Past
Grantees

Jerome Foundation Directors made a grant of $21,000 to the MINNESOTA DANCE THEATRE (MDT), Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the commissioning of new work by emerging choreographers in the 2003-04 season. In addition to maintaining a highly reputable school, MDT employs a company of eight dancers and four company apprentices. MDT has commissioned new works from choreographers for over 40 years. Since 1998, this commitment has resulted in 16 new works by emerging choreographers, underwritten by grants from the Jerome Foundation. Jerome subsidy this season will support the development and production of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, created by New York City-based choreographer Scott Rink. Based on the classic poem by Goethe, the work features a music montage by Scott Marshall and costumes by Tracy Christensen. MDT resident choreographer Stphane Andr will create a work, based on Eugene Ionesco's play The Chairs, about an elderly couple and their futile, ironic attempt to pass on their life experience to humankind.

No Press Release Information on this Grant

MIXED BLOOD THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $15,000 in support of the commissioning, development and full production of new plays by emerging playwrights. Mixed Blood is a professional, multi-racial theater dedicated to encouraging cultural pluralism, individual equality and artistic excellence. Jerome dollars will be directed toward the emerging artists who are participating in the Bill of (W)Rights Project, the development of a new play by Zaraawar Mistry, further work on a new piece by Victor Zupanc, and other projects.

S.A.S.E.: THE WRITE PLACE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for the organization MIZNA, received a grant of $14,000 in support of the publication of the Mizna journal.  Mizna, a nonprofit forum promoting Arab American culture, is committed to giving voice to Arab American artists through literature, film and performance.  Jerome financing focuses on the literary journal Mizna, which, since 1999, has published the writing and artwork of over 150 Arab American writers and artists.  As one of the only such journals of its type in the country, it has published 11 issues for a subscriber base of 455 and for distribution to libraries, universities and community centers.  One of the purposes of the journal, issued twice each year, is to identify and publish the work of emerging writers.  While the journal predominantly includes writing by Arab American authors, it is also open to writing by other authors dealing with Arab American subjects.

The WALKER ART CENTER, in cooperation with the Southern Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the pilot program Momentum: New Dance Works in the 2000-01 season. Jerome Foundation supported that pilot, and authorized a two-year grant of $38,000 to continue the program with some revisions. Momentum will commission, develop, and present new contemporary dance works by ten emerging Minnesota choreographers. Eight of those will be presented in a Momentum series, and two will take the form of solo choreographer evenings. Momentum focuses attention on the areas most innovative, under-recognized choreographers. Each week, the series will feature the work of two choreographers performing a three-performance run, with post performance discussions and a critical feedback session. There will be an open call for proposals, with final selection made by the curators of both organizations and an independent panelist.

The WALKER ART CENTER, in cooperation with the Southern Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the pilot program Momentum: New Dance Works in the 2000-01 season. Jerome Foundation supported that pilot, and authorized a two-year grant of $38,000 to continue the program with some revisions. Momentum will commission, develop, and present new contemporary dance works by ten emerging Minnesota choreographers. Eight of those will be presented in a Momentum series, and two will take the form of solo choreographer evenings. Momentum focuses attention on the areas most innovative, under-recognized choreographers. Each week, the series will feature the work of two choreographers performing a three-performance run, with post performance discussions and a critical feedback session. There will be an open call for proposals, with final selection made by the curators of both organizations and an independent panelist.

NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer JENNIFER MONSON, received a grant of $11,000 in support of the Ducks and Geese Migration, a new work under the umbrella of the multi-year navigational dance project BIRD BRAIN. This project investigates migratory patterns and habits of birds and other animals and their biophysical and metaphorical relationship to humans as fellow travelers. The project encompasses five components: site-specific public dance presentations, panel discussions with artists and scientists, dance workshops for the general public, a website that tracks the migrating birds and dancers, and an educational resource guide currently in development. The Ducks and Geese Migration will navigate north from Texas along the Mississippi flyway through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Southern Canada. In the spring of 2004, four dancers will present 30 site-specific events along the migration route, as well as conduct workshops and organize panel discussions.

