Past
Grantees

Yo-Yo Lin (林友友) is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary artist who explores the possibilities for self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. She often uses animation, live performance, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.” Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care.

Refusing the Western medicalization of the crip body, she works towards a “soft data” archive that holds space for illness in its wholeness. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives.

Lin was a 2019 artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and a 2020 Open Call recipient for the Shed. She teaches at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns fellow. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Over the years of building my interdisciplinary art practice, I have committed myself to making work that expands dominant notions of what filmmaking, technology, or space-making can be. Some of the questions I asked and continue to ask include: How do we tell cinematic stories spatially, physically and virtually? Can we reclaim data-gathering as daily practice for soft knowledge? What are the ways we can reframe the body as a technology? How do we build care and community-building into how we work with and develop technology? I am interested in how we continue to practice ways of working with technology that deepens and strengthens our relationship to our bodies, our communities, and the earth. This fellowship will allow me to expand and deepen my artistic practice in a research-oriented manner while simultaneously offering me the space to continue to create care-focused, tech-driven performances, tools, and spaces with and for disabled, chronically ill, POC communities.

A.P. Looze is a transgender multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practice supports them to turn toward the history of pain in their family and this nation in order to end lineages of violence and open up portals to love. Their original solo performances have included The Ways I Wished to Love Her at Pillsbury House + Theater, Foray Softly at The Guthrie, The Grief Experiments through 20% Theatre Company, A Dream of Brightness at the Red Eye Theater, God Made Me Crooked at Queertopia, and Finding Loaded Guns in Weird Places at Pleasure Rebel. Their tennis-inspired music video musical C’Mon Baby Stroke It premiered at Trylon Cinema in 2021. They were a 2016 20% Theatre Q-Stage Fellow, a 2018 Pillsbury House + Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Northern Lights Artist on the Verge Fellow, and part of the 2022 Red Eye Theater Isolated Acts Cohort.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use this fellowship to deepen my contemplative practice and continue to explore decoloniality, making interdisciplinary work inspired by spiritual/economic/political liberation. For the past ten years, I have explored questions of embodiment as a trans person. As my gender’s boundaries dissolve, I am more interested in surrendering to the vast pluriverse of non-human wisdom. This fellowship will support my work with the Akashic Records, a realm of consciousness that holds unconditional love for all souls. The Records have provided insights through music, poetic words, and imagery that I have integrated into recent performance and installation work. I will continue to open the Records, holding pressing questions related to whiteness, embodiment and decoloniality. I will follow the inspiration of what emerges to create new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with my creative process and spiritual explorations.

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a Filipino American artist, writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work and research have revolved around an interdisciplinary reflection on how legacies of empire inform social and economic value systems. She received her MFA through both the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work has been included in new media festivals and galleries including Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Initial Public Offering, Reddit, online (2019); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Meitzler’s work has received support from HarvestWorks, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work relates Filipino etiological myths to a sense of personal, economic and historical rupture. As the climate crisis continues to grow, I use the mythic, origin stories of tropical storms as a way to connect to the unresolved moments of the past and powerfully propel beyond them. A lot of the writing and storytelling that I do, interweaves colonial history and this climatic turbulence alongside my own personal experiences, which is as someone who grew up between the tension of two cultures deeply defined by Americanism. Currently, I am working on an animation that follows three Filipino nurses, inspired by my mother and her community, as they engage with Philippine etiological myths of earthquakes as a response to the embodiment of colonial debt.

Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. Her artistic practice spans mediums and genres, engaging dance, music, physical and scripted theatre, design, burlesque, literature, construction, performance, theory, composition, devising, and the culinary arts. Her work has historically been concerned with identity, simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and expectations of “truth” in queer performance. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a leading QTGNC focused arts organism in the Twin Cities. Her original work as been presented by Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening), Red Eye Theater (NW4W), Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, Northern Spark, Right Here Showcase, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Wanderlust Productions, and 20% Theatre Company, where she worked in many capacities from 2015 to 2021, ultimately serving as Artistic Director in its final years. She is a 2019 mentee of The National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theatre/Art2Action), and a member of Actor’s Equity.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am arriving at this fellowship in my 31st year. Virgo Sun, Gemini Moon. Venus in Libra, Mars in Cancer. I know so much of Transition and am a new Student of Time. Southern child, eldest cousin. Self-named, Wed, I feed. Without apology, a new score. Autonomous entrances and exits. Available to possession and exorcism, avoidant of martyrdom and apotheosis. Curbed censor, encouraged teacher. Naming, creating, re-naming, re-creating. Of course there will be New Works Multi-Cross-Trans-Inter-Extra Disciplinary (eek). Of course the humor the wink the glint the cheek the nod the glance the smile the ode homage collage décolletage. An Icon in the making, hunny. Always gild the lily, why else be Gay? I'm over joy resistance rage. Down with meaning and conjuring and proselytizing didactics. Here’s to the dilettante the liar the raccoon the conduit the Transsexual aesthete. The charlatan dances and still we clap laugh cry eat come. It’s all in the making every second even now.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested and compelled by communal memory, tall tales, and Black expressions of gender and divergence. Inspired by the Black American diaspora to which I belong, I am working on a book about the intersection of family, American surveillance, and Black radical faith. Following the life and lineage of protagonist Alphonso–descendant of a slave and slave owner in a small cotton town of Edgefield North Carolina–as he evolves and shape-shifts from petty criminal and womanizer to sober foot soldier and eventual minister of Islamic Temple No. 1 in New York City. BORN AGAIN is biomythography exploring the consequences of melanin, locomotion, and generational curses.

(b. Costa Rica) Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Visually Impaired choreographer and Disability advocate based in NYC. His work traces the ideological narratives contained in immigrant and disabled bodies. Nunez is a Dance/USA Fellow 2022, a Princeton University Arts Fellow 2022, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 2018. His performances have been presented by The Joyce Theater, The Brooklyn Museum-The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. He has held residencies at Danspace Project, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2020, Núñez was invited by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs to share his story as a disabled and formally undocumented immigrant during Immigrant Heritage Week. Núñez received his green card in 2018 and continues to be an advocate for undocumented, disabled immigrants.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My practice comprises three elements: physicality (named vortex), sound and audio description.

Vortex centers movement in circular motion supported by diaphragmatic breathing. It is born out of the principle that the human body is 70% water and has a 95% level of oxygen. By moving the body in circles, water and air rotate, causing internal whirlwinds and tornadoes that renew energy. Vortex teaches principles of proprioception to Visually Impaired dancers using the sagittal, transverse and frontal planes safely.

Music and sound are created with a frequency of 432 Hz, known as the frequency of the universe. It allows the body to re energize through the power of the creative source.

My Audio Description is manifested through storytelling, song and poetry as a form of resistance, preservation, cultural continuity, and perseverance of my indigenous identity.

Margaret Ogas is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in the Twin Cities. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance and informed by Chicana cultural sensibilities, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Ogas has been presented by the Walker Art Center, Candy Box Dance Festival, Red Eye Theater, Center for Performing Arts, FD13, Mizna, Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio and others. She was awarded a 2022 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre.

Margaret is a core collaborator and performer with the Taja Will Ensemble. She has also performed for Laurie Van Weiren, Chris Schlicting, Sequoia Hauck and others. Margaret is a teaching artist, specializing in modern technique, improvisation, and composition. She is currently a youth instructor at Young Dance. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a dancer and improviser who is interested in the way choreography can be used to tell stories and traverse the messy, layered nature of identity.

My dances weave personal narrative and thoughtful aesthetic choices to connect with audiences through humor and heartfelt storytelling, intentionally blending the everyday with the surreal. I am inspired by the political spirit of the Chicano art movement and the vibrancy of communities I find myself within and around.

