Nathan Yungerberg is a Brooklyn-based Afrosurrealist and storyteller whose plays have been developed or featured by The Cherry Lane Theatre, JAG Productions, LAByrinth Theater, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, The National Black Theatre, The Fire This Time Festival, 48 Hours in Harlem, The Lark, Roundabout Theatre Company, The Playwrights’ Center, Crowded Fire Theater, and The Bushwick Starr. He is one of seven Black playwrights commissioned by The New Black Fest for HANDS UP: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments published by Concord Theatricals, and adapted by BBC radio. Nathan’s play Esai’s Table was featured in The Cherry Lane Theatre’s 2017 Mentor Project (Mentored by Stephen Adly Guirgis). Awards, honors, and residencies: 2021 National Black Theatre of Harlem I AM SOUL residency, Blue Ink Playwriting Award (Finalist), 2019 Djerassi Resident Artist, The 2016 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (Semifinalist), Ken Davenport 10-Minute Play Festival (Winner). Nathan is also a writer for Sesame Street.

Fellowship Statement

My work is driven by my journey of creating a black identity. I was adopted at two weeks old and raised by white parents in Wisconsin. My innovation is rooted in investing less in what hasn’t been done before and more into what is not done enough. For generations, the negative portrayals of black bodies have demonized and desecrated a culture filled with light. I seek to share the radiance and the heart of the Black soul in a way that is aspirational and illuminating. I am currently working on a play called Sweetwater: The Gospel of Iman for a residency at the National Black Theatre in Harlem. Sweetwater follows a brotherhood of six Black gay men through the 1980s AIDS crisis in New York City who call themselves the New Apostles, and their god is a god called joy, or resilience, a god of tactics, a god called tomorrow.

Photo by Robert Feliciano

Whitney White is an Obie Award and Lily Award-winning director, writer, and musician originally from Chicago. She is a believer of alternative forms of performance, multi-disciplinary work, and collaborative processes. Her original musical Definition was part of the 2019 Sundance Theatre Lab, and her five-part musical exploration of Shakespeare’s Women, Reach for It, is currently under commission with the American Repertory Theater in Boston. Past fellowships include the New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, Colt Coeur Theater and the Drama League. White received an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep, and a BA in Political Science and Certificate in Musical Theatre from Northwestern University. Her recent directing includes The Amen Corner (Shakespeare Theatre Company), Our Dear Dead Drug Lord (WP Theatre and Second Stage, NYT Critic’s Pick), Aleshea Harris’ What to Send Up When it Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, American Repertory Theatre, The Public Theater, NYT Critic’s Pick).

Fellowship Statement

As a creator, I am a believer of alternative forms of performance, multi-disciplinary work, and collaborative processes. I aspire to use performance across mediums to challenge understandings of blackness, femininity, and much more. I currently have two works in progress to which this funding, in addition to professional development and support, would go to: Macbeth In Stride and Definition. Both challenge musical theatre as a genre, and radically defy traditional structures. One is a look at the process of adaptation, while the other is completely original. Definition is being developed with The Bushwick Starr, and Macbeth In Stride is part of a five-part series with the American Repertory Theatre. Thank you again, and I look forward to the next two years.

Photo by Melissa Bunni Elian

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American puppet artist/stop motion filmmaker with a visual arts background, and a DJ (DJ Chamun). She loves transporting people to another world where you believe inanimate objects are alive and you feel the sense of joy that comes from having your imagination expanded.

Wanduragala is the founder and Executive/Artistic Director of Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop. She’s inspired by creating a platform for other Native, Black, IPOC artists to explore puppetry, where they get funds, mentorship and studio access to develop creative and technical skills in contemporary puppetry. Wanduragala’s work has been supported by the Henson Foundation, Jerome Foundation, MRAC and MN State Arts Board, and her last puppet theater production was presented by Pillsbury House Theatre. You can see her work (and hear some playlists!) at www.chamindika.com

Fellowship Statement

Puppetry’s surreal nature gives me a sense of freedom to explore without fear. It’s also pure magic/joy when audiences feel that the puppets are truly ALIVE! Bringing the objects to life is really important to me, so I’m grateful for the support of other Native, Black, IPOC puppeteers I’ve gotten to know through Monkeybear.

My first puppet piece was a few years ago, so I’m excited to focus on artistic development in the next few years, moving towards an interdisciplinary practice: embedding stop motion animation into live puppet performance, learning sound design for my work by diving into modular synths (I’m excited by its sense of play, which connects so well with puppetry), creating puppet films and honing my directing skills so I can take the performative aspect to the next level. I’m currently working on my second short film, which incorporates stop motion animation and puppetry (live action).

