Past
Grantees

Mobile since her birth in Singapore, composer, and saxophonist Caroline Davis (she/her) lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut album, Live Work & Play, was featured on All About Jazz’s best releases, and she was named one of JazzTimes’ Best New Artists in 2012. Her second album, Doors: Chicago Storylines, is an audio documentary that uniquely sets stories from Chicago's jazz scene from the 80s and 90s alongside her original music. In 2018, she won the Downbeat Critic’s Poll “rising star” in the alto saxophone category. Caroline’s third album, Heart Tonic, was released on Sunnyside Records to much acclaim in NPR, the New York Times, and DownBeat. Davis’ self-titled Alula, featuring Matt Mitchell and Greg Saunier, will be released on New Amsterdam Records in May of 2019.

She has shared musical moments with a diverse group of musicians, from jazz to improvised and composed music, recently including Matt Wilson, Lee Konitz, Angelica Sanchez, Matt Mitchell, and Billy Kaye. Her regular collaborations include Maitri, Whirlpool, and Persona (with Rob Clearfield). She has participated in several mentorship programs, including the International Association for Jazz Education’s Sisters in Jazz and the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead. In March of 2019, she will be a composer-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony to write a set of new works based on the electrical activity of neurons in the brain.

Fellowship Statement

For all my projects, I take care to design the music, hire the right performers, and work towards a message. My process involves reading articles, scribble stream-of-consciousness notes about the compositional tools, shape, and forms of each piece, and sitting down to write. For Heart Tonic, I focused on various types of arrhythmia to write the music after seeking out recordings of irregular heartbeats and speaking with patients who have this condition.

In May, I’m releasing an album of trio music (alto saxophone, synthesizers, drums) that was written in response to the vortex generator structure on most birds. I have developed a keen interest in the movements of birds, especially patterns of takeoff, flight, and landing, and the way the alula structure affects them. This work is continuing at a deeper level for the next album, which I am writing music for now.

In the immediate future, I intend to immerse myself in the study of neuron function in the brain and to improve my ability to hear/perform complex rhythms. My interest in the first topic developed when I received my PhD in Music Cognition in 2010. I want to understand how neuronal networks communicate, especially with respect to timing and motion, and develop music based on my findings. For the latter, I have been taking classes at Chhandayan Center on Indian systems of tonality and rhythm. With the help of the Jerome fellowship, I’ll be able to take private lessons and improve my abilities.

Photo by Jacob Hand.

Considered one of America's leading spoken word poets, Caridad De La Luz (she/her), aka La Bruja, is a multi-faceted performer named in the “Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know” (La Respuesta). Known as a “Bronx Living Legend,” Caridad has received a Citation of Merit from the Bronx Borough President as well as The Edgar Allan Poe Award from The Bronx Historical Society. She has performed at The Apollo, Lincoln Center, Gracie Mansion, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, City Hall in New York City and many international venues. Since her 1996 debut performance in the famed Nuyorican Poets Café, she continues to host Monday Night Open Mics where people from all over the world come to perform. The New York Times called her “a Juggernaut" and she is currently cultivating her own art space in the Soundview area of The Bronx called “El Garaje” where she lives.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist connected to ancestral knowledge through my Puerto Rican, Bronx and Taino roots, I create work that speaks about our realities and injustices, as well as to Feminist, Latinx, LGBTQ and POC communities. My goal with this grant is to expand my knowledge of Indigenous practices by visiting artists and healers of First Nations along the Northwest Coast of North America, Peru and Africa. With this knowledge, I will expand my creativity and offer healing circles in The Bronx where I’ve lived my entire life. Through meeting new contacts, I will also be able to invite healers and artists to create and share their knowledge in my space, El Garaje, through creative residencies in the future. My artistic work has always included healing, which is why I chose the stage name “La Bruja” (aka The Witch). My intention is to create transformation via art and Indigenous worldview healing practices.

Photo by Ted Lopez.

Antonio Duke (he/him) is a Twin Cities-based actor, playwright, and teaching artist. He worked with Pillsbury House Theatre as part of the Summer 612 Micro Grant (2011 & 2012), Late Nite Series (2012) and Naked Stages Fellowship (2018) where he created his solo performance play Ashes of Moons. His solo performance play Tears of Moons was part of the Guthrie Theatre’s Solo Emerging Artist Celebration. Antonio’s plays The Death of Kings and The Fog premiered as staged readings at the Guthrie Theatre for The New Griots Festival. His play The Sly Sambo appeared as part of the Fresh Ink Series at the Illusion Theatre. The Fog garnered him The Many Voices Mentorship from The Playwright Center. He's the recipient of the 2019 Artist Initiative Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board for his solo performance play Missing Mississippi Moons. Training: University of Minnesota/Guthrie BFA Actor Training Program.

