Past
Grantees

Seong Ae Kim is a Korean-born composer based in New York City. An awardee of New Music USA grant and Composers now/ Rockefeller Brothers fund fellowship, her recent works spanning the past 5 years have been acutely focused on amplifying self-truth and voicing social justice concerns. As an advocate for social justice, she collaborated with fellow artists and ensembles to address and confront today’s practitioners of social injustice in our society – those who oppress others through acts of racial discrimination and immigrant scapegoating.

Her recent commissions include Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Amanda Gookin of Forward Music Project, Parhelion trio, Ensemble Ipse, Hypercube, Ensemble mise-en and Popebama among others. Kim’s works were presented at June in Buffalo, Composer’s conference, International Alliance of Women in Music, New York Women Composers Inc. Festival, International double reed society (Japan, Thailand and U.S.), and Audio Trading Manual Festival (Korea) to name a few.

Marcie LaCerte is a mixed Chinese-American animator based in NYC, originally from Minnesota. She was most recently a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center. She is interested in making personal films that use surrealism and satire to explore themes of identity, memory, and alienation. Beyond film, she is also interested in interactive multimedia art.

Her films have been recognized by The New Yorker, Vimeo Staff Picks, Ottawa International Animation Festival, GLAS, AFI Docs, and more. She has created work for Vox, Netflix, NPR, Quartz, and Scientific American. She has given talks at the CalArts Experimental Animation program, the Living Room Light Exchange (New York), Bethany Arts Community, and the Light Grey Art Lab Residency.

In her free time, she likes listening to podcasts, looking at vintage clothing, and making websites for friends.

As a former journalist and a descendant of immigrants displaced by conflict, Eunice Lau (she, her, hers) is drawn to stories about journey of the immigrant. Her feature documentary Accept the Call, set in Minnesota’s Somali community, explores the impact of injustice and intergenerational trauma. It aired on PBS’s Independent Lens after screening at acclaimed film festivals. Her work is supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, Tribeca Film Institute, Woodstock Film Festival, ITVS, Chicken & Egg Pictures, North Point Institute, YouTube Impact Lab and New York State. A Masters of Fine Arts in film graduate from NYU, Lau was born and raised in Singapore and now lives in Queens on Lenape land. Her latest feature Then They Came For Us is currently in post-production.

Jiabao Li creates works addressing climate change, interspecies co-creation, humane technology, and perceptions. Her mediums include wearable, robot, AR/VR, projection, performance, software, installation. In Jiabao’s TED Talk, she uncovered how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. She is a member of NEW INC Creative Science at the New Museum. Jiabao is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her lab explores the intersection of art, design, technology, and biology. She graduated from Harvard GSD with a Master of Design in Technology with Distinction and thesis award.

Jiabao is the recipient of numerous awards, including iF Design Award, AACYF 30 Under 30, Falling Walls, NEA, STARTS Prize, Fast Company, Core77, IDSA, A’ Design Award, Webby Award, Cannes World Film Festival Best VR short Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at Ars Electronica, Today Art Museum Biennial, SIGGRAPH, Milan and Dubai Design Week, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Museum, ISEA, Anchorage Museum, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, CHI, Donghu Shan Art Museum, MOOD Museum of Design, Alaska State Museum. Her work has been featured on Fast Company, ArtForum, Business Insider, Bloomberg, CCTV, Yahoo, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, Domus, Yanko Design, Harvard Political Review, The National, Leonardo, and iF World Design Guide.

Rowan Renee creates deeply researched, immersive installations that confront the aftermath of trauma at the intersection of the criminal legal system, State power and the family. They have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015) and they have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. Since 2019, they have developed collaborative projects for people impacted by the criminal legal system, including “Between the Lines,” a series of art workshops by correspondence with LGBTQ+ people incarcerated in Florida, and “A Common Thread,” a co-weaving and transformative justice studio at Recess Art. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, now touring nationally. Currently, they are developing a site-specific installation about class and memorialization in Green-Wood Cemetery's public lots, where they are the 2022 Artist-in-Residence.

Alex Romania makes multidisciplinary work at the crux of expansive tasks and deteriorating forms. Romania has presented works at Abrons Arts Center, Grace Exhibition Space, BKSD, Panoply Performance Laboratory, ABC No Rio (NYC), Glasshouse ArtLifeLab, Rosekill (NY), the Pillsbury House (Minneapolis), Sub Rosa (Athens), Huerto Roma Verde, Casa Viva (Mexico), Human Resources (LA), Encuentro (Lima), UV Estudios (Buenos Aires). Theyhave held residencies at Movement Research, Chez Bushwick, CPR, Chashama, Tofte Lake Center, SPACE at Ryder Farm, BAX, Old Furnace, MacDowell, and Djerassi. Alex has worked with artists Kathy Westwater, Antonio Ramos, Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez, De Facto Dance, Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Sarah White-Ayón - is collaboratively directing the feature film RECKONING with Stacy Lynn Smith. Alex is releasing films with Daria Faïn and Daniela Fabrizi and – is also part of the bands ‘PęRD!EM’ ‘C LT’, and ‘B!G’ / ‘worm’ / ‘Town Ghost’, with collaborator Hegemonix. They look foward to the 2024 premiere of Face Eaters at The Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC).

