Past
Grantees

Marian Yalini Thambynayagam, Brooklyn, New York will travel to India and two locations in Sri Lanka to deepen her perspectives by examining the conditions vulnerable communities in Sri Lanka and the Diaspora are currently facing. Her spoken word poetry explores issues pertaining to the Sri Lankan Diaspora, using gender and sexuality as a lens, focused primarily on the US, Canada and England. This trip will expand her explorations and inform future work.

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP (TCG), New York City, received $18,620 in support of the National Theatre Criticism/Affiliated Writers Program. TCG's mission is to strengthen, nurture and promote the professional, nonprofit American theatre. Since its founding in 1961, TCG's constituency has grown to 470 member theaters and 17,000 individuals nationwide. Among its many activities, it publishes American Theatre, a national, general circulation magazine dedicated to theatre. It's published ten times a year with a readership of more than 75,000 and a subscriber base that includes all 50 states and 90 foreign countries. In 1989, with Jerome support, TCG launched the National Theatre Criticism/Affiliated Writers Program to help emerging writers from Minnesota and New York City develop careers in arts journalism. The program allows the magazine to greatly expand its coverage of the national theatre scene while simultaneously encouraging a new generation of cultural reporters and critics by establishing ongoing relationships with regionally based writers. During the course of the program's 19 years, 59 emerging writers have contributed 183 articles to American Theatre. The three Affiliated Writers chosen each year receive stipends, travel funds and editorial support.

VA-MEGN THOJ was awarded a grant for the documentary/narrative Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Killings, concerning the erasure of race in the media coverage of the case of the Wisconsin Hmong hunter killings, illuminating the active and ongoing occulting, or masking, of race in Hmong-white relations. The film is based on a conversation between Va-Megn Thoj and anthropologist Louisa Schein, published in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. The subject of the conversation was the 2004 killing of six white hunters by Chai Soua Vang in Wisconsin. The video work will feature elements of the real life conversation between Thoj and Schein while interweaving fictional elements extracted from a screenplay written by Thoj called Die by Night, which portrays the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically hunted and maimed by what they think is a Hmong demon from Laos. Daybreak, however, reveals to the sole survivor that it is white hunters in ski masks who have ruthlessly murdered the party over one long night. This dark story inadvertently suggests that Chai Soua Vang, vastly outnumbered by eight hostile white hunters, perceived a similar threat to his life and could see no other response than the violent one he embraced. His intent is a sustained critique of the hunting incident and the media coverage of it to provoke needed dialogue about race relations.

Kim Thompson, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Seoul, South Korea, her birth land in order to lend her voice to her fellow 200,000+ Korean adoptees so that a more complete version of the adoption story can be told. She intends to use her time in Korea to continue a collection of prose/poetry/essay centered on the themes of race, cultural identity and the mythology and truth of her birth mother. She expects to gain more information through interviews about adoption and the social systems that support adoptees, orphans and single mothers.

Samantha Thornhill, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Trinidad to conduct cultural research and draw sustenance and ideas from the culture and the place, which will inform upcoming writing projects. She will connect with the Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace and spend time in the rural village of Caparo.

Rebeca Tomás, New York City will travel to Seville, Spain, undertaking three months of intensive study to gain a significant level of mastery with the bata de cola (long-train dress), a technique and sub-genre of Flamenco dance. She will incorporate it into her vocabulary and creative process. She will study with Milagros Menjibar, known as la reina de la bata de cola, (the queen of the long-train dress); Menjibar combines the emotional force and elegance of classical flamenco with her own revolutionary touches. Thomas will also study with Maria Angeles Gabaldn, Yolanda Heredia, and Belen Maya-all highly regarded teachers and dancers of this form.

Pramila Vasudevan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to New Delhi, India to work with the Raqs Media Collective, artists who produce new media and multidisciplinary work from a contemporary perspective, and to study contemporary Indian performing arts through the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a progressive hub of contemporary Indian art. Vasudevan started a new media and movement-based performance company, Aniccha Arts, in 2004. Her travels will help guide her vision for this company and the new work she will be developing over the coming year.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $27,000 in support of the 2008 Essentially Choral Program. VocalEssence is recognized for its innovative exploration of music for voices and instruments. Its mission is to explore music for the human voices from spoken word to choral singing. Essentially Choral encourages emerging composers to create choral work and supports them as they develop it. VocalEssence partners with the American Composers Forum on the call for scores, the mechanics of the selection process and services offered to composers. Five composers are selected from applications submitted in response to an open call to have works-in-progress read by the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, a 32-voice professional chorus directed by Philip Brunelle. This program encourages stylistically diverse and experimental composition. Rehearsals with the Ensemble Singers, professional development seminars, one-on-one coaching and reading rehearsals combine to make an intensive experience for the composers.

VSA ARTS OF MINNESOTA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $38,000 to support Career Advancement Grants for Artists with Disabilities and services to artists. VSA arts of Minnesota promotes quality, accessible arts experiences for people with all types of disabilities throughout the state. Artists are assisted in their artistic pursuits through grant programs, workshops and access to information. Proposals for Career Advancements Grants will be submitted in response to an annual open call and reviewed by an independent jury. Selection criteria will be artistic merit/quality, demonstration of forward movement by the artist along a career path, the merit of the proposed artistic project and eligibility as an emerging artist.