Fellowship Statement

My artistic aim is to create stories from the black diaspora as authentically as possible. In my writing I focus on mythology. Within mythos lies intimate and epic circumstances that I am driven to explore. I conjure most of my muse from black spiritualities; specifically, those deities from the Afrocentric Yoruba, Santeria and Voodoo traditions. In my work, I speak about trauma, both personal and historical. Performing traumatic events with Afrocentric cultural aesthetics is important to me because it provides me with the chance to connect with my ancestors. In doing so, I follow in a lineage of West African storytellers called Griots. Stories are strange spells. They are conjurations in our mouths. Playwriting and performance is a spiritual manifestation act rooted in an ancient practice of Afrocentric storytelling. It is through this practice that I can sit with the ancestors that I have yet to meet.

Photo by Bruce Silcox.

Kerri Edge (she/her) is an artivist who uses dance and film as vehicles to shed light on issues of social injustice and commemorate the achievements of African American people. She is Artistic Director of the Edge School of the Arts (ESOTA), which was founded in the image of the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center (BJCAC). ESOTA is dedicated to bringing the art and discipline of African American dance to young aspiring artists and audiences, from local to international. Kerri began her dance training at the age of three at BJCAC in Jamaica, Queens where she met her mentor Michael Peters, who sparked her interest in dance for film. She continued her studies at The Eglevsky Ballet School, LaGuardia High School, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Martha Graham School, and SUNY Purchase. She earned her Masters in Arts Administration from New York University and is currently a Professor of Dance at Medgar Evers College. Her commitment to the Jamaica arts community is evidenced by her volunteer work with the Jamaica Is . . . Arts Alliance, the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation and the Queens Sickle Cell Advocacy Network.

Fellowship Statement

I am an artist making sense of the world that I am a part of; I would like to leave a trace in forms that are felt and experienced for all people, now and for future generations. I am an artivist grappling with notions of memory and time, along with the role of African American-based dance rituals and body memory, through all of the senses, finding locations for where they intersect and create sensations of depth and wonder.

My 4 Little Girls film uses the universal languages of photography, song and dance to depict stories from the American Civil Rights Movement. An extensive education component helps children and adults explore history together through the use of objects from a vast collection of expressive poster samples from the Civil Rights Movement, lessons on two important social issues, and engaging hands-on activities. REFORM: Racial Disparities in the American Justice uses tap dance as a vehicle to shed light on the racial disparities in the American criminal justice system encouraging others to advocate for legislation. The collection of tap dance monologues set to music, poetry and film tell stories that highlight the African American male experience with the criminal justice system and the lasting effects on both the African American family and the community at large. The short stories are compiled into a unified work that stands with victims threatened by the increased discrimination and encourages audience members to realize the promise of equality America makes to us all.

Photo by Saiku Branch.

Jes Fan (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, China. They are the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant Recipient, Recess Art Session Residency, Bemis Center Residency, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, Pioneer Works Residency, John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally; selected exhibitions include Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong), Disposed to Add at Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia), Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University’s Sarah Doyle Gallery (Providence). They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design.

Fellowship Statement

My studio practice is rooted in a haptic approach to understanding how identity is materialized, biologically and ontologically. I use substances such as hormones, silicone and soap—materials that are imbued with erotic and political signifiers to articulate my concerns about diasporic politics, transgender identities, and posthumanism.

Currently, I am working on new film, titled Xenophoria. Xenophoria, at first glance, simulates a YouTube cooking video, but the narrative quickly dives into the lab process of melanin production. Here, E. coli bacteria is used as a host, allegorical to ways in which miscegenation has been viewed as a dangerous contamination, and broader anxieties of racial intimacy. The mood of the video shifts and the camera turns to medical portraitures of the 19th century by Lam Qua. A set of paintings that depicts tumors of patients in the Canton region. These paintings ascribe to a colonial period when race and character is still not fully taxonomized, and medical science was sought out as a tool to dissect race as a distinct category. The film ends with a sudden jolt to an interview with a researcher who proposed to harness melanin's anti-radioactive properties for interspace travel in the near future.

