Past
Grantees

Malik Isasis is a Brooklyn-based, narrative filmmaker whose body of work explores the intersections of the personal and the political. He was offered a development deal with Sesame Street Studio after participating as a 2019 Sesame Street Writing Fellow. Malik is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.

Mafe Izaguirre (Venezuela, 1978) is a New York-based artist, graphic designer, and educator. Her work, known as The Mind Project, is framed by the ideas of the philosophical post-humanism: a movement that poses the human as a plural, fluid, and decentered being living in multiple spaces of interaction with machines, software, other species, and spiritual hybrid systems. Izaguirre is a 2020 MoreArt fellow and a 2020 Queens Arts Council Grant Awardee. She works as an artist member of the Long Island City Artist Association, the Global Posthuman Network, and The Operating System—a global open-source art collective. Izaguirre is the co-founder and Creative Director of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, an online psychoanalytic transmedia magazine created by IPTAR members and a Board Member of the humanitarian organization Cuatro Por Venezuela Foundation. To read more, visit: MafeIzaguirre.com

Naomi Jackson is the author of a novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association named Jackson’s novel an Honor Book for Fiction. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town.

A graduate of Williams College, Jackson’s writings have appeared in Harper’s, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Writer. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Camargo Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Bronx Council on the Arts. Jackson is currently Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

Nicole Shawan Junior was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. She’s a black, queer and poverty-born counter-storyteller. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in What is a Criminal? (Routledge 2022), PEN America’s Handbook for Writers in Prison (Haymarket Books 2021), Emerge, Gay Mag, ZORA, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, SLICE, Color Bloq, CURA, and elsewhere. Nicole has received fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, NYFA, Esalen, Lambda Literary, and more. She’s an alumna of Bread Loaf, Tin House, VONA, and Hurston/Wright’s Writers Week.

Nicole is a creative prose editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly, associate nonfiction editor at Slice Magazine, and serves on the Sundress Publications editorial board. She’s also the founder and Executive Director of Roots. Wounds. Words.: A Literary Arts Revolution. Nicole is completing her manuscript-in progress, Cracked Concrete: A Memoir of Crackheads, Cousins & Crime.

Japanese-born composer Asuka Kakitani has deep love for nature which inspires her to transform her admiration of the natural world into musical stories. Her projects span from 18-piece jazz orchestra, string quartet, women’s vocal quartet, instrumental solo repertoire, and collaboration with a choreographer. An explorer of new challenges, Kakitani constantly pushes her boundaries and expands her musical language to express her inner world. As an advocate of original music, she co-founded the Twin Cities Jazz Composers’ Workshop to foster creative and forward-looking composition.

Kakitani has been the recipient of grants and awards from the BMI Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the American Music Center, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Tommy Kha (b. 1988, Memphis, Tennessee) received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is a Foam Talent, a finalist for the Jerome Hill Fellowship, the Hopper Prize, Artadia Award, and Hyères Photography Grand Prix, a recipient of CR Magazine’s Photography Annual, and En Foco Photography Fellowship, and a former artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Light Work, Fountainhead, and the Camera Club of New York. He is currently a Celebrate the Studio resident at International Studios and Curatorial Program.

His work has been published in Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Vice, Slate, BUTT, Buzzfeed, and Miranda July’s We Think Alone, and has collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles, and exhibited at Launch F18, PS122 Gallery, Brooks Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Teen Party, Yongkang Lu Art, Hyères Festival, and Kunstverein Wolfsburg.

From an office with butterscotch walls in Ridgewood, Queens, Aditi writes nonfiction, scripts, and other text objects. Her cultural criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She has appeared on radio and television including WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, BBC World Service, CBC, and more. 

She is at work on her first book project, The Killing of a Tiger, a meditation on human supremacy, colonialism, mental health…and tigers. She is also editing Judgment of the Brits, a psychosexual colonial dramedy, and shopping around Problematic, a TV pilot. The first issue of Pockets, a magazine she edited, will be published in February. She received her BA and MALS from Wesleyan University.

Jenny Klukken is a multidisciplinary artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Primarily a musician, Jenny performs on the marimba and combines her classical percussion background with her passion for folk, jazz, and world music. In her unique approach, she bridges the gap between virtuosic marimba repertoire and improvised music making. A recipient of various artistic development grants, Jenny has travelled the world to develop her voice on the marimba. As a composer, she embraces complex rhythms, improvisation, audience approachability, and the high technical skills the instrument demands. As a visual artist, Jenny primarily works with high-flow acrylics, painting color-dense pieces inspired by sound and movement. Each of Jenny's art forms continually inspire and propel each other.

