Past
Grantees

THE KITCHEN, New York City, is an interdisciplinary arts organization that provides innovative artists working in the media, literary and performing arts with exhibition and performance opportunities to create and present new works. A Jerome grant of $15,000 was awarded to support commissions given to emerging creative artists. These new works will be presented during the 2006-07 season. They cover a broad spectrum of disciplines ranging from music, dance, theater and performance art to video, sound and mixed-media installation.

JOANNA KOHLER, a Minneapolis-based filmmaker and media activist, will travel to New Mexico to learn more about media literary models and facilitation in order to improve her community engagement with digital media and her work as a filmmaker. Kohler will participate in a workshop presented by the New Mexico Media Literacy Project.

WILLIAM KRUSE was awarded support for Big Boy, a short narrative video about sex, using the context of the coming of age talk between a father and his adolescent son. The story projects across three vignettes: First Sexual Experience, Married Sex and Sex Between Seniors. With Big Boy, the method of storytelling is as important as the message. The structure of this narrative piece addresses the new way in which audiences view content.

A grant was awarded to EMILY and SARAH KUNSTLER for Disturbing the Universe: Radical Lawyer William Kunstler, a documentary about William Kunstler's transformation from smalltime divorce lawyer to larger-than-life defender of equal rights and justice in America, as told by his daughters. In this 90-minute documentary, the co-directors will explore their father's life, from middle-class family man, to movement lawyer, to the most hated lawyer in America (New York Times), in order to understand his political development and his role in the social change movements of which he was a part.

THANHHA LAI, a poet in New York City, will travel to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to learn about changes in the lives of four ten-year old girls, now 40, whom she knew immediately after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. As a ten-year old girl in 1975, she fled Saigon with her family to Montgomery, Alabama. The travel will help Lai juxtapose her life with the girls who stayed in Vietnam and will inform her collection of prose poems.

Choreographer GELAN LAMBERT, New York City, will travel to Ghana, West Africa, including Accra, Cape Coast, Wa, Volta Region and Tamale to seek parallels between contemporary dance forms and ancient African dance. Lambert's ancestors came from Ghana. It is essential to his work for Lambert to find accurate and authentic documentation of movement in this region of Africa.

The LARK PLAY DEVELOPMENT CENTER, New York City, received $10,000 in support of the participation of emerging playwrights in various development programs. The Lark is a play development center committed to identifying new voices. It brings resources to playwrights to develop their visions rather than trying to fix plays to make them suit the needs of a particulargives writers the tools and resources they need-space, time, actors, directors, critical feedback, and the freedom to experiment and expand their boundaries. The process begins with an open submission policy and careful selection and then evolves in a variety of programmatic tracks. Each year, the Lark works with approximately 85 playwrights.

Support was awarded to MOUA LEE for the production of Dab Neeg (a Hmong word meaning Stories or Tales). This feature-length narrative contains three short stories: Forest Keeper, Poj Ruam (a Hmong phrase referring to a girl who is mentally incapable of speaking) and Unforgettable Smile. The stories involve themes of actions and consequences. Forest Keeper is about a man who loves to hunt; he kills for the thrill, until he learns a valuable moral lesson. Poj Ruam, focuses on the brutal rape and murder of a young girl and the supernatural forces that exact justice on the four men responsible. Unforgettable Smile is about the obsession of a young man with a beautiful young woman he sees in a crowd. He goes back to the same location year after year looking for her, until she one day appears and agrees to marry him. But his health takes a downward turn soon after the wedding. He's unaware that the woman with whom he is so obsessed was killed shortly after he laid eyes upon her the first time.

GREG LICHTENBERG, a writer in New York City, received funding to travel to Israel and to the city of Hebron on the West Bank to conduct the research necessary to complete his novel, The Time Value of Love, which was inspired by two previous trips. Lichtenberg will meet with a Chief of Staff of a former Prime Minister of Israel as well as a member of Israel's delegation to the United Nations. He will spend time in Tel-Aviv, Be'ersheva and the old city in Hebron and will meet with Israelis, both Jewish and Arab.

THE LOFT LITERARY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $100,000 in support of the Mentor Series. This large, comprehensive and independent literary center serves over 600,000 writers and readers of all ages each year. Its mission is to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers and an audience for literature. The Loft received support for the Mentor Program, initiated in 1979 as a vehicle for emerging Minnesota writers to work in small group settings with nationally recognized writers, and to be mentored by them in various ways ranging from review of their work to providing inspiration and examples for a writing life. Twelve emerging Minnesota-based writers (four in poetry, four in fiction, and four in creative non-fiction) are selected through a competitive process to work intensively with six nationally acclaimed writers (two in each genre). The program includes individual conferences, group sessions, craft seminars, manuscript conferences and public readings.