My work magnifies the surreal realities of existing as a biological body in the age where the body is reconceptualized in digital, informational and molecular terms. It dwells in this productive anxiety and offers no resolution to identity politics that are riven by binaries.

Photo by Han Minu.

Megan Flød Johnson (she/her) is a socially engaged “theatre for youth” artist who brings together youth and their communities through play to spark social action. She co-creates with communities around the country exhibits, events, residencies and performances for the very young.

THE NEST (2014) is an evolving installation about an illusive creature inhabiting public spaces revealed through child-led curation and storytelling. Children’s ideas transform space into a layered, narrative playscape capturing identity(ies) of place, youth assets and reflections on welcoming a stranger. THE NEST was developed at Children's Museum of Pittsburgh (remounted in 2017) and has since traveled to Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Noah's Ark at Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and summer 2019 as an exhibit with the St. Louis Public Library system. THE NEST is the subject of a documentary by filmmaker Alicia Rice called When Kids Meet a Creature.

Megan resides in Saint Paul, MN where she is a Teaching Artist and Program Developer for SteppingStone Theatre and Art Center of Eden Prairie. She holds an MFA in Theatre for Youth and graduate certificate in Socially Engaged Practice from Arizona State University and BA’s in Theatre and Music from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI.

Fellowship Statement

I am a socially engaged “theatre for youth artist” who brings together youth and their communities through play to spark social action. I seek to disrupt dominant narratives and expectations for young people to designate new spaces for process, dialogue, experimental thinking, play and welcoming multiple points of view. Youth agency is central in my work, which experiments with models of participation through performance, unstructured play and hands-on making.

I am working on developing a mobile version of my installation playscape, THE NEST about an elusive creature whom children build a temporary home for in public spaces. I will experiment with different models of engagement for the project including city-hosted events, guerrilla pop-ups, and an original performance. I hope to bring pop-up NEST experiences to youth and families in places where they already are—in parks, parking lots, apartment buildings, clinics, schools, and/or shopping malls. 

Photo by Alicia Rice.

t’ai freedom ford (she/her) is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over, is available from Red Hen Press. Her second poetry collection, & more black, is forthcoming Spring 2019 from Augury Books. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

My writing grapples with all things related to my existence/non-existence in these United States. This means I'm obsessed with issues around (so-called) race (whiteness/ Blackness/otherness/mixedness), gender and sexuality (gender queering/querying, masculine-of-centering, closeted bisexual questioning), family/ancestral heritage (American/Black histories), pop culture (escapism via fantasy, public personas and invasion of privacy), and gentrification (desecration of sacred spaces, displacement, whiteness and entitlement, etc.) Currently, I'm working on a novel that explores how families and communities deal with grief and loss in the midst of gentrification. Also, I’m dreaming of ways to create multi-media works that amplify Black angst, Black joy and Black noise.

Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a mother, choreographer, performer, a collaborative artist, community organizer and a three-time Bessie award-winning choreographer and performer for her latest work, Memoirs of a... Unicorn. Marjani is an inaugural recipient of the UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship and a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. Her work has been incubated in residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center (MANCC), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Residency, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, CUNY Dance Initiative, 651 Arts and Movement Research. Marjani has produced seven award-winning works in steady collaboration with her partner and composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee) over the last ten years. Humbly, she defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving and irreverent conjurers!

Fellowship Statement

My storytelling is intended to thicken the common narratives of people of the African Diaspora, and stir up visions for human liberation. What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, look like? I commit to the work of shifting and visioning through art. I dance to tap my heart and my prolific imagination, to ignite vision or desire for ontological integrity and ascension in my audiences. In dance, I can imagine my own liberation and engage a fantasy of free-being as a plausible reality. With Memoirs of a.. Unicorn, developed in collaboration with composer Everett Saunders, I've centered on thoughtfully sharing the work such that it reflects our core values:

Rafael Gonzalez (he/him), better known by his stage name Tufawon (2 for 1), is a Dakota/Puerto Rican hip hop artist/activist from Minneapolis. His name represents his mixed identity. He has traveled the world through the intersection of music and fighting for social causes. He was recently interviewed on The Breakfast Club and Hot 97 promoting Indigenous People's March in DC, and he performed at the official concert. In the fall of 2018, he completed his first headlining hip hop tour in Europe with Nataanii Means and Michel Be called “Resilience.” In January 2019, he went to Cuba through Minneapolis based nonprofit US Cuba Artist Exchange with a delegation of music producers from the states to collaborate with pioneering Cuban hip hop artists. They performed at a showcase and created two collaborative songs. Tufawon has released 4 EPs: Self Care, The Homecoming, The Send Off, and Schwag.