Photo by Sarah White

Saymoukda (she/her) is an award-winning Lao American poet and playwright born in a Thai refugee camp and raised in Rondo, Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of the children’s book When Everything Was Everything, several plays, and currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Playwright in Residence with Theater Mu.

Fellowship Statement

It’s an honor to be awarded a Jerome Hill Fellowship for my work in theater. In my bones, I feel that I’m more than a playwright. I’m a creative legacy-architect. The Lao are not often part of public discourse. I believe that my plays are roadmaps for people to further engage with the histories, experiences, and stories from the Lao diaspora.

During the fellowship, I’ll be taking classes to hone the technical side of playwriting, read scripts, attend virtual performances, and be in conversation with my peers. I’ll also use my time to develop Motherland Orphans, a play about the generation of Southeast Asian Americans who were not born in their “motherland” but are tethered to her through stories, song, food, language, and refugee-love languages.

Thank you, Jerome Foundation. This former refugee’s heart is screaming with joy!

Photo by John Schlaider

So + Bex (So Mak and Bex Kwan) are not the same person. However, they are best friends who are both queer, gender non-conforming Chinese artists of roughly the same height (Bex is an inch taller), working with shadow, sound, and performance. Both alumni of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program, they began developing their collaborative artistic vocabulary at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), first as participants in the Upstart Program 2017-8, Space Grantees 2018, and then as Artists in Residence from 2019-2021. So + Bex were featured at The Brick’s 2018 Trans Theatre Festival, were Spring 2019 BRIClab residents, and were featured at the Highline's Out of Line series in July 2019. As solo artists, they have been invited to present at theaters, galleries, and universities in Singapore and the U.S., including La MaMa, the National Asian American Theater Company, and 3LD.

Fellowship Statement

When we first met in 2015, we were finding ourselves in situations of surreal overlapping identity where our housemates were confusing us with each other. It was both absurd and surprised neither of us. Our work always circles back to these questions: how can people like us—queer, gender non-conforming, East Asian people—build power with each other if we are seen as identical? How do our persons stretch to be at once threatening (especially in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic), harmless (especially in comparison to Black people), and interchangeable (especially in media)? How do we shoulder the perpetual foreignness that we are assigned while managing the distance that we feel from our own cultural and ancestral roots? Our process weaves dreamscapes from shadow puppetry, archival audio, and comedy to unearth the absurdity and revelation of our sameness.

Photo by Carlos David

Ifrah Mansour is a Somali, refugee, Muslim, self-taught multimedia artist and an educator based in Minnesota. Her artwork explores trauma through the eyes of children to uncover the resiliencies of blacks, Muslims, and refugees. She interweaves poetry, puppetry, films, and installations. She's been featured in Middle East Eye, BBC, VICE, OkayAfrica, Star Tribune, and City Pages. Her critically acclaimed How to Have Fun in a Civil War premiered at Guthrie Theatre and toured to cities in Greater Minnesota. Her first national museum exhibition, Can I Touch It!? premiered at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her visual poem, I am a Refugee, is part of PBS’s short Film festival. Mansour’s installation, My Aqal, Banned and Blessed premiered at Queens Museum in New York. Learn More: facebook.com/ifrahmansourart

Fellowship Statement

My artwork is informed by my lived experience, and that of my community of Muslim, refugee, black, and Somali immigrants. I create art out of my most painful experiences to connect communities, spark conversation, and create meaningful relationships between refugees and Americans. As a refugee, I didn’t see my story represented on stage or in cinema. Now, I am a self-taught multimedia artist blending poetry, puppetry, sculptural installation, and films to stage resilient refugee stories. I am also an educator to East-African elders that often are learning for the first time. They teach me so much about Somali life and culture. My proudest work, How to Have Fun in a Civil War, is a play about Somali history seen through the eyes of children, has given me such an insight to bringing out the hidden complex identities, and resiliency of minorities in Minnesota. With my fellowship, I hope to learn what it takes to write, develop, produce and distribute powerful refugee and new American stories in cinema.

Photo by Lindsey Marcy

Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work hybridizes theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play by employing consumer technology—such as VR, GoPro and GPS—and featuring diverse, multi-generational performers. Emily Harvey Foundation (NYC) has presented Liu’s projects in numerous solo showings (2014-2017). In 2017, she staged HANG OUT, a site-specific, episodic play in Manhattan Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park. MAKE A FOUNTAIN, an extensive catalog documenting those performances, was released in 2018. Liu was a resident artist at LMCC 2018-19 and ISSUE Project Room 2019, and a fellow at Institute for Public Architecture 2020. Her recent projects included PLAYDATE, a neighborhood-wide play in and about Downtown Brooklyn, and PIGTAIL–A Swivel Stool Dance™—both commissioned by ISSUE Project Room.