During this fellowship, I will root into my choreographic practice, taking time to develop my voice and experiment in interdisciplinary modes. I will build on my connections with BIPOC and queer artists to develop and present a new ensemble work.

Valerie Oliveiro is a dance and performance maker based in the Twin Cities and from Singapore. While they currently engage movement as their primary motor for expression, they also engage in other expressions, such as design, writing, drawing and photography, as generative, complexly relational proposals. Their choreographic work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery and Bryant Lake Bowl and Cowles Center and has been supported by Minnesota State Arts Board, MRAC, Jerome Foundation and MAP Fund. Currently, they are a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater, ensemble member at Lighting Rod (QTBIPOC-led performance organism) and co-run a small performance incubator MOVO SPACE.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Valerie is creating new work in 2023/2024 and will foreground their own artistic research in North America and Asia.

MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium.

A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College CUNY. www.mxoops.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

During this fellowship I will develop UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL, a party and multimedia performance that uses the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture to reveal how cognitive bias connects us all. This piece tells the story of humanity coming to grips with our collective inheritance, a ramshackle meshwork of cognitive processes evolved to survive, not for self-awareness. An interdisciplinary approach invites the audience to meditate on what might be unfinished about human cognition and how these biases keep us from building a better world together.

With support from the National Performance Network Creation Fun, this work will be developed in the Live Feed Residency at New York Live Arts toward a Spring 2024 premiere. Additionally, this fellowship period will incubate [NONFATAL_ERROR], a multimedia ensemble of artists engaged in collaborative world-building. Ensemble members work in dance, new media, interactive video projection design, sound design, voice, and costume, fashion, sculpture and more. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming.

Atim Opoka is a Ugandan-American songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist who fuses afro-pop and hip-hop while embracing the power of transformative story-telling. She is most recently a 2021 recipient of a Waters Grant as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Opoka has performed original works at the Stone Arch Bridge Festival and Powderhorn Park Festival. She has a BA in Vocal Performance from McNally Smith College of Music.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We live in a society that is fast paced, go and grab. Looking for the next trend or 7 sec distraction or viral video with no regard to the cost or impact, positive or negative. I believe art is a holistic experience that requires the full body mentally, physically and spiritually. It doesn't judge, but asks for your time and space, modeling and shaping all of our experiences to get us where we are right now. I am growing, and I will continue to grow, and not only feed my garden, but I will add and water those who let me, and one day I will bloom, when I oughta bloom.

Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Phingbodhipakkiya is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has explored microscopic universes, familial memories, and the power of collective action, revealing the often unseen depth, resilience and beauty of marginalized communities. Her work has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, highway tunnels, subway corridors, and on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2020-2021, she was artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and the Guardian and is held in permanent collections at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My artistic practice is about finding joy and belonging even in the face of grief and injustice, and rallying communities to imagine a shared future we can’t yet see. Through defiant storytelling, my work brings forth colors, patterns, textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices that need to be heard. Through listening and partnership, I seek to expand the narrative around the AAPI community and other communities of color and fighting to reveal the unseen labor of women.

As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will continue creating participatory works that invite audiences to commune, connect and lay down their burdens—spaces of healing and wonder that allow us to tell our stories and imagine new pathways forward.

Upcoming projects include a civic practice residency with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and a public art series focused on the prevention of domestic violence with the Asian Women’s Shelter.

Lela Pierce grew up in rural MniSota Makoce, the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She maintains artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Pierce has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). Her work has been presented internationally in both Sweden and India as well as in the Twin Cities at venues including Bockley Gallery, SOOVAC, Franconia Sculpture Park, Walker Art Center, and the Soap Factory. Pierce holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN—where she currently teaches sculpture—and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The persistent practice of imagining transformation is vital for seekers of freedom.

