Past
Grantees

Khary Jackson (he/him) is a poet, playwright, dancer and musician. He has written several plays, one of which (Water) was produced in 2009 at Ink and Pulp Theatre in Chicago. As a hip hop/street dancer he was fortunate to create and perform a piece at the 2018 Choreographers’ Evening at Walker Art Center. He has been a recipient of several generous grants, including the 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Writing, the Minnesota State Arts Board’s 2012 Cultural Community Partnership Grant and 2010 Artist Initiative Grant for Poetry, the Many Voices Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center in 2005 and 2007, as well as the 2009 VERVE Spoken Word Grant from Intermedia Arts. He is an alumnus of Cave Canem, the esteemed writing fellowship for black writers. His first poetry book, Any Psalm You Want, was published with Write Bloody Publishing in the spring of 2013.

Fellowship Statement

It is my aim to use multiple artistic mediums in the service of a greater, unifying idea. After years of focus on individual areas of arts composition and performance, this feels like the time to bring them together, and create artistic experiences that can speak to someone on multiple levels of engagement. I am looking at poetry/creative writing as the grounding element in a collaboration with dance, music, video and visual art. I want others to hear more of what I’m hearing, see more of what I’m seeing, and, perhaps, move with me in whatever ways they can.

Photo by Erin X. Smithers.

Jessica Jones (she/her) leads the pianoless group, the Jessica Jones Quartet, which features her original music and has several critically acclaimed recordings. The group has played festivals and major clubs on the East and West Coasts of the U.S. In addition, Ms. Jones is active as a sideman and has worked with Joseph Jarman, Cecil Taylor, and Don Cherry as well as a variety of Haitian, Caribbean, and African bands. She composed an opera with poet Arisa White, as well as a varied body of additional compositional work. Jones is an innovative jazz educator and consultant, working with children on improvisation, composition, and oral traditions for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stanford Jazz Workshop, the Vision Festival, Brooklyn Friends School, and others. Currently, Jones is an Artistic Director for REVA, Inc, a non-profit created to use creative arts to inspire, educate and heal people and communities.

Fellowship Statement

I play tenor saxophone and compose. My primary body of work is for my two-tenor saxophone, pianoless jazz quartets. I write for the strengths of the band, creating frameworks for free improvisation. This celebration of diversity represents my deep belief in listening for the strengths of individuals as a key to stronger unity. Voices are a strong influence on my compositions, which often incorporate spoken or sung music, or lines that are phrased based on speech patterns. I am currently working on a “poetry opera” with poet Arisa White, as well as continuing to expand my compositions for vocalists in a jazz context, and continually developing repertoire and rapport with my Quartet. I continue to study deeply in the jazz tradition, mining the great jazz improvisers and composers to strengthen my skills as a player and composer.

Photo by Cheryl Richards.

Anthony Jones (he/him) grew up in a hotbed of jazz education in Berkeley California where he was steeped in music at home and trained in some of the earliest jazz education programs in the nation, including Berkeley High School and UC Berkeley’s Young Musicians Program. While still in high school, Jones was part of an innovative cooperative quartet that performed bold experimental music around the Bay Area and on an East Coast tour where they were exposed to the still thriving loft jazz scene. Jones co-founded the Jessica Jones Quartet and the Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness Trio and subsequent configurations with Charlie Burnham; both groups record and perform extensively. He has appeared as sideman with Don Cherry, Muhal Richard Abrams, Peter Apfelbaum, and Joseph Jarman, among others, including in national and international jazz festivals.

Fellowship Statement

There is a natural geometry and architecture to my hearing that I try to explore and reveal through my improvisation and composition. The use of contemplative silence and restrained placement by the musicians is the kind of language I am developing with my band as a unit, and what I am exploring in my compositional direction. My compositions and playing call on all aspects of the African-American music continuum, including the intersection of free improvised music with R&B and jazz. The resulting music has an exploratory, modern searching bent. The current focus of my work consists of the use of certain musical phrases, gestures, and forms from, but not limited to, this music. I seek to develop this both as a composer and a player, in different ensembles but with a particular focus on Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness.

Photo by Marc Greene.

Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly (he/him) is the artistic director of New Brooklyn Theatre. In 2009 he founded the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. The two companies merged in 2018. Raja has been awarded a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and, twice, the Princess Grace Award (2017, 2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a BA in Dance and English from Connecticut College. Raja has been awarded a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award, a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard, a DanceWEB Scholarship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, a HERE Arts Fellowship, a 2018 Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

Fellowship Statement

I am obsessed with the development of popular culture over the last thirty years. My work unabashedly appropriates the structures, themes, and aesthetics found in reality television, celebrity culture, and social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook), then deconstructs it into new works which combine dance, theatre, and visual media. My aim is to challenge audiences to recognize their own implication in popular media: how media has trained and molded their desires, relationships, and identities. My movement-based performances combine fashion shows, gallery exhibitions, drag, stand-up comedy, minstrel shows, and stage-plays into a single, overwhelming, over-saturated Gesamtkunstwerk in which artists and audiences experience their shared humanity. I rehumanize our over-mediated experience of reality.

Photo by Thomas Dunn.

Adam Khalil (he/him) and Zack Khalil (he/him) (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and are currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). They both graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College and are UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows and Gates Millennium Scholars.

Fellowship Statement

Our work centers indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—while subverting traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative nonfiction practice. With a practice that includes experimental filmmaking, documentary, performance & curation, we are charting out a critical & unconventional space for situating & interrogating ideas of indigeneity today.

Photo by Bayley Sweitzer and Sam Richardson.

Hasabie Kidanu (she/her) received her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2017. Her film Mal-Fekata was most recently screened at the 48th Rotterdam International Film Festival as part of the Bright Future program. She has been a member of the Blackburn Printmaking Studio in New York since 2013. She was most recently a guest lecturer at Addis Ababa University. Since 2014, she is an Arts and Culture writer for TADIAS Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

I work with printmaking, film, and text. I was raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and often reference the city as a site of my research. I engage specific works of literature to ground and challenge my understanding of history and modernity. Currently, I am producing a film alongside a reading of Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly. Through the back and forth of reading and production, interpretation and application, I hope to produce a site/work that is of, and apart from, my understandings of early cinema and African literature.

Naomi Ko (she/her) is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and cultural producer. Her TV pilot, NICE, was an official selection at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Naomi created, wrote, and starred in the half-hour pilot. Naomi also played Sungmi in the 2014 Sundance award-winning feature film Dear White People, is a Moth StorySlam winner, and a featured performer for Mortified. Naomi performs with Funny Asian Women Kollective (FAWK) around the country and her comedic writing and performance can be seen in Episode 5 of The Mortified Guide, now available on Netflix. Naomi is the co-founder of the APIA MN Film Collective and has won multiple grants, awards, and fellowships for her work. Naomi is currently in pre-production for an upcoming short film she is directing and she is developing her feature film Good Genes.

Fellowship Statement

My work primarily focuses on creating unapologetic and raw film and TV narratives that feature fearless Asian American women. Even though the genres I play with can span from a raunchy sports comedy to a historical drama, at its core, each story explores the diversity of spirit, personality, and interests of Asian Americans in a grounded and humanistic lens. Currently I am exploring the ways in which Asian American women exercise their agency through my next feature film, Good Genes. It is a black comedy about a group of scientists of color who create their own personal genetics ancestry company to alter the genetic ancestry of known racists and white supremacists.

Photo by Katherina Vang.

Born in Wonju, Republic of Korea and adopted to Oklahoma, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (she/her) earned a MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2007), Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Bielefeld 2019, German-English editions). A recipient of grants from Intermedia Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board among others, she is associate professor of creative writing and directs Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College. She lives in Saint Paul.

Fellowship Statement

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is a transnational poet and scholar whose work confronts militarism and racial-gendered-class violence dividing kinships, selves, and imagination. Inspired by the Korean diaspora to which she belongs, she aspires to create alternative ways of feeling, knowing, and remembering to resist over sixty years of unending Korean War and its legacies. Her work has appeared previously in Agni, Blackbird, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Jubilat, Korean Literature Now, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Currently, Kwon Dobbs is developing a mixed-genre, multilingual book manuscript about white settler colonialisms and camptown kitsch in the digital age.

Photo by Thaiphy Phan-Quang.

Sieng Lee is a first-generation Hmong American refugee. Lee graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a Master’s in Fine Arts. He is an artist, graphic designer, and community organizer. His recent achievements include being a recipient of the MAEP at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; a Cultural Community Partnership Grant from the Minnesota States Arts Board; designing and developing the We Are Hmong/Peb Yog Hmoob Minnesota exhibit at the Minnesota History Center, which won an AASLH award; and directing multiple political campaigns to elect Fue Lee, Samantha Vang, and Jay Xiong to the Minnesota House of Representatives to form the first ever Minnesota Asian Pacific Caucus. His passion lies at the intersections of our multicultural society, helping to bridge the many inequities and misunderstandings.