Writer, editor and public policy coordinator MAI NENG MOUA will spend four weeks in Laos and Thailand doing ethnographic research and conducting interviews with family members and others to inform her memoir. Moua is the founder and editor of Paj Ntaub Voice, a Hmong literary journal, and the editor of the first Hmong American anthology, Bamboo Among the Oaks. Moua will visit Laos in order to better understand the place her mother calls home and which Moua left when she was three years old. She will also visit the monastery in Tak Province in Thailand to interview her grandfather and uncle about her father, who died when she was three. She will visit museums, Hmong villages, the Mekong River and major cities.

MICHELLE MEHRI MOUSAVI, Minneapolis, MN, received support for My Life As A Terrorist, an experimental documentary that recounts the filmmakers experience growing up Iranian in the aftermath of the Iran Hostage Crisis. It explores two vastly different but historically intertwined narratives: the story of American hostage Robert C. Ode, who was held in the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran, for 444 days; and the filmmakers experience as an Iranian-American child enrolled in American educational institutions for 10 years.

THEATER MU, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $38,000 in support of the development and production of new works by emerging playwrights and composers. Created in 1992, Theater Mu strives to be the premier artistic company creating theater and Taiko from the heart of the Asian American experience. Its various programs include a mainstage season, Taiko concerts featuring resident company Mu Daiko, educational outreach programs, and a New Eyes developmental series. Jerome support will be directed toward the development and production of new work by emerging creative artists who are contributing pieces for Mu Daiko, New Eyes and the mainstage. The 2003-04 season includes the world premieres of Interior Design by Kiseung Rhee and From Shadows to Light by Ka Vang. Jerome dollars will also support the development of new drum works by Mu Daiko company members Iris Shiraishi, Jennifer Weir, Rachel Gorton and Angie Ahlgren.

The Jerome Foundation placed the Jerome Hill Film Collection with the Museum of Modern Art a few years ago. The Collection is housed in the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. Substantial preservation work needs to be done on this collection not only to ensure the future viability of Jerome Hills finished films but also to prepare key holdings for the Jerome Hill Centennial in 2005. A first commitment of $100,000 to the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, New York City, was authorized. It will support a preservation internship at the Bartos Center and initial laboratory work on two of the most important titles, Film Portrait, Jerome Hills autobiographical work, and his Academy Award-winning documentary on Albert Schweitzer.

No Press Release Information on this Grant

ALYSA J. NAHMIAS received funding to support Unfinished Spaces: Cubas Architecture of Revolution, a documentary exploring the Cuban Revolution through its most significant architectural achievementThe Cuban National Art Schools. It follows the lives of the three architects who designed the schools, Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi, providing visual encounters with their architecture. Their massive undertaking began with great energy; however, construction stopped in the mid-1960s. The architects have recently been invited to resume work to complete the building they began 40 years ago.

NEW RADIO AND PERFORMING ARTS, Staten Island, New York, received a two-year grant of $28,000 in support of emerging artists commissions within the Turbulence program. Founded in 1981, New Radio and Performing Arts stimulates and advances the publics awareness of innovative work in the arts by producing and promoting experimental work for radio and live performance. In 1996, it expanded its mandate to net art and launched the Turbulence web site. Turbulence commissions emerging and established artists exploring the networked medium using both existing technologies and new applications to originate innovative work. The program has commissioned, exhibited and archived over 60 original works. Since 1996, Jerome Foundation has provided support for commissions of four new works, each year, by emerging artists. The works may be music, sound, text and/or graphics-driven. Turbulence also seeks works that involve real time, multi-location, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Jerome commissions in the upcoming year will go to Jason Freeman, Diane Ludin, Jillian McDonald, and Brooks Singer.

NEW RIVERS PRESS, Minnesota State University Moorhead, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $25,070 in support of the publication of five volumes in the Minnesota Voices Project (MVP). New Rivers Press has been revived as an independent press affiliated with a higher education institution. The mission of the Press is to continue the publishers legacy of acquiring, editing and promoting books in all genres by new and emerging writers; and to serve as a teaching press. The Minnesota Voices Project, which Jerome Foundation has supported since 1980, is devoted to the work of new and emerging writers. It invites writers of poetry, short fiction, novels, novellas, personal essays, memoirs and other forms of creative prose to submit manuscripts. Three titles are selected each year, two of which are by emerging writers who reside in Minnesota and/or New York City. MVP winners receive an honorarium, publication of their work, and subsidized travel to promote their book.

The NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS, New York City, under the artistic direction of Richard Maxwell, brings innovation and exploration of theater to the public through text and music. Maxwell seeks to create out of something seemingly insignificant and irrelevant, that which proves to be profound and universal; to show the acting process devoid of style to achieve a new kind of realism; to redefine the musical; and to prove that humor and sadness can cohabitate without apologya play can be simultaneously tragic and comic. A grant of $10,000 was approved to support the development of Good Samaritans, a play about love involving a social worker in a Salvation Army shelter and an alcoholic man who comes to the shelter for help. Good Samaritans will create an environment in which everyday situations take on deeper meaning by rendering the most banal exchanges in a painstakingly heightened manner. By taking apart clichs, Maxwell hopes to discover deep emotional currents beneath deceptively simple surfaces.

Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a two-year grant of $70,000 to DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP (DTW), New York City, in support of the First Light commissioning program. First Light was initiated with support from Jerome Foundation in 1983. By 1999, all artists presented at DTW received commissions to create their work from a commissioning pool to which several grantmakers contributed. Dance Theater Workshop, is one of the countrys most important service, producing and presenting organizations. Its mission is to identify and nurture talented emerging and mid-career artists working in diverse cultural contexts; to stimulate a broader audience and public context for these artists and their work; and to offer opportunities to these artists via an interactive community laboratory for the imagination and its essential, practical application to the world around us. Jerome dollars support commissions for emerging choreographers, which will result in works produced at DTW in the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons. These commissions supplement guaranteed performance fees, production and promotional support, which Dance Theater Workshop provides to artists as part of its basic program. The 2003-04 season will mark the beginning of the organizations first full year of operation in its splendid new performance center.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York City, received $10,000 in support of the publication of a book of photographs by Brooklyn-based photographer Vincent Cianni. We Skate Hardcore documents the Latino culture and lives of in-line skaters in Brooklyn, New York. Combining black and white, color photos and video stills, with text provided by the subjects, this book addresses the lives of a young Latino community, and presents the determination and dreams of urban youth, coming of age as the larger Latino population in the United States continues to grow. Vincent Cianni has been photographing the Southside Latino Neighborhood in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he lives, since 1994. NYU Press plans to publish this book in the fall of 2004, with an initial print run of 3,000 copies, including CD ROMs containing video streams of the in-line skaters. The book will be co-published with the Center for Documentary Studies, Durham, North Carolina, an interdisciplinary educational organization dedicated to advancing documentary work that combines experience and creativity with education and community life.

The seven musician members of MARIACHI FLOR Y CANTO will travel to San Antonio, Texas, to study new repertoire and stylistic interpretations with nationally known Mariachi Los Caporales. In a previous brief workshop with Mariachi Los Caporales, Mariachi Flor y Canto saw immediate improvement in its sound. As a result, Mariachi Flor y Canto decided that further study with the well-known Mariachi band must be pursued. The St. Paul Mariachi band will work exclusively for several hours a day for eight days with the San Antonio Mariachi band. At the end of their stay, Mariachi Los Caporales and Mariachi Flor y Canto will perform a joint concert at Six Flags Fiesta Texas Theme Park.

SOLVEIG NILSEN, writer and librarian, will spend three weeks in Norway to advance work on her memoir, The Daughter Project. Nilsen came of age in a small Minnesota town where her father was the Lutheran pastor. Her daughter grew up in a San Francisco commune and a back-to-the-land New Hampshire farm. Nilsen will travel to the country of her family's origins and walk the mountainous regions. She expects the trip to provide illumination on the parallels, clashes, and intersections of the geographical and cultural zones that her family has inhabited. This sets a context for the memoir as it moves through the continents and countries she and her daughter have experienced.