Oscillating between 2D, 3D, and 4D (sonic/performance/film), I currently create spaces, images and situations that expand “inbetweenness,” borders and places of transition. Through a mapping of internal and external experiences of sensation of the corporeal body, I attempt to map vehicles of life force and interconnected processes of transformation. My current body of work is deeply influenced by the concept of “Sankofa,” moving forward with knowledge of the past.

Through practice and attention, I speak a personal decolonized aesthetic language—centering ancestral connections, the 5 elements of nature and feminist sentiments.

The Narcotix is a West African art-folk band based in Brooklyn, with feathers all over. It is many-limbed and limber, a five-piece with voices, guitars, bass, keys and drum set. Reverb-laden vocals blur and swell in dissonant intervals, buoyed by a riverbed of shimmering Congolese guitar riffs, thumping P-bass, cavernous synths and traphouse hi-hats. The result of this band's cohesion is a compelling musical statement whose relationship to identity is as fraught, complex and ever-changing as anything else in this time.

The rave reception of the debut EP Mommy Issues, released in summer 2021, paved the way for The Narcotix to take their musical compositions to new heights. With this fuel, composers/instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas have reimagined the boundaries with which to push the musical landscapes usually bound by the automatic resignation of conformity. With the instrumental prowess of Adam Turay (rhythm guitar), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Matt Bent (drums), Foinchas and Quansah have amassed the Will, and now means, to harness the creative force and pour it into their upcoming debut album, Dying.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We’re currently working on completing our debut album, a 10-song homage to the practice of exercising unwavering vulnerability whilst creating. The recording process for the album began on September 24, 2022. So far we’ve recorded the foundations of each song and we plan to incorporate the full instrumentation and production elements over the next few months. Following the release of the album, we’d like to plan a series of concerts and a proper US tour. During the fellowship, we are especially keen to sharpen our technical skills through various lessons and workshops. This upskilling will serve as a vehicle through which we will be able to explore broadening our live performances. For example, we’d like to expand on live arrangements by adding elements of improvisation where appropriate. Studying composition will enable us to incorporate additional instrumentalists such as horns, strings, and percussion players.

Named by The Guardian as a musician “who will enrich your life,” Shruthi Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer and vocalist with a unique dual background in Carnatic (South Indian classical) and Western classical music. Shruthi has won numerous honors, including the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her compositions are performed worldwide; in 2021, her work premiered at the United Nations COP26. She is a Carnatic vocal disciple of her mother, musician Nirmala Rajasekar, and has studied as a Western classical soprano with Jerry Elsbernd, Rochelle Ellis, and Patricia Rozario, OBE.

Shruthi has been in residence at the Anderson Center, Tusen Takk Foundation, and Britten Pears Arts. An alumnus of Princeton University and a former Marshall Scholar, Shruthi pursued graduate study in the United Kingdom in ethnomusicology and composition. She serves on the board of new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Through music, I explore identity, community, and joy. In my work, my two idioms of Carnatic and Western classical intersect and converse to show how different influences coexist in all of us. Each of us is a mosaic of our experiences. When recognized, our varied backgrounds allow us to understand each other, no matter how different our individual stories are. This is what drives me to create: to build spaces for reflection and exchange.

Community is central to every aspect of my composing, from the cultural and diasporic experiences that inspire me to the different groups of listeners and performers that I bring together in the music that I create. I love writing for the voice because singing is simultaneously personal and communal. To sing together requires us to breathe together, to sense one another, and to listen to our neighbors — making us more present, grounded, and giving.