A grant was awarded to MIAO WANG for Beijing Taxi, a feature-length film set in the two years surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Beijing Taxi turns a humanist lens onto the personalities and changing lives of three taxi drivers: Bai Jiwen, a 55-year-old married veteran driver with a 22-year-old son; Wei Caixia, a 33-year-old married woman with a 6-year-old daughter; and Zhou Yi, a 38-year-old married man with an 8-year-old daughter. Their stories connect a morphing cityscape and tales of citizens searching for their place amidst the dizzying pace of change. Beijing Taxi takes the viewer on a lyrical journey into fragments of a society navigating the bumpy roads to modernization.

STEPHANIE WANG-BREAL was awarded a grant for White Stork Hotel, a feature-length documentary about adopted Chinese girls, their American adoptive families and the Chinese political and cultural pressures that led to their abandonment. For the past eight years, China has been the leading country for US international adoptions. There are now approximately 70,000 Chinese adoptees being raised in the United States. Ninety-five percent of them are girls. Each year these girls face new questions regarding their adopted lives and surroundings. The characters and events of this story challenge traditional notions of family, culture and race.

AVI ZEV WEIDER received support for Welcome to the Machine, a feature-length documentary that explores our relationships to technology and reveals that all discussions about technology are ultimately about human values. The film explores the possibility of machines attaining human intelligence and ultimately asks a number of intriguing questions. Is there something about being a human that cannot be replicated through machines? If we do succeed in creating an intelligent machine, a machine that acts like a human, talks like a human, thinks like a human, what will we do with it? Will we grant it consciousness when it asks for it? Will we treat it as an equal? What exactly will the future world look like? Will it be much different? Will biological human beings be on this planet at the end of the century? What makes all the technological changes present on the horizon possible, anyway? What exactly is the origin and nature of technology? Welcome to the Machine is a documentary film about the ideas, the people and the machines behind these far-reaching questions.

Adia Tamar Whitaker, Brooklyn, New York, will attend a summer dance intensive in Kingston, Jamaica, where she will study Jamaican folklore in performance, culture and contemporary contexts. She will then travel to Ghana to study the Dahomean roots of Afro-Haitian dance in Ewe culture. In her choreographic work, Whitaker combines these traditional influences with hip-hop and modern dance vocabularies. She wants to study these forms at their source.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS was awarded a grant for Public Hearing, a 100-minute experimental cinematic reenactment of a real public hearing. The screenplay is derived from a public-domain transcript generated in the small town of Allegany, New York, which chronicles a debate surrounding a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter expansion in the area. Public Hearing synthesizes a fictional feature-film and a factual document. The original transcript was discovered on the Allegany town website, where the supporting PowerPoint visuals are also available for download. These visuals will be used in the film as props in the same way they were used during the real event as evidence. That which is not available for download, or is not accounted for in the transcript, will be imagined. Through such methods, the film will challenge the boundaries of intellectual property and public domain, and in so doing will belong to neither fact nor fiction.

Diane Wilson, Shafer, Minnesota, will travel to South Dakota, northern Minnesota and Canada to conduct research for a creative nonfiction book, Beloved Child, which explores the process of healing from historic trauma through the personal stories of Native people. Juxtaposed with the story of Dakota removal to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota after the 1862 Dakota war in Minnesota, the book challenges contemporary stereotypes with a pre-contact Dakota tradition of child-beloved. Wilson uses personal stories to explore larger, historical issues. She will interview specific individuals.

Bridgette Wimberly, New York City, will travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to work with teens in the Cleveland Juvenile Detention Center to gather information to inform her spoken word poems about their experiences.

CHAVISA WOODS, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Southern Illinois and Kansas, Missouri, exploring her relation with her Native American heritage, while conducting interviews with estranged relatives and citizens of her hometown. She will travel to Native American reservations where distant relatives are residing to understand relationships between the American rural class and Native American culture. Her current writing is an artistic exploration of the experiences of lower class Americans, a societal critique and a personal revolution.

THE WRITERS ROOM, New York City, received a two-year grant of $33,000 to subsidize membership fees and provide scholarship funds for emerging writers with financial need. The Writers Room is an urban writers' colony dedicated to providing clean, quiet and affordable workspace, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year to writers. Members include novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, nonfiction writers, journalists, biographers, memoirists and children's book writers. It serves approximately 400 writers each year with approximately 300 of those being emerging.

SUSAN YOUSSEF received funding for Habibi Rasak Kharban (My Darling, Something's Wrong With Your Head), a narrative digital short that explores the story of a forbidden love crushed under the weight of both the Israeli occupation and traditional Islamic society of Gaza. Set in modern-day Khan Younis, it is the retelling of the famous Sufi mystical parable Majnun Layla. When the film begins, the Gaza strip has come under full closure-Palestinians are not allowed to travel in or out of Gaza via Israel. Two Palestinian college students who have been studying in the West Bank-Qays and Layla-have just been forced to return home. The two were childhood companions who used to tend sheep together. Qays fell in love with Layla in their childhood. The film references this innocent past as the time Qays and Layla spent in the West Bank; however, upon return to the Gaza strip, with the limits of curfews and checkpoints as well as societal traditions and rules, Layla is inaccessible to Qays, and he descends into madness.

Jake Yuzna, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to three cities in Germany to visit the sites of the last days of Ernst Rhm's life, a founding member of the Nazi Party, the leader of a storm battalion, and an open homosexual. Yunza will also research and interview young queer couples living in Berlin's arts community. The research will become the basis for the creation of a dramatic film consisting of two interwoven storis of queer relationships in Germany. The first will follow the final months of Ernst Rhm, climaxing with the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler reportedly executed 85 people including several founding members of the Nazi Party and high ranking officers of the military. The second will center on a love story set in the queer arts community of present day Berlin.