Fellowship Statement

With hip hop being the foundation, my music is an honest reflection of my life experiences and personal struggles/growth, my hopes and dreams for the future, spirituality and connectedness to the land, love, and the realities of the world we live in. My style is an embodiment of intricate lyricism with complex vocabulary balanced by a very clear, smooth, and concise delivery. With a socially aware approach, I touch on topics such as Indigenous resiliency, politics, health, defending Mother Earth, and fighting against oppressive systems. The underlying message in my music is always connected to freedom—the continual transformation I am experiencing is profound. You can hear it with earlier works like Schwag, where there is a bit of an egotistical and raunchy element. Compare that with later releases like The Homecoming or Self Care where themes of fighting for freedom and unlearning/denouncing patriarchy are common, you see the contrast and ultimately, the growth and transformation. I aspire to bring the vibrations of his ancestral roots into his future music projects, fusing them with contemporary production styles.

Photo by Tommy Ellis.

Stylistic polyglot deVon Russell Gray’s (he/him) compositions evoke soulful meditations, the envelopment of anxiety in a nurturing sonic cocoon. As a new music performer and mood scholar, he channels celestial fascination manifested in aural familiarity. deVon intuits through clairaudience a direct connection to our collective musical legacy, as guided by Bach, Beethoven, Threadgill, and Mumford.

Born and raised in the Rondo Neighborhood, the composer is a member of Saint Paul’s hip hop stalwarts HEIRUSPECS, celebrating twenty-two years of music-making and hometown-repping, as well as a decade of funding scholarships at their alma mater Saint Paul Central High School.

deVon is an omnipresence with bands, artists, scholars, and other creators. In addition, he touts music direction for new theater (Sandbox Theater’s Queens), Afrofuturistic interdisciplinary works (Joe Horton’s A Hill in Natchez), and visiting artist residencies (Cedar Cultural Center’s Midnimo Residency Program). In 2016, the Cedar Cultural Center awarded deVon funds from the Jerome Foundation to create a work for a quartet of violas and cellos plus electronics called Fractious Child, Op. 1 No. 1. In 2017, he became a McKnight Foundation fellowship recipient.

Fellowship Statement

The novelist Annie Dillard says, “How can you as a writer expect to create extraordinary work on what is likely an ordinary Tuesday?” I don’t know, yet that’s who I am. A seeker of the extraordinary. What I know, is that revelations and epiphanies come when they’re needed, no sooner.

I’ll use my skills. I will continue to create artful music that allows listeners to dream, to feel rooted, and to access the cosmos. In my art and life I aspire to achieve a level of clarity that allows me to answer simply simple questions such as, “Who are you as an artist and what do you aspire to do in your work?” Truthfully, I’m a pretty heady composer that’s always trying to dress it down. Ultimately it’s the blues. Earthy, music of the dirt. Comprised of basic elements. I will continue to keep a keen eye on my mentors where joy and mental health are concerned. This work can take its toll.

Presently and for a while now, I’ve been dreaming up an opera.

Photo by Katie Mae Dickinson.

Kathryn Haddad (she/her) is a writer, teacher and community organizer whose work explores contemporary Arab American experiences and reflects on the political reality of life for Arab Americans. Kathryn founded Mizna – one of the few Arab American Arts and literary organizations in the United States and served as Artistic/Executive Director for twelve years. She’s a recipient of a Bush Fellowship for work with the Arab American community and received three Playwright’s Center Many Voices Fellowships. Her plays have appeared in various venues, including the anthology, Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. Kathryn was awarded the 2018 Kay Sexton Award at the Minnesota Book Awards for her literary impact on the State of Minnesota through her work with the Arab American community.

Fellowship Statement

I strive to tell Arab and Arab American stories through theater - reflecting on the social and political climate at home and abroad. Immigration, family life, political struggle, colonization, religion, and bicultural experience have all been subjects I have explored. This award will give me the opportunity to work with community to continue the dialogue and conversation through art. The fellowship will allow me time to work on my craft as a playwright and strengthen my writing through study and practice. I would like to make new connections and collaborations with theaters, individuals, and communities that share a common vision, and I hope to reach new audiences with my work.