Fellowship Statement

My work treads a delicate line that weaves in and out of the two realms that have shaped the Hmong identity since before time: the living and the spiritual. In so doing, I introduce general audiences to the celestial mythology that shapes modern Hmong Americanism, while activating the Hmong community’s exclusive access to view, recognize, and react to their own stories on display. By using physical objects that have a spiritual, and at times controversial, significance, my work questions the performance of tradition as it has been adopted and reinterpreted from generation to generation.

Simon Liu (he/him) was raised between Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, UK and lives in Brooklyn. His films and 16mm multiple projections have been presented at film festivals globally including the Toronto, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. He has performed at institutions such as the M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, CROSSROADS at SFMoMA, Yale University and as part of Dreamlands: Expanded—an expanded cinema series presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Microscope Gallery. Liu is an adjunct faculty member at the Cooper Union School of Art and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Wave Farm and the Jerome Foundation. He is in post-production on his first feature, Staffordshire Hoard and is developing a film which imaginatively traces the passage of an ancestor who traveled from Guangzhou to Amsterdam by foot.

Fellowship Statement

In recent years my practice has centered around building a filmic catalogue from my places of origin through a body of work consisting of abstract diary films, alternative documentaries and 16mm projection performances. These works act as a storage mechanism that activate the potential for me to reconsider my formative experiences and how they relate to my position as a half Chinese, half English person who was born and raised in the former British colony of Hong Kong. I’m driven by a desire to compress fleeting exchanges into a single frame—by exploiting the material potential of “outdated” analogue formats—with the intent of relaying an exaggeratedly contemporary experience. Currently I’m working on a suite of 16mm films which call into question the ethics of image making and two feature documentaries that interrogate personal family mythologies in relation to centuries old histories of South China and the English Midlands.

Photo: Still from E-Ticket (2019) - Photo of the Artist at a WTO Protest in 2006.

Kareem M. Lucas (he/him) is a Brooklyn born and Harlem-based actor/writer/producer/director. His solo pieces include The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro, From Brooklyn With Love, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, A Boy & His Bow, and Black Is Beautiful, But It Ain’t Always Pretty. He is currently co-collaborating on the development of the immersive theatrical piece The Black History Museum...According to the United States of America, as a writer/performer with the Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative at HERE Arts Center. He recently presented his solo piece, RATED BLACK: An American Requiem, as a part of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door Series, and The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro as part of his 2019 Mentor Project at Cherry Lane Theatre. Kareem received an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program.

For more info follow him on Instagram @KareemMLucas.

Fellowship Statement

I feel a great responsibility to articulate what it is to be Black now. Currently, my curiosity is drawn to investigating and deconstructing the Black heterosexual cis-gendered male perspective as it functions within America’s White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. How the legacy of slavery, racism, misogyny, religion and the value of the Black body over the Black mind still insinuates itself into our modern day existences and systems, as we navigate love, intimacy, identity, and self-worth in this digital media age The greatest service I may provide through my work is to communicate on behalf of my culture, so that we may reflect, heal, inspire, take responsibility, and move forward, because this lack of self-awareness, self-care, self-love, and overall accountability has diminished our progress as a people in this land for many generations.

Photo by Stan Demidoff Photography.

Kate Marks’ (she/her) film PEARL WAS HERE has over 25 million views on YouTube. She is a 2016 HBO Access Directing Fellow as well as a 2013 Project Involve Fellow (Barbara Boyle Award winner). She directed the HBO Access pilot MANIC, which premiered in the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and received Best Drama from the New York Television Festival and Best Actress in a Drama at Series Fest. Her award-winning shorts (PEARL WAS HERE, HOMEBODY, 7 DAY GIG, and MIRACLE MAKER) continue to screen all over the world, including Slamdance, Edinburgh International, Palm Springs ShortFest, New Orleans, Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, and Cleveland International Film Festival as well as broadcast on PBS.

Kate holds a BA from Brown and her MFA in film-directing from CalArts where she received the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts. Additionally, Kate is an organizer, a teacher, a stilt-walker, a bad trombonist, and a reckless dancer.

Fellowship Statement

I come from a long line of tricksters. My grandpa was famous for his epic pranks and my dad was a legendary wild man. Telling tall tales is in my blood and (like a good trick) my films use comedy, surprise, and spectacle to take you somewhere unexpected. My stories feature oddballs, misfits, and losers and I love experimenting with tone, mining humor out of dark situations. I am currently working on my first feature, THE COW OF QUEENS. In the final days of her father’s illness, Sonya and her dad, Del, go on one last adventure to usher an escaped slaughterhouse cow to freedom through the streets of New York. It’s an off-kilter love story about a dad, a daughter, a cow with a dream, and the good people of Queens.

