Past
Grantees

Rebeca Tomás, New York City will travel to Seville, Spain, undertaking three months of intensive study to gain a significant level of mastery with the bata de cola (long-train dress), a technique and sub-genre of Flamenco dance. She will incorporate it into her vocabulary and creative process. She will study with Milagros Menjibar, known as la reina de la bata de cola, (the queen of the long-train dress); Menjibar combines the emotional force and elegance of classical flamenco with her own revolutionary touches. Thomas will also study with Maria Angeles Gabaldn, Yolanda Heredia, and Belen Maya-all highly regarded teachers and dancers of this form.

Pramila Vasudevan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to New Delhi, India to work with the Raqs Media Collective, artists who produce new media and multidisciplinary work from a contemporary perspective, and to study contemporary Indian performing arts through the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a progressive hub of contemporary Indian art. Vasudevan started a new media and movement-based performance company, Aniccha Arts, in 2004. Her travels will help guide her vision for this company and the new work she will be developing over the coming year.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $27,000 in support of the 2008 Essentially Choral Program. VocalEssence is recognized for its innovative exploration of music for voices and instruments. Its mission is to explore music for the human voices from spoken word to choral singing. Essentially Choral encourages emerging composers to create choral work and supports them as they develop it. VocalEssence partners with the American Composers Forum on the call for scores, the mechanics of the selection process and services offered to composers. Five composers are selected from applications submitted in response to an open call to have works-in-progress read by the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, a 32-voice professional chorus directed by Philip Brunelle. This program encourages stylistically diverse and experimental composition. Rehearsals with the Ensemble Singers, professional development seminars, one-on-one coaching and reading rehearsals combine to make an intensive experience for the composers.

VSA ARTS OF MINNESOTA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $38,000 to support Career Advancement Grants for Artists with Disabilities and services to artists. VSA arts of Minnesota promotes quality, accessible arts experiences for people with all types of disabilities throughout the state. Artists are assisted in their artistic pursuits through grant programs, workshops and access to information. Proposals for Career Advancements Grants will be submitted in response to an annual open call and reviewed by an independent jury. Selection criteria will be artistic merit/quality, demonstration of forward movement by the artist along a career path, the merit of the proposed artistic project and eligibility as an emerging artist.

A grant was awarded to MIAO WANG for Beijing Taxi, a feature-length film set in the two years surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Beijing Taxi turns a humanist lens onto the personalities and changing lives of three taxi drivers: Bai Jiwen, a 55-year-old married veteran driver with a 22-year-old son; Wei Caixia, a 33-year-old married woman with a 6-year-old daughter; and Zhou Yi, a 38-year-old married man with an 8-year-old daughter. Their stories connect a morphing cityscape and tales of citizens searching for their place amidst the dizzying pace of change. Beijing Taxi takes the viewer on a lyrical journey into fragments of a society navigating the bumpy roads to modernization.

STEPHANIE WANG-BREAL was awarded a grant for White Stork Hotel, a feature-length documentary about adopted Chinese girls, their American adoptive families and the Chinese political and cultural pressures that led to their abandonment. For the past eight years, China has been the leading country for US international adoptions. There are now approximately 70,000 Chinese adoptees being raised in the United States. Ninety-five percent of them are girls. Each year these girls face new questions regarding their adopted lives and surroundings. The characters and events of this story challenge traditional notions of family, culture and race.

AVI ZEV WEIDER received support for Welcome to the Machine, a feature-length documentary that explores our relationships to technology and reveals that all discussions about technology are ultimately about human values. The film explores the possibility of machines attaining human intelligence and ultimately asks a number of intriguing questions. Is there something about being a human that cannot be replicated through machines? If we do succeed in creating an intelligent machine, a machine that acts like a human, talks like a human, thinks like a human, what will we do with it? Will we grant it consciousness when it asks for it? Will we treat it as an equal? What exactly will the future world look like? Will it be much different? Will biological human beings be on this planet at the end of the century? What makes all the technological changes present on the horizon possible, anyway? What exactly is the origin and nature of technology? Welcome to the Machine is a documentary film about the ideas, the people and the machines behind these far-reaching questions.

Adia Tamar Whitaker, Brooklyn, New York, will attend a summer dance intensive in Kingston, Jamaica, where she will study Jamaican folklore in performance, culture and contemporary contexts. She will then travel to Ghana to study the Dahomean roots of Afro-Haitian dance in Ewe culture. In her choreographic work, Whitaker combines these traditional influences with hip-hop and modern dance vocabularies. She wants to study these forms at their source.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS was awarded a grant for Public Hearing, a 100-minute experimental cinematic reenactment of a real public hearing. The screenplay is derived from a public-domain transcript generated in the small town of Allegany, New York, which chronicles a debate surrounding a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter expansion in the area. Public Hearing synthesizes a fictional feature-film and a factual document. The original transcript was discovered on the Allegany town website, where the supporting PowerPoint visuals are also available for download. These visuals will be used in the film as props in the same way they were used during the real event as evidence. That which is not available for download, or is not accounted for in the transcript, will be imagined. Through such methods, the film will challenge the boundaries of intellectual property and public domain, and in so doing will belong to neither fact nor fiction.

Diane Wilson, Shafer, Minnesota, will travel to South Dakota, northern Minnesota and Canada to conduct research for a creative nonfiction book, Beloved Child, which explores the process of healing from historic trauma through the personal stories of Native people. Juxtaposed with the story of Dakota removal to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota after the 1862 Dakota war in Minnesota, the book challenges contemporary stereotypes with a pre-contact Dakota tradition of child-beloved. Wilson uses personal stories to explore larger, historical issues. She will interview specific individuals.