The LOWER MANHATTAN CULTURAL COUNCIL, New York City, received $21,000 in support of Workspace. The Council is a leading arts presenter, advocate and service provider to artists and arts groups throughout the borough of Manhattan. Workspace provides studio spaces in downtown urban environments to emerging artists. It addresses the critical need for affordable space to work, and also creates an environment for artists to learn from each other and access career-building resources. This year, in two sites, the program will allow 30 artists, competitively selected via an open call, to occupy studios for nine months. Complementary programs that strengthen the residency include stipends; opportunities to meet leading New York curators, dealers, writers and collectors; and an Open Studios Weekend held at the end of the residency. Artists are given 24-hour a day, seven-day a week access to their studios.

THE FIELD, acting as fiscal sponsor for LUIS LARA MALVACIAS, received a grant of $9,000 in support of the creation of There is no such Thing. Malvacias is a choreographer, dancer, designer and visual artist. There is no such Thing will explore the power of images and words to trigger and manipulate emotions, references and behaviors as related to individual experiences. Malvacias will investigate the verbal, visual and physical possibilities contained in the concepts of hiding and struggling. Twenty-one short sections form the structure of the piece. The resulting work will contain physically contradictory movement material, theatrical images, spontaneous actions and immediate performance, videos, installations and manipulated sounds.

WYATT MCDILL received a grant for Apartment 39, a feature-length narrative about eBay auctioneers August, Bella and Carthage, who search the obituaries looking for estates to auction off on eBay. As the story begins, these three come to find themselves on the deserted farm of one Einar Anderson-a recently deceased farmer whose sad life might only ever be known through the possessions now being sent via UPS to all corners of the country and world. As they disassemble a life lived-and the mystery of that life deepens-the three young people are simultaneously caught up in two other intrigues. A mysterious connection among the three auctioneers, the dead farmer and a young women on a voyeur web site, apartment 39.com unfolds.

Film animator PATRICIA MCLAUGHLIN, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Kyoto, Japan, to work for two months as an artist-in-residence at the Kyoto Art Center. The focus of McLaughlin's work is on the basic necessities for living, the physical and spiritual maintenance of the body. Japan continues to be at the forefront of technological developments for modern urban life, while maintaining strong ties to a spiritual and religious past that remains a mystery to many Westerners. Living among the old and new structures of Kyoto, McLaughlin will witness firsthand the evolution of human ingenuity in Japanese design.

The Jerome Foundation Board approved a two-year commitment of $5,000 to RENEW MEDIA, New York City, acting as fiscal sponsor for GRANTMAKERS IN FILM AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA (GFEM). Open to all foundations as well as government agencies and nonprofit organizations with significant media grantmaking programs, GFEM is an active forum and source of learning for grantmakers concerned with media. It also advocates for the funding of innovative and public interest media as a vital and essential cultural force within the dominant forms of creative, social and journalistic expressions of our time. GFEM engages funders in key media issues and developments in the field through festivals, grantmaker briefings, annual conferences, regional conferences, a media policy working group, information services and special projects including searchable databases.

MEET THE COMPOSER, New York City, received a two-year grant of $40,000 for Creative Connections grants to emerging composers in Minnesota and New York City. Meet The Composer fosters the creation, performance and recording of music by American composers and develops new audiences for their work. The men and women who write music are brought into personal contact with their audiences. Creative Connections (formerly the Meet The Composer Fund) supports the participation of composers in activities connected with performances of their work. Audiences participate in such composer-led activities as creative workshops, discussions, interactive presentations and in-school residencies. The grants also allow composers to inform the rehearsal of their works and perform in and/or conduct premieres. With four funding cycles per year, this program is responsive to musical ensembles and composers.

ABINADI MEZA was awarded support for the production of Like Snow, Falling, a 25-minute experimental video exploring memory and the winter landscape. The non-linear narrative of the video will be generated from five interviews with people having a memory linked to a specific space. The metaphor of snow falling will illustrate the ephemeral yet cumulative nature of memories-how they build up layers and weight, yet eventually disappear.

THE FIELD, acting as fiscal sponsor for choreographer SARAH MICHELSON PROJECTS, New York City, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of a new work titled Swan Lake (working title). The Field offers programs and services to independent performing artists and companies. Sarah Michelson maintains a collaborative laboratory for the rigorous investigation of new dance/art ideas, processes and forms, which results in contemporary work that challenges the current discourse on dance. Michelson will choreograph Swan Lake in collaboration with Parker Lutz and composer Mike Iveson. The work will be choreographed in response to its site, The Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The nature of the work, alluding to a requiem, marks a turning point in the career of a dance artist.

MILKWEED EDITIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $46,000 in support of the publication of four single author books and one anthology. Milkweed Editions, an independent, nonprofit literary publisher, releases 12 to 20 new books each year in the genres of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. In 2005, it released its 200th title, bringing more than one million Milkweed books into circulation. Jerome Foundation funding will be directed toward books by emerging authors, including James Armstrong. In 2008, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Minnesota as a state, Milkweed will publish an anthology of writing from the region. A portion of Jerome funding will be used for this volume as most of the writers will be emerging.

MILKWEED EDITIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $11,500 in support of the publication of two books by emerging authors. One of the nations largest independent nonprofit literary publishers, Milkweed Editions releases 12 to 20 new books each year in the genres of adult fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's literature. It publishes books that have the potential to make a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a transformative art.