Photo by Jamie Milner.

Dustin Maxwell (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer and visual artist originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, now based in Brooklyn, New York. In New Mexico he trained in Graham and Limon with his dance “mother,” Joanne Emmons. He has a BA in Dance from the University of Minnesota and extensive training in Yoga and Butoh. As a freelance dancer he has worked with Aniccha Arts, Chris Schlichting, Morgan Thorson, and many others. His choreography and performance installations have been shown in galleries, theaters, basements and alleyways in Minnesota, New York and Germany. He was a nominee for the 11th Annual Sage Awards, Outstanding Performer.

Fellowship Statement

I work primarily within the modalities of somatic improvisation and butoh. Being born queer into a Mormon family of eight has shaped my perspective in many ways. Sexuality, spirituality and the experience of otherness are major themes in my work. My choreography is highly visual and minimal in movement relying on the innate history, ancestry, cultural identity and politics inherent in the body. My body is a field for knowing that which is seen and unseen; that which lies beyond the boundaries of the mundane. My artistic endeavors use performance as a method for connecting with others at this essential level and perhaps provoking “awakeness.” I believe this expands the limits of consciousness which is a radical and subversive action.

Photo by Justin Hickman.

As a media composer and installation artist, Kathy McTavish (ze/hir) creates chance-infused, open systems. Ze uses generative methods to build networked, multichannel video and sound environments ::: cross-sensory, polyphonic landscapes which flow from the digital web (the cloud) into physical spaces.

Kathy has a background in cello performance, mathematics, ecology, music theory and code. The confluence of these disciplines informs hir work as a composer and multimedia artist. As both a musician and a mathematician, Kathy likes multi-threaded, dynamical systems and chance-infused, emergent patterns. As a queer artist, ze is interested in the ways we construct personal stories / myths and the infinite, bendable between.

Kathy’s current work explores the porous, intimate boundaries between humans and machines ::: the erotic dynamics of tapping glass ::: the carbon cycle ::: the cyborg body ::: the fragile electric body ::: the resistance cyborg ::: the networked, digital hive mind ::: the swarm.

Fellowship Statement

I like patterns but my work explores chance & improvisation. Mathematical models are a score. They are a blueprint to draw contours of change and movement ::: convergences, divergences, emergent patterns and cascading, system-level impacts.

Chance is a frayed thread, a stochastic cloud, a pointillist field, a complexity, an uncertainty, a ragged line. Chance is a prayer ::: a slim window of chance to survive this time of profound climatic change. Evolution requires fruitful deviation. A system's ability to adapt to change depends on its ability to mutate ::: on trial & error & improvisation.

I am interested in the poetics of code ::: the networked (i) ::: a deviant, queer learning machine ::: aerial artist ::: (m)bodied cloud ::: burlesque, cybernetic ze ::: beat poet of electricity ::: a honey ::: a lure ::: a torrent.

Photo by Magic Box Photography, Duluth, MN.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, Glendalys Medina is an interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Hunter College. Medina’s work has been presented at such notable venues as PAMM, Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Medina is a recipient of a Bemis Center Residency (2019), an Ace Hotel New York City Artist Residency (2017), a SIP fellowship at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2016), a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist residency at El Museo Del Barrio (2015), a residency at Yaddo (2014, 2018), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2013), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), and the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency (2010).

Fellowship Statement

At age 7, I decided I wanted to be an artist–not really knowing that it was much more than making beautiful things. Today, I am an artist to give a voice to those who have been silenced and create cultural equity.

I am interested in patterns, how they are formed and give meaning. Humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines with the ability to detect their disruptions or “recursive probabilistic fractals” according to inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil. I investigate existing patterns in order to understand how to form new patterns of behavior, thought, structure and meaning. Patterns dictate our understanding of life and who we are, and to change these meanings, we must disrupt them and make new concrete goal-oriented patterns in order to create social change.

The style of my work is heavily influenced by systematic structures, the cadence of Hip-Hop rappers, the affirmations and visualization exercises of New Thought ministers and authors, the signatures of graffiti writers, the moves of break-dancers, and traditional Taíno motifs.

The questions I grapple with in my work are how can I create new resonant forms, architecture, actions, and movement to invoke in my viewer emotions of love and curiosity for a broader perspective of the world.

Photo by Carlos David.

