Past
Grantees

TROIKA RANCH, Brooklyn, New York, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of 16(r)evolutions. Troika Ranch is a collaborative engaging choreographer Dawn Stoppiello and composer Mark Coniglio, who create works that fuse traditional elements of dance, music and theater performances with digital computer technology. The new evening-length work 16(r)evolutions will explore the inexorable force of evolution. The work will dramatize a network of evolutionary tension among four characters as they complete a single evolutionary cycle, from the appearance of their species to their extinction.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $22,000 in support of Essentially Choral 2006. VocalEssence offers education programs, tours internationally, records, broadcasts, provides training for emerging composers writing vocal music, and commissions composers to broaden the experience of today's audiences with new contributions to concert repertoire. Essentially Choral provides a creative, developmental, networking, and educational opportunity for emerging composers interested in writing for chorus. Five composers receive readings of their work, recordings of the rehearsal readings, seminar sessions, and meetings with a senior composer mentor and conductor Philip Brunelle.

VOICE & VISION, New York City, received a two-year grant of $27,000 in support of the ENVISION Retreat and Lab workshop productions of works by emerging playwrights. Voice & Vision seeks to develop and produce vibrant theater works with female artists at the core. Each writer and artistic team is treated individually to define goals and ascertain the resources needed to bring works to their next stage. In 2005-06, the Lab will support the growth of three new works ranging in style, content, aesthetic, and cultural perspective.

JASON WADE was awarded a grant in support of STABBER, an experimental film about an institutionalized man who has been sheltered from society his whole life. He is accidentally left behind when the institution closes and goes on an incredibly violent and surreal journey that takes him from the country to the city, into the forest and ends at the precipice of a large cliff where he hurls himself into the abyss.

WHITE COLUMNS, New York City, received $20,000 in support of the participation of emerging artists in the 2005-06 exhibition season, and the payment of artists' fees. White Columns is a laboratory for exploring new ways of making and displaying art. It identifies visual artists at early points in their careers and encourages their creative and professional development. It seeks to stimulate, support and amplify idiosyncratic voices, engaging those voices in dialogue with each other, and moving that dialogue into the public sphere. The exhibition program includes thematic group shows exploring new ideas and directions in contemporary art and exhibiting 70 to 100 artists each year. The White Rooms offer solo exhibitions to emerging artists. Jerome funding also focuses on New York City and Minnesota artists.

WOMEN'S PROJECT & PRODUCTIONS, New York City, received $22,000 in support of the Developmental Theatre Program. Dedicated to developing and producing women theater artists, the Women's Project seeks progressive and inspiring stories and roles for women and strives to produce plays with diverse, transformational women at their center. Jerome support is dedicated to the development of new work by emerging playwrights, primarily through the Playwrights Lab, new play development and Women's Work. The dual emphasis of the Lab is to nurture the playwright and to develop plays through critical evaluation and dramaturgy. Playwrights are encouraged to take risks and try new styles and approaches. Women's Work is a two-week festival of ten to 12 plays written by women, many of them members of the Lab.

THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal sponsor for ELLIS WOOD DANCE received $10,000 in support of the creation of a new work titled Hurricane Flora: Inferno. Ellis Wood Dance was founded in 1996 with the mission of presenting performance work and developing community projects that focus on bringing the power of dance to a diverse audience. Hurricane Flora: Inferno will explore aspects of female identity as they relate to the four elements of air, fire, earth, and water. The two new sections in progress, Fire and Water, will be combined with the previously completed Air and Earth to create a complete piece that will tour in this country and abroad. The purpose of the work is to lead the audience through an experimental journey of female choice.

A grant in support of Manhattan, Kansas was awarded to TARA WRAY. Manhattan, Kansas is an intensely personal documentary about the filmmaker's relationship with her troubled mother who lives in Hunter, Kansas, a small town with no mental health facilities capable of treating her mother's multiple mental illnesses. The film delves into the complex nature of home, as well as the often complicated ways people, and families, care for one another.

Support was awarded to JAKE YUZNA for OPEN, an unconventional love story about a gay man and transgendered man (born as a woman, but through surgery and hormone treatment transitions into a man) who sleep with each other and discover they are each other's first time with a member of the opposite sex. Yuzna's goal is to build understanding of contemporary fringe culture by creating emotionally compelling and complex characters.

ZEITGEIST, St. Paul, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $27,000 in support of the Zeitgeist/Composer Workshop. A group of musicians animated by a spirit of adventure and collaboration, Zeitgeist presents works of substance with passion and integrity and strives to forge new links between musicians and music lovers through concerts, commissions, recordings, and dialogues with audiences. The Composer Workshop gives emerging composers the opportunity to develop their creative ideas and stretch their artistic boundaries in an environment that celebrates exploration and experimentation. Each composer brings sketches of material he or she would like to develop using Zeitgeist as a compositional laboratory. The workshop takes place over a five-day period in which each composer works directly with the ensemble, composes new material, and attends the working sessions of the other composers.

