean communities. The questioning of inheritance and memory are conceptual markers in my practice. The act of passing—passing down, passing on, passing the ball—offers generative contemplations of my points of origin. My focus for the fellowship is the dialectic of nomadism and cultural production as complemented by Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. He emphasizes the influence of the periphery onto central forms of culture. He claims that the margins offer a new understanding of the center. It can be more creative in determining meaning than a static position based on an essential form. I relate to this concept of being having been born in Ecuador, raised in The Bronx (a pre-dominantly Caribbean and Black community at that time) and determining my own identity as a migrant in relation to those who have similar experiences of displacement.

Photo by Argenis Apolinario.

Preeti Kaur Rajpal (she/her) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She first began writing as a student of June Jordan in her “Poetry for the People” program. Preeti’s work can be found in The Sikh Review, qarrtsiluni, Memoir Journal’s I Speak From My Palms Anthology, American Public Media’s On Being Blog, Spook Mag, Jaggery Lit, Blueshift Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Popula, Lantern Review, and others. She is a recent Loft Literary Mentor Series Poetry Fellow, Voices of Our Nations Arts Fellow, Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator Fellow, and Writing By Writers Fellow.

Fellowship Statement

I am working on my first collection of poems, tentatively titled O! How We Escaped! My poems explore issues of colonialism, post-colonialism, immigrant status in the US, patriarchy, post-9/11 Islamophobia specific to the effects on Sikhs in the US, human rights issues in India, India’s Partition, my family’s journey as refugees during that time, and my understanding of Sikh philosophy.

Photo by Anna Min.

As an independent choreographer and Choreographic Associate with Ragamala Dance Company, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s (she/her) work references ancient myths and ritualistic practices, global literature and poetry, and the mixed media contemporary culture she has absorbed for over 30 years. Her work draws from myriad influences to express a personal identity with universal resonance. Celebrated for her ability to “[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine” (New York Times), Ashwini has studied Bharatanatyam since the age of five. She has toured extensively with Ragamala, performing throughout the U.S. and in Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, the U.K, and India. Ashwini's choreographic work has been presented by the Cowles Center, the Yard, and the Joyce Theater, among others. Her work is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s US Artist International, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, among others.

Fellowship Statement

I have spent decades steeped in the south Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. I am committed to maintaining the beauty, technique, rigor, and values embedded in the form as it has been taught to me, while creating my own personal vision of women’s representation in performance. Like a phantom limb, my Indian ancestry lingers within me, informing my artistic work and daily interactions; my upbringing in both India and the U.S. has encouraged an aesthetic perspective with a hybrid internal compass. As an artist of diaspora, I am a cultural carrier with an instinct to move within ancestral patterns. There is a continuum between what we perceive as real/tangible and what we accept as unknown/unknowable; this gravitation between the human, the natural, and the metaphysical—which are forever engaged in sacred movement—is a focal point in my work.

Photo by Ed Bock.

Deneane Richburg (she/her) grew up a competitive figure skater, spending time in spaces where she felt she had to check her racial/cultural identity at the door, as the predominantly white skating world excluded her ancestry’s truths. To quote Zora Neale Hurston, Deneane always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” As an adult, she realized the need to carve out a space for her ancestral history, so she established Brownbody, a creative home for her artistic work that fuses theater, dance, social justice practice, and skating. Through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of Black diasporic communities. As a modern dance choreographer and skater, Deneane is interested in expanding creative expression on the ice by engaging ancestral narratives as a framework for movement exploration. Deneane is a grateful recipient of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship administered by the Cowles Center and funded by The McKnight Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

I fuse different movement worlds; a modern dance choreographer that presents works on and off of the ice. The themes of my work range from visual objectification through the story of Saartjie Baartman to issues of re-memory through a piece based on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My latest on ice evening length work is Quiet As It’s Kept, which focuses on the Reconstruction era and rise of Jim Crow laws. I’m interested in ensemble work on the ice. As a dancer I’ve performed with companies in ensemble pieces and have learned to appreciate the intricacies and manipulation of group nuances—engaging many bodies to create a fully realized and unified statement. I am interested in exploring the power of these elements on the ice in telling stories relevant to my ancestral history. Currently I am working on an ice ensemble piece that explores American Black social dances of the 17th through 19th centuries.

Photo by Alice Gebura.

Walken Schweigert (he/him) is a performer, composer and director from Saint Paul, MN. He is the founder and artistic director of Open Flame Theatre, an all queer/trans ensemble that creates surrealist and queer-centered work. Walken is a 2009 graduate of the Dell’ Arte International School for Physical Theatre, and a 2006 graduate of the Perpich Center for Arts Education (Theatre Major). He has worked with the Taller Xuchialt and Ronda de Barro in Leon, Nicaragua; toured with and been mentored by the internationally renowned Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, MA; and has busked on the streets of 11 countries. A classically trained violinist, he has been part of over a dozen musical ensembles of varying genres, from klezmer to metal. Walken was recently the recipient of a JFund award from the Jerome Foundation via the American Composers’ Forum for the composition of his second opera, The Garden, to be produced by Open Flame Theatre and Philadelphia Community Farm.

Fellowship Statement

I see my role as an artist as someone who crosses, transgresses and thrives in between boundaries. My mission is to create original, multi-disciplinary performances rooted in the queer/trans experience. Through exploring the surreal and fantastic, I seek to liberate the imagination which I recognize as a vital part of the larger struggle for justice and freedom.

What is the relationship between ritual and performance? Between song and story? How do we celebrate together? How do we grieve together? How can we harness the power of story and song to liberate our imaginations and expand our creative potential? What new traditions/rituals/rites of passage can we make for and with each other that affirm and express who we truly are? This is what I hope to explore in my fellowship. I hope at the end of it I will have made an honest contribution to a transforming cultural fabric.

Photo by Connie Chang.