Kelley Meister (pronouns: ze/hir/hirs) received an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008 and continues to live and work in Minneapolis. Kelley’s work has been shown throughout the US, including at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis; Counterpulse Festival in San Francisco; and Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Hir work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Kelley also works as a teaching artist in schools, libraries, museums/cultural production centers, and community centers throughout Minnesota with COMPAS and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Kelley is a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines drawing, sculpture, video, and performance into multimedia installations and films. Kelley’s body of work investigates and calls attention to this moment in geological history where the planet is shifted by the indelible touch of humans. This work centers on a search for empathy for those whose lives have been irreversibly impacted by climate change, war, famine, and other challenges. Kelley utilizes the process of scientific observation of the world around us, yet as a queer artist, ze chooses to infuse this observation with the emotional responses that come up rather than stifle them to present a neutral position. Hir work interrogates the cultural acceptance of our trajectory and raises questions about our effects on our ecosystems and future generations.

During Kelley’s Camargo residency, ze will spend time synthesizing hir research and developing new work as part of the multi-part project Last Vacation Before the End of the World. Utilizing the research from hir Jerome Travel and Study trip to nuclear test sites and waste depositories in Nevada and New Mexico last spring, this new work is a multimedia response to our ongoing nuclear arsenal, questions of containment and disposal of nuclear waste, and the tourism industry that surrounds our nuclear production and history. A site visit to France’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor nearby will be a part of hir residency at Camargo.

Composer/Pianist/Producer Migiwa Miyajima’s (she/her) career path began on a very different trajectory from composing music—she worked as a director of real estate ads, an IT engineer, and an editor-in-chief of a travel magazine in Tokyo. But in 2004, at the age of 30, she decided to become a musician. Five years later, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, a historic New York-based ensemble, invited her to join their team. She was the associate producer for two Grammy Award-nominated albums by the orchestra in 2011 and 2014. In 2012, having received a Japanese government scholarship as a composer and a Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship, Migiwa made her move to New York. Her ensemble Miggy Augmented Orchestra’s debut album Colorful was released by ArtistShare in 2018. She is one of the recipients of the 2020 New York City’s NYC Women’s Fund For Media, Music and Theatre.

Fellowship Statement

Experiencing the massive 2011 earthquake in Japan transformed my approach to my life’s work as a composer. I witnessed the inconceivable ability music has to speak to us as a people during chaotic times. Since then, I am most interested in music as a language that speaks to our emotions directly. After moving to the United States and seeing fear and lack of happiness turned into hatred and division, it feels that this is the time for me as a composer/musician to cultivate what I learned in Japan. In my upcoming project, I am practicing how to make my music work on fear or insecurity and how to cultivate positive energy through it. I am delighted to be inspired by this amazing community while I am tackling this profound theme.

Photo by Hayato Sakurai.

Alicia Hall Moran’s (she/her) critically-acclaimed albums (Heavy Blue, Here Today) embrace Opera, Soul, Jazz, Theatre, and Visual Art. Shows/explorations include “the motown project”; “Black Wall Street: Tulsa Race Riot of 1921”; and “Breaking Ice: Battle of the Carmens.” Further collaborations live inside the artworks of Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Simone Leigh/Liz Magic Laser, Carl Hancock Rux, and Ragnar Kjartansson, and are exhibited worldwide.

Residencies/commissions include Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, National Sawdust, MoMA, ArtPublic, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, The Kitchen, and River to River. Her contemporary sensibilities were tapped for Broadway’s Tony-winning Porgy and Bess, starring as Bess on National Tour. Her artistry with husband/pianist Jason Moran has yielded Bleed/Whitney Biennial, Work Songs/Venice Biennial, Two Wings: Music of Black America In Migration/Carnegie Hall; and the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship. Ongoing, Alicia balances composition with solo vocalism in symphonic works: through 2020 in Gabriel Kahane’s emergency shelter intake form and Bryce Dessner’s Triptych.

Fellowship Statement

As a mezzo-soprano and composer, my sense of harmony, evidenced in film, recorded output and stage performances, both entices and subdues established notions of Performer and Performance. Profound historical divisions are the jump-off points for my previous musical investigations. Class difference in the review and catalogue of Black Music is another interest. My practice is non-hierarchical and plainly observes the music of the West.

In my forays, textual and sonic, Voice itself is an embodiment. My aim has been to find a new harmony inside of my work between Performance, Performer, and Practice. The Jerome Fellowship enables deeper exploration of venues previously off limits, collaborations too impractical to previously entertain, and visual realms that were technically unavailable. Traveling to Natural settings will sharpen specificity in my work. I will re-engage my recent work on ice to continue the investigation: metaphors for expressions of fragility and civility in critically trying Times.

Photo by Charles Roussel/Prototype Festival.