LaMont Hamilton (he/him) is an autodidact interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Hamilton uses lens, performance, writing and sound amongst a variety of other mediums to negotiate between the material and the conceptual. His practice as an artist is considered visual art, but he strives for synesthetic engagements that decentralizes the ableist assumption of the “visual” and considers how bodies engage with work.

Hamilton has been the recipient of several residencies, fellowships and awards including the Jerome@Camargo residency in Cassis, France, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, MFAH CORE program in Menerbes France, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Artadia Award, ArtMatters Grant, Artist in Residence at Duke University’s African and African American Studies, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art amongst others. Hamilton has also showed at institutions such as MoMA, The Kitchen, ISSUE PROJECT ROOM, Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomburg Center, The Drawing Center and The Sculpture Center.

Fellowship Statement

I see myself in the tradition of those who view the role of “the artist” as a specific calling. One doesn’t simply choose to be an artist but is moved, deeply, into this space of wonder. We are all born with (various forms of) antennas which we use to perceive the world, but the artist is ignited to make sense of this perception. This (re)imagination is at the crux of the current direction of my practice. Whereas before my commitment was to the historical, in a pivot, I am now fully invested in art’s capacity for deep meditation, transformation. I am engaged in two working principles—Transrealistic poetics and Barulhos—first presented by poets Norman H Pritchard and Ferrier Gullar (respectively), to provide an open-ended structure for this investigation.

Carrie Hawks (they/them) makes art to investigate gender, sexuality, and race and promote healing. Their works have been exhibited at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, CinemAfrica (Stockholm), Cape Town, and Tokyo. Animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, doll-making and performance are all vital parts of their art practice. They harness the magic of animation to tell stories. Their film black enuf*, partly funded by Jerome Foundation, was nominated for a New York Emmy, won numerous festival awards and had its broadcast debut on American Public Television’s World Channel in 2019. They have performed with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, and participated in the Set on Freedom Artist Residency at the Queens Museum. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University.

For the Camargo residency period, Carrie will focus on three areas of research: self-injury, breasts and femininity, and animation techniques. They will investigate self-injury and self-harm in religion, history, and current psychology. The research will also concentrate on recent studies of self-harm unrelated to religious affiliation, and the varied responses to these similar practices. Self-injury is often met with hostility in the American health industry, so they are curious to find the differences in Europe and what treatment methods are applied.

They will investigate the relationship between femininity and breasts to explore gender non-conforming people, and histories of going outside of the gender binary in other cultures. They will also use the time to explore animation techniques and take in works at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

Carrie Hawks (they/them) makes art to investigate gender, sexuality, and race and promote healing. Their works have been exhibited at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, CinemAfrica (Stockholm), Cape Town, and Tokyo. Animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, doll-making and performance are all vital parts of their art practice. They harness the magic of animation to tell stories. Their film black enuf*, partly funded by Jerome Foundation, was nominated for a New York Emmy, won numerous festival awards and had its broadcast debut on American Public Television’s World Channel in 2019. They have performed with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, and participated in the Set on Freedom Artist Residency at the Queens Museum. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University.

Fellowship Statement

My art confronts self-imposed and external assumptions about identity in order to promote healing, particularly in relation to race, gender, and sexuality. My work highlights stories that are not being represented enough. My practice presents alternate ways of connecting through a variety of media including animation, drawing, collage, sculpture, and performance. I also incorporate humor. In performance, I have asked participants to tell me about their nemeses so that we could destroy them on paper. In film, I’ve asked “if I am Black enough” for my peers and myself, and what Blackness is. I search for strategies to address being an outsider and holding self-love. My art exudes strength in its honesty, craft, and visual metaphors. I draw upon my insecurities, confusion, and fear and invite the audience to reflect on theirs. My current project, Inner Wound Real, focuses on people of color and their experiences with self-injury.

Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Jasmine Hearn (she/they) is a performer, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist. A native Houstonian, she graduated magna cum laude from Point Park University with her BA in Dance. She currently collaborates with filmmaker and visual artist, Alisha B. Wormsley. Jasmine has worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin (UK), Solange Knowles, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jenn Meridian, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Nick Mauss (as part of the performance cast of TRANSMISSIONS—an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art).

Jasmine is a 2018/2019 Movement Research artist-in-residence, was a 2018 Dancing While Black fellow, and was awarded a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance as a part of Skeleton Architecture. They also received artist residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, and Dance Source Houston. Jasmine is a vessel and storyteller using dance and sound as materials to make, teach, and perform around the world.