Bridgette Wimberly, New York City, will travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to work with teens in the Cleveland Juvenile Detention Center to gather information to inform her spoken word poems about their experiences.

CHAVISA WOODS, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Southern Illinois and Kansas, Missouri, exploring her relation with her Native American heritage, while conducting interviews with estranged relatives and citizens of her hometown. She will travel to Native American reservations where distant relatives are residing to understand relationships between the American rural class and Native American culture. Her current writing is an artistic exploration of the experiences of lower class Americans, a societal critique and a personal revolution.

THE WRITERS ROOM, New York City, received a two-year grant of $33,000 to subsidize membership fees and provide scholarship funds for emerging writers with financial need. The Writers Room is an urban writers' colony dedicated to providing clean, quiet and affordable workspace, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year to writers. Members include novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, nonfiction writers, journalists, biographers, memoirists and children's book writers. It serves approximately 400 writers each year with approximately 300 of those being emerging.

SUSAN YOUSSEF received funding for Habibi Rasak Kharban (My Darling, Something's Wrong With Your Head), a narrative digital short that explores the story of a forbidden love crushed under the weight of both the Israeli occupation and traditional Islamic society of Gaza. Set in modern-day Khan Younis, it is the retelling of the famous Sufi mystical parable Majnun Layla. When the film begins, the Gaza strip has come under full closure-Palestinians are not allowed to travel in or out of Gaza via Israel. Two Palestinian college students who have been studying in the West Bank-Qays and Layla-have just been forced to return home. The two were childhood companions who used to tend sheep together. Qays fell in love with Layla in their childhood. The film references this innocent past as the time Qays and Layla spent in the West Bank; however, upon return to the Gaza strip, with the limits of curfews and checkpoints as well as societal traditions and rules, Layla is inaccessible to Qays, and he descends into madness.

Jake Yuzna, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to three cities in Germany to visit the sites of the last days of Ernst Rhm's life, a founding member of the Nazi Party, the leader of a storm battalion, and an open homosexual. Yunza will also research and interview young queer couples living in Berlin's arts community. The research will become the basis for the creation of a dramatic film consisting of two interwoven storis of queer relationships in Germany. The first will follow the final months of Ernst Rhm, climaxing with the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler reportedly executed 85 people including several founding members of the Nazi Party and high ranking officers of the military. The second will center on a love story set in the queer arts community of present day Berlin.

ZENON DANCE COMPANY AND SCHOOL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $10,000 in support of July 2008 performances of works by emerging New York City and Minnesota choreographers at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. The mission of Zenon Dance Company and School is to sustain an artistically excellent, professional dance company in the Twin Cities by presenting the commissioned works of emerging and locally, nationally and internationally recognized modern and jazz choreographers to the broadest and most diverse audiences and communities possible. This repertory company has commissioned new works from over 30 choreographers, many of those with the support of the Jerome Foundation. The culmination of its 25th anniversary season will be this series of performances at Dance Theater Workshop.

ZENON DANCE COMPANY AND SCHOOL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $24,500 in support of the commissioning and performance of new dance works by three emerging choreographers. The mission of Zenon is to sustain an artistically excellent, professional dance company in the Twin Cities by presenting the commissioned works of modern and jazz choreographers to the broadest and most diverse audiences and communities. It accomplishes this through performance, education and outreach. The Jerome Foundation grant allows Zenon to select emerging choreographers based in Minnesota and New York City and commission them to create new works while in residence with the Company. These works are then presented on the Zenon season.

ADAM ZUCKER, New York City, will travel to Poland to explore a lost world of Polish Jewry, and its recent renaissance via the Jewish Culture Festival, an annual event celebrating Jewish culture in a country that has lost almost its entire Jewish population. The Festival takes place in Cracow, a city 20 minutes from Auschwitz. The Jewish quarter of Cracow is filled with music, art, dance, lectures, exhibits and films celebrating the 900-year history of Jews in Poland. Festival founder Janusz Makuch has invited Zucker to attend the Festival, meet with the organizers, interview people engaged in the project and conduct research. Zucker intends to develop the seeds of a new documentary.

13P/THIRTEEN PLAYWRIGHTS, Brooklyn, New York, received $8,000 in support of the production of two new works in the 2007-08 season: Have You Seen Steve Steven by Ann Marie Healy and Crawl, Fade to White by Sheila Callaghan. 13P was formed in 2003 by 13 playwrights ready to take matters into their own hands by producing their work on their terms. The plan is to produce one play by each of the playwrights and then disband. 13P is committed to the understanding that there is no substitute for the commitment a company makes to a playwright by giving his or her play the chance to live and be seen in full production. Many of the plays scheduled for production have been incubated by other theater companies but have not yet received the productions envisioned by the authors.

AFRICAN VOICES, New York City, received $7,500 to support writers fees and publication of new works by emerging writers. African Voices is dedicated to presenting art and literature by writers and artists of color. Its mission is to strive for literary and artistic excellence while showcasing the unique and diverse stories within the African Diaspora. It's published the work of more than 500 emerging writers and artists since 1992. In addition to publishing a literary magazine, it sponsors readings, conferences and art exhibitions. A Jerome grant of $7,500 will enhance the organization's capability to serve emerging writers, paying contributors' fees for emerging poets and fiction writers and production costs.