Kathryn Savage’s Groundglass: An Essay (Coffee House Press), explores topics of environmental justice and links between pollution and public health. A recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, her work across forms has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. A hybrid writer, recent fiction, poetry, and essays appear in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, Guernica, VQR, World Literature Today, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. She teaches creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Scott Stafford is a dancer, movement director, and teaching artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He believes that expression is vital, and accessible to every individual. His most recent evening-length work, Honey—a dance landscape inspired by club spaces, featuring an original soundscore by Grammy winning producer, David Morales—debuted at the Walker Art Center in 2021. The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “Honey pursued expression with luminous flow and pristine technique - acting as a clarion call to new ways of being.”

In addition to creating contemporary performance work, Stafford competes in the ballroom scene in the categories of hand performance, runway, and new way vogue performance.

Stafford was born in Windsor, Ontario and grew up in Metro Detroit. He is a devoted student of qigong, and can be found either deep in the forest or step-touching on a dim dancefloor.

Jordan Strafer (b. 1990, Miami) is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in video. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. Strafer’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Housing, New York (2020); SculptureCenter, New York (2020); Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020–21); The New Museum, New York (2021); and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin (2021). Strafer’s video, PEAK HEAVEN LOVE FOREVER (2022), was presented as part of the “Currents” section of the 60th New York Film Festival in 2022. Solo presentations of her work include PUNCHLINE at Participant Inc, New York in 2022, and upcoming exhibition venues include Secession, Vienna, CAMH, Houston, Index, Stockholm, and KINDL, Berlin in 2023.

Pyeng Threadgill is an American vocalist, songwriter, writer, video artist as well as a voice and movement teacher. As a vocalist/performer she creates New Porch Music, a form based on the traditions of Black American Folk, Soul, Jazz and improvisational music. She uses these traditions to create connected conversations whereby audiences may reflect on their own life stories and identities for healing and empowerment.

In her fourth solo album and multimedia project Head Full of Hair, Heart Full of Song, Ms. Threadgill shines a light on hair, adornment and ancestry and the political as well as spiritual implications of race, hair and identity. Using video installations exploring Black hair rituals, interactive poetry fed from a cotton candy machine, hair artists and curated sound, Pyeng sees this album in particular as a digital talisman for young Black women and girls and nonbinary folks and adolescents to use as they move through the world.

Currently Ms. Threadgill is writing her first book, a mixed-genre auto-biographical voice chronicle, that is slated to be published in the spring of 2023.

Yuliya Tsukerman is a Brooklyn-based playwright and puppetmaker working in theater and film. In her puppetry, she investigates the body as a living object through fragmentation, abstraction, and distortion of scale. Her plays have been performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Mana Contemporary, The Brick, and on Governors Island. Violent Mercies, her trilogy of short marionette films, has shown in festivals all over the world. Recently, she's been a playwright-in-residence at New Perspectives Theatre Company, an artist-in-residence at LMCC’s Arts Center and the St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab, a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting, and a Franklin Furnace grantee.

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performances focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Danspace, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Center for Performance Research, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. She was a 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their “25 to Watch” issue. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English from Princeton University.

A one-time $7,000 grant to Theater Mu to support early career artists involvement in the AAPI Generations Conference to be convened virtually and in St. Paul in May 2023.

Janani Balasubramanian (they/them/theirs) is a New York City-based multimedia artist, working across installation, image, live and immersive performance, emerging media, poetry, and prose. Their practice aims to bring insights from contemporary science into usable, playful, divine, and mythic places in everyday life. Balasubramanian is an artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History; 2021-2022 Pew Foundation grantee through the Academy of Natural Sciences; inaugural Collider Fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; 2021-2022 Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellow; and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. Additionally, Balasubramanian was a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and their work has been presented and/or commissioned by dozens of venues across North America and Europe.

During their time at Camargo, Balasubramanian plans to connect with scientists at L’Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers (OSU) Institut Pythéas and explore French art historical, scientific, and philosophical texts that relate to questions posed by brown dwarf astrophysics to inform their work on the libretto, storyboard, and art design for Rogue Objects, an operatic film for planeteria.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (he/him/his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and he received a 2018 Jerome Travel and Study grant. His work often concerns his family, his lived experience as a Black man in an anti-Black country, and barriers to living in full community.