Jennifer Kramer is an award-winning director, producer and writer. Her narrative feature film, The Sandbox, screened in 15 film festivals worldwide and garnered seven awards. Her work has exhibited at the Weisman Art Museum and the Walker Art Center. She received the 2016 Jerome Foundation Travel/Study grant for her documentary film in Mexico, currently in production. She is a recipient of the 2019 MN State Arts Board (MNSAB) grant for her series about women behind famous men and the 2020 MNSAB Artist Initiative grant. Kramer has served as a grant panelist, juror for film festivals, and guest speaker at the University of Minnesota, School of Journalism.

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith have been making dances since 2006. Their process recontextualizes sexual trauma through body-based methods of abstraction, filtration through each other, imaginative landscape building, and dissociation. Works: Body Comes Apart (New York Live Arts 2019, Documented by The New York Public Library for Performing Arts Jerome Robbins Dance Division); Basketball (PS122 and Baryshnikov Arts Center for COIL 2017); Rude World (PS122 and The Chocolate Factory Theater for COIL 2015); Tulip (Roulette, 2013; Judson Now at Danspace Project, 2012); Beautiful Bone (The Chocolate Factory Theater, 2012).

Residencies/awards: 2021 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence; 2020 AIRSpace Residency at Abrons Arts Center; 2019 Baryshnikov Arts Center BACSpace Residency; 2018 Bessie Schonberg Fellows at The Yard; 2018 DiP Residency Artists at Gibney, featured as one of Alastair Macaulay’s “Best Dance of 2017” in The New York Times for Basketball; 2013 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award Nominee for Emerging Choreographer.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in The New Republic, McSweeney’s, and Poetry. She has received awards from MacDowell, Artist Trust, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. She is working on her second book of poems, a book of prose, collages, performance pieces, and a short documentary about her parents' experiences as Vietnam War refugees playing extras in Apocalypse Now.

Casey Llewellyn is a playwright whose work interrogates identity, collectivity and form. She lives in New York City and was a 2018-19 Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.

Works include: O, Earth (commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre, 2016), I Am Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour (conceived by Brooke O'Harra, co-written with her, La Mama, 2016), and The Body which is the Town (honorable mention, The Kilroys List).

Her play O, Earth was featured on Broadway World’s 11 New Superb Theatrical Experiences from 2016 list and The Advocate’s Our Top 10 New York Theatre of 2016, and The Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s the Mix list in 2018.

Her essay "What We Could Do With Writing" appears in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap.

Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. Her work explores perception and transmission processes focusing on the relationship between sound technologies and listening practices. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation and the creation of sound devices and systems. Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (AR), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Roulette Intermedium, The Kitchen, Issue Project Room, Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Ostrava, Czech Republic), MATA Festival 2012, Experimental Intermedia, Fridman Gallery (NY), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway) and the XIV Cuenca Biennial, among others. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various international residency programs.

Malcolm Low, from Chicago, danced with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, Ballet British Columbia, Zvi Gotheiner, Crystal Pite/Kidd Pivot, & 5 years with Bill T. Jones. Malcolm has worked with Ralph Lemon, David Thomson, Patricia Hoffbauer, and has begun working with Jodi Melnick - a duet for the WPA Virtual Commissions at The Guggenheim. Malcolm choreographed One Forgotten Moment on Alvin Ailey 2 (2012). Showing his work since 1999, Malcolm’s awards include Fund for New Work/Harlem Stage Gatehouse Grant (2009), BAX Passing It Down Award (2011), MCAF from LMCC (2012, 2014, 2015), MCAF/LMCC Process Space Grant (2014), and LIFT/OFF residency at New Dance Alliance (2014). Malcolm was Artist in Residence at Queensborough Community College (2014), was awarded a MAP Fund grant for In The Thrust... (2014), was Princeton University Guest Artist (2017) and on faculty (2019). Malcolm is currently working on dance videos and stories at malBEC in upstate New York.