Minneapolis-based playwright JANET MALIA ALLARD will spend one month in Hawaii at the Kalaupapa Settlement on Molokai and on Oahu. Allard will conduct interviews, attend hula festivals and do historical research on Hawaiian performing arts, gathering raw materials and information to create a new theater piece on the Kalaupapa Settlement, a home for surviving Hansen's disease patients. The play will bring to the stage stories of loss, forced isolation, adaptation, family, struggle and survival.

The Jerome Foundation received several years ago a bequest that endowed a GEORGE AND GIESLA AMBERG DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP for the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a $4,486 grant to that Department to support a 2004 dissertation fellowship for Elena Gorfinkel. She is working on a dissertation titled Dated Sexuality: 1960s Sexploitation Cinema and Erotic Temporalities.

ARTISTS SPACE, New York City, received a two-year grant of $36,000 in support of the participation of emerging artists in its 2003-04 and 2004-05 exhibition seasons. Over its 30-year history, Artists Space has supported over 6,000 emerging artists through exhibitions, services and programs. Dedicated to the development of new ideas, Artists Space looks for innovative methods to introduce and exhibit work in a wide range of media. Its Irving Sandler artists file is now available as an online database. Artists Space presents exhibitions 11 months out of each year, both in-house and guest curated shows. The main gallery features large scale group exhibitions. Three project spaces introduce emerging artists in one-person shows and present exhibitions in an architecture and design series.

THE ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS' WORKSHOP, New York City, received a two-year grant of $42,000 in support of programs and activities that support the development of new works by emerging Asian American writers. The Workshop engages artists and audiences in the cultivation and promotion of Asian American literature and art through innovative presentation, intensive workshops, tours, youth work, and publication. An ever-evolving entity, the Workshop serves between 100 and 150 emerging writers each year through training, publication, and public presentations. Jerome subsidy is directed toward several program strands at the Workshop, chief among those the annual workshops offered for writers and publications. The Workshop has produced ten anthologies of the best of new contemporary Asian American writing, and has also published a journal and magazine. The Workshop recently announced its first individual poetry manuscript competition open to Asian American poets without published collections.

EVA BARR, theater artist in Wyckoff, will travel to Matagalpa, Nicaragua, to work with the theatre groups of the Collectivo de Mujeres. It is Barrs intention to learn how their use of performance affects the communities and individuals with whom they are involved. She will apply what she learns to her work in rural Minnesota.

DON BERNIER received a grant for In A Nutshell (working title),a one-hour documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Yassa Tashjian, a.k.a. The Nut Lady. Ms. Tashijan, who founded the Nut Museum of Old Lyme, Connecticut, is viewed by some as a fascinating eccentric and by others as a nut case. Bernier probes the life of this artist, philosopher, entertainer and curator.

INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for THE BODYCARTOGRAPHY PROJECT, received $6,000 in support of the development and production of new work by choreographers Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad. Bieringa and Ramstad will use the lens of film creation as a structure for live performance, balancing the weights of dance and video in real time in front of an audience, creating an opening for an evolution of live work that charges audiences and challenges their attention. In their new work, Bieringa and Ramstad are interested in highlighting and contrasting different seasons, urban and wilderness locations, and wildlife spaces re-emerging in urban environments. The work will be presented in theaters and in public spaces, in a minimum of ten towns throughout Minnesota. All events will be documented and presented as part of an exhibition accompanying performances in Minneapolis.

The BLACKLOCK NATURE SANCTUARY, Moose Lake, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $43,000 for emerging artists' residencies. The Sanctuary, founded in 1994 by the Blacklock family, is dedicated to preserving undeveloped land and providing artists with uninterrupted time and space to develop new work. It fosters creative growth through direct experience, study and interpretation of nature. The Emerging Artist Fellowship Program, the focus of Jerome support, provides emerging artists, selected competitively from an open call and jury review, with the support needed to create work in the performing, visual or literary arts via a significant period of uninterrupted residency time for research and field work.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for the B MAGIC ORCHESTRA, received $10,000 in support of the commissioning of two emerging composers to make new works for the B Magic Orchestra and the presentation of those works in the Community Jazz Concert Series at The Dakota Bar & Grill, a leading jazz club in the Twin Cities. The Orchestra provides a versatile voice for modern day jazz composers. The call for submissions will be undertaken in collaboration with the American Composers Forum. A jury will select two emerging Minnesota jazz composers, who will be commissioned to write new work for this jazz ensemble, founded in 1998 and led by composer/conductor William Banfield.

TAMARA BRANTMEIER, a painter living in St. Paul, will spend 35 days studying at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. She will take two intensive, month-long drawing and painting courses, and attend weekly lectures, technical demonstrations and additional drawing classes. Each student receives two critiques per day. Brantmeier will visit specific collections, museums and art centers. This travel and study experience is designed to expand her abilities and strengthen her technique. She is pushing toward increased self-confidence, a visual understanding that is subtle, and more precise powers of description.