During his residency, Kleber-Diggs will work on an essay collection related to his passion for swimming as a departure point for exploration of themes related to body, race, aging, and recreation as sanctuary. Camargo Foundation’s proximity to the Mediterranean Sea and the Parc National des Calanques will inform his experiences in those waters for his work-in-progress.

Amanda Krische (she/her/hers) is a New York City-based dancer, interdisciplinary choreographer, and herbalist creating work that uses the body to speak with the disciplines of psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, and ecology. Her work has been commissioned by the National YoungArts Foundation, Grace Farms Foundation and Bombshell Dance Project and she received a 2018 Jerome Travel and Study grant. Amanda has served on faculty in the Dance Department at LaGuardia Arts High School and has been a guest teacher/lecturer at NYU and Cooper Union School of Art.

While at Camargo, Krische plans to continue researching her body of work that is created for and with women who have experienced sexual violence. Working in collaboration with the landscape of Southern France, this time will be spent using movement and the study of mythic archetypes of the feminine rooted in ancient community practices from Southern France to continue developing performance work that utilizes and reveals the body as a site of processing grief.

Ka Oskar Ly (they/she/nws*) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural producer based in Minnesota. They create experiences ranging from conversations to installations, storytelling through gatherings, textiles, murals and more to evoke ancestral powers that seed community futures. Although the Hmong language has no word for “art” or “queer,” their practice unapologetically expands on these meanings. Ly’s most recent project, Room for New Worlds (Making Room), is an ongoing re/search exploring identity and futurism rooted in the cultural through lines of the Hmong diaspora.

Through the Camargo residency, Ly will engage in immersive and contemplative research, conversations, reflections, and observations with immigrant communities, including the Hmong diaspora community, and will revisit their birthplace in the south of France. They hope to deepen their understanding on how immigrants influence art, culture, and identity of places, and what cultural approaches and protocols have been adapted to safeguard ancestral lineage.

* nws is a Hmong pronoun meaning she/he/it/her/hers/his/its.

Hailing from Japan and based in New York City, Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima (she/her/hers) is a composer, producer, pianist, and bandleader of the 17-piece Miggy Augmented Orchestra. She creates large-scale works manifesting her distinct life experiences, integrating musical elements from Japan with the harmonies and rhythms of modern jazz. In March 2021, Miyajima released a book with accompanying music entitled Your Future Story, the first chapter of her ongoing Unbreakable Hope and Resilience project about the real stories of survivors and volunteers of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. She has performed at Birdland Jazz Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center and Times Square. She is the recipient of grants and awards including the 2021 Creative Engagement program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 2020 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre and a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

Miyajima plans to use her residency to being work on a large-scale multi-disciplinary project embracing differenes, Forgiveness, a five-movement musical suite accompanied by moving images. She plans to explore the presense in Marseille and absence in Cassis of immigrant working-class people, learning about the cultures of these two geographical harbors, and experience both their similarities and disparities.

Michael Premo (he/him/his) is an artist, journalist whose film, radio, theater, and photo-based work has been exhibited and broadcast in the United States and abroad. In addition to his work as a co-founder of and executive producer for Storyline, he has created original work with numerous companies including Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Foundry Theater, The Civilians, and StoryCorps. Recent projects include a new performance soundwalk, Sanctuary, commissioned by the Working Theater; the multi-platform project 28th Amendment and the participatory documentary Sandy Storyline. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, A Blade of Grass Artist Files Fellowship, a NYSCA Individual Artist Award and a 2019 Jerome Film, Video and Digital Production Grant. Premo is on the Board of Trustees of A Blade of Grass.

While in residence at the Camargo Foundation, Premo plans to research and possibly document community activities organized by supporters of Olympique de Marseille, conceptually linking this work with the region’s connection to the coast and the ocean.

Ashwini Ramaswamy (she/her/hers) is a Minnesota-based choreographer and dancer who practices the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. She is a founding member of Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy’s Ragamala Dance Company and has received grants and fellowships from the MN State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, The South Asian Resiliency Fund, 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and McKnight Foundation, USArtists International, MAP Fund, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project.

She plans to use her residency to deepen her choreographic practice—called Sacred Axis—that connects her decades-long study of Bharatanatyam with contemporary dance forms. Additionally, she will study ancient texts and dramaturgical and directorial processes to inform future projects. Ramaswamy is deeply inspired by Paris-based south Asian writer, dance producer, and curator Karthika Nair (with whom she hopes to meet while in residence), and whose reworking of the text of The Mahabharata—her experimentation with poetic forms, cadences, and perspectives—are influences for Ramaswamy’s own desires to break open the possibilities of ancient works and forms for today’s world.