Kendra J. Ross is a Detroit native working as a dancer, choreographer, teaching artist, facilitator and community organizer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. As a dancer, Kendra has worked with Urban Bush Women, Ase Dance Theater Collective, MBDance, Moving Spirits Dance Company, Movement of the People Dance Company and as a guest artist with Oyu Oro. Kendra’s choreographic work has been presented at Florida A&M University, the off Broadway show 7 Sins, Museu de Arte in Salvador, Brazil, Dixon Place, Ailey Citigroup Theater, and Actors Fund Theater. She has been an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, The Neighborhood Project Through 651Arts, and The Laundromat Project. Kendra serves as the Founder/Director of STooPS, an outdoors-based community building event that uses art strengthen ties between different entities in Bed-Stuy. She is also a teaching artist at Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As an avid student of folkloric traditions of the African Diaspora, my work is grounded in the Ghanian concept of Sankofa—looking back in order to move forward. I am working to develop a Sankofic praxis to collect embodied research that employs Black History as a springboard for imagining all aspects of community—art, culture, movements, people, lifestyles etc. This process will help me to not only navigate my contemporary life as a Black woman but also invite others to learn from the enriching lessons of these forms. Through intentional partnerships with collaborators, community members, especially elders, local organizations and businesses, I will work to collect, share, and interpret their stories. I will continue creating a collaborative archiving of history and culture with the development of my project, the Sankofa Residency. Through my artistic expression, I want to help shape the future of my community by interpreting and reimagining the narratives. My work is to dance Afrofuturism in action.

Sarah Rothberg creates playful, poetic, usually-a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationship to the world around you. These take many forms ranging from VR/AR to installation, performance, video, writing, workshops.

These experiences exist in a variety of contexts: at galleries, museums, festivals, on google docs, at the consumer electronics expo, screens in the NYC Subway system, Apple stores around the world, zoom calls, secret twitter accounts, or the MoMa (unsanctioned). Some hosts have included: bitforms gallery, Rhizome, NRW-forum, MTA Arts, Sotheby's S2, CultureHub, Gray Area Foundation. Rothberg is on the faculty at NYU (interactive media at ITP), a member of ONX Studio, and a mentor/former-member at NEW INC.

Rothberg is part of collaboratives: MORE&MORE UNLIMITED, which facilitates workshops for imagining changed worlds, and IS THIS THING ON? a post-web2 experiment in artist-driven livestreaming.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Usually, I make things to connect to someone: you! or myself.

I am currently working on spaces (mostly virtual) for performance and conversation, and am specifically interested in how technologies facilitate different kinds of interactions between people, as well as different ways of thinking and imagining.

In general, I pursue projects that allow me to engage with emerging technologies (broadly speaking), and question how they impact the world with a mix of experimentation, silliness, critical inquiry, sensitivity and joy!

Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist, researcher and robotics maker. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by the New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine. He was a resident at The Kitchen in 2021. He is a recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts/ Wavefarm Media Arts Assistance Fund, Jerome Foundation/Harvestworks New Works Commission, and Knockdown Center (NYC) residency for time-based art.

He has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Levitation Festival, Museum of Contemporary art of Lima and Central Park Summerstage Fania Records 50th anniversary. His album Roza Cruz with his Latin American experimental project La Mecánica Popular was named one of the best Latin American albums of the decade by Zona Sucia and Estereofonía. Featured at CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Daily News, and NPR. He holds a PhD from NYU and published the book Fusión: A Soundtrack for Peru.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested in synesthesia, the cross-pollination of the senses, and polyrhythm. I want to generate pieces across time/space contexts that use polyrhythm and synesthesia as tools to generate a state of contemplation. For this I will develop a series of pieces that combine robotics, video, music, performance art and sculpture.

Rafael Samanez is a Peruvian filmmaker who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in New York City. Samanez was the Founder and Executive Director of a Bronx-based grassroots organization, VAMOS Unidos, advocating for immigrant and worker’s rights. His work as a community organizer inspires his films, which center intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, race, migration, and class. He received a 2018 Princess Grace Award/Honoraria in film, was a John Grist Documentary/BAFTA New York Scholar, and graduated with an MFA from the City College of New York in 2019. His short film, Out of the Shadows, won Best Documentary Film Award at the 2019 Cityvisions and appeared in multiple film festivals including New York Latino Film Festival, Urbanworld and San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. Rafael is currently working on two feature length documentaries, is a film consultant, and teaches media production courses at the City College of New York.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I aspire to produce impactful films that reframe narratives traditionally defined by status quos. My art builds strong connections with universal experiences where viewers can traverse through nuanced journeys elevating conversation and thought. I want my films to appeal to and validate directly-impacted audiences while challenging conventional norms. During this fellowship I plan to finish two feature length documentaries. The first, My Existence is Resistance, covers the life and work of three influential trans women of color breaking down barriers in New York City during the height of the global pandemic. The second, Defend the Sacred, focuses upon Indigenous resistance within the militarized environment of the Mexico/U.S. border.

Kavita Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, educator, researcher, polyglot and lifelong New Yorker hailed by NPR for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” Her projects blending modern jazz, new music, and world traditions include Visions (2014), Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), Interplay (2018, nominated for France's Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year), and Cape Verdean Blues (forthcoming, 2023). She is currently working on a new album of original music for her jazz quintet. Kavita performs her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on six continents, and her work has been supported by New Music America, Chamber Music America, Jerome Foundation, Camargo Foundation, and Park Avenue Armory. She has worked with Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, Miguel Zenón, Lionel Loueke, Billy Childs, Miho Hazama, among others. Kavita holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a composer-vocalist who integrates performance practice, improvisation, and ethnomusicological field research to create original works that unearth and expose the virtuosity of the human voice. Made in deep engagement with the jazz tradition while also advancing its global sensibilities, my music is about and for people like me—communities in exile, refugees, stateless people, cultural nomads, and those who straddle hybrid identities. By creating works that are multifaceted, complex, cosmopolitan, and inclusionary of those at the margin, I strive to shed light on underrepresented cultures and musical traditions and to provoke my audience to question hierarchical notions of social identity. Current projects include All Roads Lead to Home, original music for jazz quintet inspired by a pilgrimage to my ancestral villages in coastal Gujarat, Little Drifters of a Split Earth, an immersive opera for youth voices about global child migration, and Who Will See My Garden Grow?, a collection of personal songs around the subject of motherhood. I am grateful to the Jerome Foundation for this recognition and continued support of my work.

Thailand-born, NYC-based composer Tidtaya Sinutoke (ฑิตยา สินุธก) and Filipina-American librettist Isabella Dawis are the co-recipients of the Fred Ebb Award for musical theatre songwriting and the Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award. Their other awards include the Jonathan Larson Grant, the Billie Burke Ziegfield Award, the Playwrights Realm International Theatremakers Award, and the Kleban Prize for Librettists. Their musicals and operas include HALF THE SKY (The 5th Avenue Theatre’s First Draft Commission and Radio Play, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Theater Mu, Theater Latté Da, the O’Neill Center), SUNWATCHER (Weston Theater Company, Ancram Opera House, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Civilians, Goodspeed Musicals, Tofte Lake Center), and LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG (American Opera Project).

Isabella and Tidtaya’s work has been supported by the American Theatre Wing, Musical Theatre Factory, the Kurt Weill Foundation, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and many more. More at tidtayasinutoke.com and isabelladawis.com.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a team of two Asian female writers, we create new music-theatrical narratives with bold, unconventional Asian women at the center. We blend musical idioms and storytelling traditions from around the globe, bringing together performers, creatives, and audiences from underrepresented communities. By uplifting Asian, female, and immigrant voices, we work to reinvent the American musical theater and opera landscape.

We look forward to spending our fellowship developing the following pieces, in collaboration with the Twin Cities and NYC theatermaking communities. HALF THE SKY tells the story of an Asian American woman climbing Mount Everest – a contemporary American musical on a global scale, infused with Thai and Himalayan folk music. Our chamber musical SUNWATCHER brings to light the story of Japanese female astronomer and “hidden figure” Hisako Koyama – by mixing elements of Noh theater, electronic live looping, and taiko drumming. LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG is an opera for kids about sea creatures – using Southern Thai folk music and shadow puppetry to educate about climate change.