Heather MacKenzie is a visual artist, writer, and educator with a practice founded in hand weaving. They delight in materials, processes, and loom technologies, prodding the inconsistent logic of their operations. Through their long-term research into standardized measurement, queer mathematics, and encryption technologies, they continue to poke at systems and structures and rules, questioning the possibilities of their engagement. Heather has acted as a Fulbright Scholar in Paris, France; Fountainhead Fellow at VCU in Richmond, VA; and artist-in-residence at ACRE, MASS MoCA, Cité des Arts Paris, among others.

Their work has been exhibited recently at venues including the Textile Center of MN; Alternative Art Space in Boston, Massachusetts; Sediment Gallery in Richmond, Virginia; Heaven Gallery and Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago; and PointDom in Toulouse, France. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies, where they occasionally lecture.

Kaleena Miller is a tap dancer and choreographer based in Minneapolis and New York. She is Co-Director of the Twin Cities Tap Festival in Minneapolis and an Artist in Residence at the American Tap Dance Foundation in New York. Kaleena is a 2015 McKnight Dance Fellow, recipient of grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board and was named one of DANCE Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2016. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Air Le Parc (France), Everwood Farmstead Foundation (WI) and the Southern Theater as part of their ARTshare programming.

She was a founding member of Rhythmic Circus and toured extensively with the group from 2009-2017, highlights including performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), the Kennedy Center (DC) and the New Victory Theater (NY). She has a BFA in Dance from the University of MN- Twin Cities.

Led by Brazilian dancer/ choreographer Leonardo Sandoval and composer Gregory Richardson, Music From The Sole is a tap dance and live music company that celebrates tap's Afro-diasporic roots, particularly its connections to Afro-Brazilian dance and music, and lineage to forms like house dance and passinho (Brazilian funk). Their work embraces tap’s unique nature as a blend of sound and movement, incorporating wide-ranging influences like samba, passinho, Afro-Cuban, jazz, and house.

As part of their mission to bring tap dance to new audiences, they have appeared at both music and dance venues, including Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Caramoor Jazz Festival, Kaatsbaan, and The Yard. They were recently commissioned new pieces by Works And Process at the Guggenheim.

They are committed to creating more opportunities for fellow BIPOC and immigrant artists, and through partnerships with organizations like the National Dance Institute and Lincoln Center Education, to inclusive, impactful, and lasting community engagement.

Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Costa Rican/American artist working in the fields of choreography, film, installation, and sound. Núñez is a Mellon Foundation Grant Recipient 23′, a Princeton University Arts Fellow 22’, a Jerome Hill Fellow 22’, a Dance/USA Fellow 22’, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 18’. His work been presented by Abrons Arts Center, The Joyce Theater, Princeton University, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, CUE Art Foundation, Performance Mix Festival, and Battery Dance Festival, among others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Art In America, The Brooklyn Rail and The Dance Enthusiast. He’s been an Artist In Residence at Loghaven Artist Residency, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2023, Núñez was selected by the Art In America as one of 20 New Talent artists on a global scale. The same year, he was nominated for a “Bessie,” The New York Dance and Performance Awards in the Best Performer category.

Valerie Oliveiro is a queer fluid-medium artist and activist in the performance field based in the Twin Cities and born in Singapore. While she currently engages movement as her primary motor for expression, she also presents drawing, writing, photography, video, environmental design and mixed media installation as simultaneously complicit, complexly relational proposals. Her work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery and Bryant Lake Bowl.

Currently, she is one of 7 Co-Artistic Directors at Red Eye Theater, co-runs a small performance incubator MOVO SPACE and serves as Artist Council Manager for the Northern Spark Artist Council. She is also proud to be involved in the work of the MN Artist Coalition.

Kyoung H. Park is a North Korean playwright/director, born and raised in Santiago, Chile, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. As Artistic Director of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, a peacemaking theater company, he has devised three full-length plays — disOriented, TALA, and PILLOWTALK — and created over 20 community-based, experimental projects including performances for new media. His work centers stories of (im)migration, queerness, trauma, identity and the ways these intersect in communities of color; it’s described as “intensely personal” by American Theater Magazine and “very much of this moment” by the New York Times.

Kyoung's Pacific Beat has been a resident company at The Tank, Bushwick Starr, Baryshnikov Arts Center, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, BRIC Arts Media, Performance Project @ University Settlement, and Kyoung has worked internationally in Santiago (Chile), Rio de Janeiro, London, New Delhi, and Seoul. MFA in Playwriting: Columbia University, MA in Peace and Global Governance, Kyung Hee University.