Fellowship Statement

The body of my work is rooted in the belief, born of language from my work with Marjani Forté-Saunders, Tara Aisha Willis, and Staycee Pearl, that I am a vessel for ancestry and spirt to speak through. I offer work that remembers and honors past, speaks of present, and prepares community for future. As a choreographer, dancer, sound-maker, and performer, I am investigating how the body is able to use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth. I use dance and sound as materials to conjure an environment to be experienced. I ask, “How can the body and voice act as bridges that connect communities with their individual truths and how these truths live together. Working as a freelance artist, I have had many opportunities to engage with community—teaching dance and movement classes, facilitating spaces for movement/sound exploration, performing in multidisciplinary projects, and creating intimate, immersive performance experiences. I am committed to the facilitating environments that gives space for folks to connect with their fantasies and feelings.

Photo courtesy of Whitney Browne Photography.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the winner of Bomb Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. Helal has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Fellowship Statement

My first full-length collection, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), is the launch pad for my next work: intimacy v. isolation, exploring the impact of migration, trauma, and technology on Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development.

I believe in my work's potential to disrupt old ideas and catalyze conversations that create solutions. Just as “poem to be read from right to left” created a robust discussion around colonial structures in the English language, my genre-defying narrative points directly to the inherent systemic abuse in the U.S. immigration system.

This fellowship will support me as creator and teacher. Emerging means forging a path from the margins into the center, where productive conversations around craft and genre intersect with necessary discussions around race, identity, nation-making, and immigration policy, while we continue to make room for new thought; solutions.

Jonathan Herrera Soto is a print-based studio artist originally from Chicago, IL, and currently maintains a studio practice in Minneapolis, MN. He graduated with a BFA from the Minneapolis College in Art and Design in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions of Jonathan’s work include Querida Presencia at the Duluth Art Institute in Duluth, MN, and Entre Rios y Montañas at Annex Gallery in Chicago, IL. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; 33 Officia Creativia, Toffia, Italy; Spudnik Press Cooperative, Chicago, IL; High Point Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and Epicenter, Green River, Utah. Herrera Soto was a 2018 recipient of the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant.

Fellowship Statement

I construct print-based objects, installations, and environments that echo lived experiences of those who are no longer with us. My print-based processes of producing tracings and impressions translate the content through the symbolically revealing the act of remembering. Slicing open wounds into wood, burning the surface of limestone with acid, and the crushing of ink on paper under immense pressure, re-animates acts of violence that carries through an art-object’s final presentation. I research, explore, and unpack ideas within a framework of praxis--the simultaneous conceptual framing and physical compressing of ideas through work in order to examine the spaces left behind by others. I am currently working on a series about love’s influence on ethnic bodies in constant movement—the love that guides mothers that flee their homes with their children in search for asylum, the rebels that fight against oppressive regimes, and friends that search for their missing comrades.

Joe Horton (he/him) is a rapper, artist, and founding member of FIX music and arts collective. His interdisciplinary work spans medium and genre, but always features a signature blend of futurism and mysticism. The best example of this is his latest work, A Hill in Natchez, is a surreal work that combines elements of dance, visuals, and music. Joe is currently working on a new album produced by Anatomy (Kill the Vultures) as well as VESSEL, a visual and musical work that will premiere at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Fall 2019.

Fellowship Statement

I owe as much to the mystical tradition as I do the artistic. I am interested in nurturing vital knowings that come directly from the Mystery. I want to marry ancient techniques of ecstasy and forward-thinking technologies. I want to sing to the moment as it passes.

Su Hwang is a poet, activist, and the author of Bodega with Milkweed Editions, which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York, then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Literature, she teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with poet Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

My creative practice is constantly evolving to keep pace with current events, but I also strive to acknowledge and bring to light the fraught, complex nature of our collective histories. Language is political, now more than ever––and I believe the act of writing poetry is a concrete form of resistance. My debut poetry collection BODEGA is forthcoming and I will start my second collection ROOST in earnest at Hedgebrook this summer—exploring madness, mass incarceration, and metaphors of containment. I will continue working with incarcerated writers and co-direct Poetry Asylum with poet/activist Sun Yung Shin. Our goal is to highlight and dismantle stereotypes as well as underscore concepts of invisibility in the visible, forced displacement, and transference of violence and discrimination. I aim to produce fearless work that advances my social justice goals through community building, collaboration, activism, advocacy, and open dialogue.

Photo by Jeffrey Forston Photography.