Fellowship Statement

Highlighting the shifting, participatory nature of viewership, mediated in real time by everyday use of technology, my practice reveals how experimentation is most fruitful when it escapes predetermination. My projects have included collaborations with bankers, construction and municipal workers, sociologists, psychotherapists, dog walkers, and scientists—sometimes all in the same performance. Poking at the traditional boundaries of media-based art, and often smashing the 4th wall between performer and spectator, I stir together contradictory forces of memory, spatiality, and the inherent friction and great possibilities of sociality. My second book, Heavily Prescribed Good Times, on PLAYDATE and PIGTAIL, will be released in 2021.

Photo by Steve Bookman

Amoke Kubat remains curious about self, the natural world, and the Sacred. She reclaims African Indigenous Spiritual sensibilities to reconnect to the first worlds, Spirit and Nature, as practice for holistic wellness. Self-taught, Amoke uses artmaking and writing to continue to heal herself and hold a position of wellness in an America sick with social injustices.

Amoke is an accidental playwright. Her play ANGRY BLACK WOMAN & Well Intentioned White Girl began as a conversation with a friend. Amoke expressed her annoyance with being called “angry black woman.” Her friend responded, “Like the well intentioned white girl'”? This play continues to tour as public readings in Minneapolis and rural Minnesota cities, and is available on Vimeo. As a Naked Stage Fellow, her second play, Old Good Pussy and Good Old Pussy, was performed at the Pillsbury House Theater in 2020. This play explores aging, ageist stereotypes, sexuality, and the social interpersonal tensions between intergenerations.

Fellowship Statement

My artistry is a tapestry of growing relationships, that has been woven from a motherless life, non-traditional black experience, discovery of the self through pain and tribulations as I strive to live my fullest life. I draw upon the strengths of diasporic African peoples and my Ancestors.

In 2020, in the time of COVID and World Wide Socio-political UNRESTS, I fought past, present and future. It was the battle to proclaim and be heard that, MY LIFE MATTERED when growing old is disdainfully feared. Old and aging peoples are more vulnerable and at risk and sometimes seen as collateral damage.

My new work will explore Black women's UNSAIDS about AGING; mind, body, and sexuality. But what if old black women, upon turning 100, revealed themselves to be Goddesses?

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Bushwick-raised artist and educator. He was the 2015 Hispanic Organization of Latino Artists (HOLA) Best Ensemble Award Winner, ATI Best Actor Award Winner 2016, HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer 2017 and 2016 Princess Grace Honorarium in Theater. He has taught theater and poetry in NYC Public Schools for ten years. He has toured internationally and appeared on TEDxBushwick, performed in Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals, Richard Maxwell’s Samara, Kaneza Schaal’s JACK &. and Victor Morales’ Esperento. In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater’s UTR Festival for ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn.

Fellowship Statement

I am currently working on Taxilandia, a culmination of my work over the past 9 years that serves as a living collection of the people, spaces, and stories from my community. After the virtual run with La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and The Tank in NYC, when Covid-19 rules permit, I will start the groundwork for a live production with New York Theatre Workshop and the Bushwick Starr. After the city-run, I will use Taxilandia and what I've learned from my years of collaborative creation in New York City to lead conversations with displaced people across America. I want to collaborate with local artists and theaters to adapt the show for their own communities. The 15 years of teaching artist work and cataloging gentrification I’ve done within Bushwick will inform the artistic conversations I’ll have with communities across America.

Photo by Crichton Atkinson

Phillip Howze is a playwright and theater maker whose works include Self Portraits (BRIC-Arts Media) and Frontieres Sans Frontieres (Bushwick Starr). His plays have been seen and developed at American AF Festival, Bay Area Playwrights, Clubbed Thumb, Lincoln Center Education, New York Theater Workshop, Page 73, PRELUDE, Public Theater/NYSF, San Francisco Playhouse, Sundance Theater Institute, Theatre Masters, and Yale Cabaret. He is currently a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3, and was recently named Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University’s new Theater, Dance & Media program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Fellowship Statement

Fellowship is a noun. Among its meanings are communion and companionship.  In a year of unfathomable loss, collective grievance and individual grief, when we have been necessarily distanced from each other, thoughts of fellowship could rightly feel like a throwback, or frivolity. Often for theater artists, fellowship has served as a friendly harbinger: a herald of hope, company and good humor. How might fellowship serve this same cause today? Not to commiserate with the times, but to imagine and commune in renewed ways. To wonder and refashion old words into new worlds. Together, to remember the meaning of things.  

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan