Past
Grantees

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Martha Colburn, and Loren Connors. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, and keyboards, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008 Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, the 2016 Art Matters Grant, the 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency and the 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency. She is also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Ortman lives in Brooklyn, New York.

As she embarks on the creation of a new work at Camargo, she plans to do ambient field recordings at the Calanques National Park and in Cassis to gather new compositional textures.

Laimah Osman is a queer Afghan American visual artist, educator, and graphic designer. She makes multidisciplinary art that celebrates her cultural heritage and experiences. Osman’s family left Afghanistan for the U.S. when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Since then, she connects to her Afghan culture through her family, community, and the media. Particularly after 9/11, Afghan and Muslim people are singularly portrayed in the media in connection to violence and war. Osman wants to present the richness and diversity of her Central Asian culture and hopes to challenge the one-dimensional representation of Afghan and Muslim people that fuels today’s atmosphere of racism and xenophobia.

Osman’s visual work is based in the research, study, and practice of various printmaking and book arts processes. The origins of these different techniques are tied to global histories of communication and offer limitless possibilities for storytelling and socially engaged work. She is drawn to the nuances and possibilities for chance, repetition, multiplicity, improvisation and collaboration in generating work, as well as the materiality as a counter to the digital age.

While at Camargo, Osman plans to explore ideas around migration, safety and security in dialogue with others who are considering and expressing similar global concerns. She will travel to Marseille to see how this large modern “port city” is shaped by its immigrants. She also plans to experiment with different folds and bookbinding methods to make structural decisions and prototypes for the artists’ books.

Isabel Sandoval received $15,100 for Lingua Franca, a narrative feature about an undocumented Filipina transwoman who works as a caregiver to Olga, an elderly Russian-Jewish woman with dementia. She becomes involved with Alex, Olga’s adult grandson, who is unaware that Olivia is transgender. This film, inextricably linked to Sandoval’s intensely personal journey, explores the nuanced and layered contemporary issues of immigration and transgender rights through the lens of a romantic drama.

Mónica Savirón received $30,000 for The Ledger Line. This experimental film enacts what ledger lines do, bringing voices difficult to be heard and be accounted for into the musical score. Shifting from archival and found footage to original imagery filmed by Savirón, this work extends the space for what one can hear and express, especially when it comes to sexism, racism, and climate crisis. Sound is the guiding force for the images to move and evolve, tracing lines of cause and effect between our actions and the world.

Tony Whitfield is a multimedia artist, designer and educator whose practice draws upon collaborative relationships to present and interpret urban experience to illuminate social change, particularly in the lives of underrepresented populations, engendering greater understanding of the histories that underpin current cultural phenomena.

During his residency at Camargo, he will be focused on the development of the narrative and textual content of the video and audio- visual components of Over Deep Water, a multimedia theatrical meditation on the experience of caregiving; and Garden Under Bluer Skies, an installation inspired by the palliative potential of herbal naturopathic practices from which HIV/AIDS drug therapies were derived. These two projects will be presented as part of This Dancerie, a cycle of work that explores a century of gay male queer life in Paris and New York. These works recognize the 25th anniversary in 2021 of the implementation of three drug therapies, transforming AIDS/HIV from a terminal illness to a manageable chronic condition.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (she/her) is a Lebanese-American photographer, born in Beirut, and currently living and working in Queens, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, and Familiar Stranger, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, New York; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

Fellowship Statement

My work focuses on the ways in which globalized communication brings idealized images from one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, I am building my own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards. In one sense the advertisements serve as a visualized end energizing capitalist growth, and in another they purport a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city. The advertisements and pervasive neo-liberal capital represent our most recent form of colonialism. What is fascinating to me about this system is that it employs images as its most powerful tool. This under-documented place is now occupied by images of a different place and people.

D. Allen (they/them) is a multidisciplinary poet and artist living in Minneapolis. Their first hybrid poetry collection, A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe (The Operating System, 2019), weaves together poems, lyric essays, dictionary erasures, and images in response to the poet's diagnosis with a connective tissue disorder, asking: What holds us together when the body falls apart? D.’s writing has appeared in QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, District Lit, Rogue Agent, Lockjaw Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. D. has recently received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, an Emerging Artist Grant from VSA Minnesota, and a Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft; they have been a resident at the Mallard Island Artist Residency, The Lighthouse Works, Write On Door County, the Andrews Forest, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. D. earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota in 2017.

Fellowship Statement

D.’s poetic practice is oriented around presence. Their work takes many forms: word architectures, light drawings, textured surfaces, slow dinners, layered sounds, sustained listening, temporary assemblages, quiet gardening, exploratory movements. Through their work across media and disciplines, D. navigates pain and illness, queer kinship, sex and intimacy, the natural world, and the realities of queer, genderqueer and disabled embodiment. Collaboration and relationship-building are vital to D.’s artistic life.

Currently, D. is developing their first full-length stage work using text, images, light, sound, movement, and large-scale handknit textiles with the support of a 2019 Q-Stage: New Works Fellowship from 20% Theatre Company. D. is also working on a collection of researched lyric essays, while pursuing new collaborations and smaller-scale experimental projects across disciplines.

Photo by poet Roy G. Guzmán.

Noel W Anderson is a professor and Area Head of Printmedia ay New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Originally from Louisville, KY, Anderson received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University; he holds two MFA’s from Indiana University and Yale University. Anderson’s research initiatives have led to national and international scholarly presentations. He was recently published in October Journal. His works have been exhibited at The Studio Museum of Harlem, Tilton Gallery (NYC), Zidoun/Bossuyt (Luxembourg), and the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS). Anderson was recently a recipient of a Jerome Travel and Study Grant and NYFA Fellowship. Anderson's work explores the tangled historical relationships between weaving, screen culture, and representations of black masculinity. During his time as a Camargo resident, Noel Anderson will work on a series of small- and large-scale tapestries, while researching the history of 17th- and 18th-century French weaving.

Janani Balasubramanian (they/them) is a writer, game designer, and immersive theater maker whose work has been presented on stages across North America and Europe, including The Public Theater, High Line, MoMA, Abrons Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Red Bull Arts, Ace Hotel, Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Residency support for this work has included the NEA, Public Theater Devised Theater Initiative, and Mount Tremper Arts. Balasubramanian is currently a 2018-2020 Van Lier fellow at the Public Theater as well as artist-in-residence with the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History. Current projects include Rogue Objects, a live audio game about a celestial object struggling with its consciousness; Transference, a collaboration with stellar astronomer Dr. Natalie Gosnell; Harold and Okno, a Cold War era novel about an extraordinary friendship; and Night Chicken, a farm animal jazz musical.

Fellowship Statement

I am invested in continuing to explore audio-immersive games as a theatrical form. Additionally, I am interested in collaborating with artists in music, film, and VR to develop even newer forms together. I also seek to build from the methods I have developed while in residence with the brown dwarf astrophysics group to collaborate with scientists in other fields. I hope to discover what I, as an artist, can learn from each scientific field’s research practices, and contribute to the rich, historical, and ongoing exchange between theater and science. Finally, I hope to build my fluency with relaxed performance and other accessible theater-making methodologies, and create both large-scale and intimate performance experiences that expand our notion of what contemporary theater can look like, and who and where its audience can be.

Photo by Anna Hadjo.

Rachel Breen (she/her) has exhibited her work across the Twin Cities and nationally. She has received several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field and an artist residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Rachel’s social engagement projects have twice been a part of Northern Spark, an all-night public art festival addressing climate change. Rachel is a professor of fine art at Anoka Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and received her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College. She worked as a community organizer for social justice organizations and political campaigns across the country and is a co-founder of Jewish Community Action in Minnesota. These experiences influence the process and content of her art today. Rachel was born and raised in Minnesota. Her ancestors had roots in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.

Fellowship Statement

At the core of my practice is a sewing machine, which I use to draw, create installations and perform. I describe my work as “public making” as it encourages reflection about social concerns. Through acts of sewing, I divert sewing’s original purpose, that of creating, toward social critique. I call attention to the stitch as a symbol of human interdependence, and I use it to express a belief in the possibility of social change and repair.

My recent work examines the implications of two garment workplace tragedies, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City and the 2013 Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Bangladesh. I connect these tragedies to raise questions about the relationship between overconsumption and the abject working conditions of garment workers. With this fellowship, I plan to continue investigating these questions, focusing especially on matters of scale, materials, and public participation.

Photo by Justin Allen.

Shirley Bruno (she/her) holds Masters from London Film School and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains where she was an artist fellow. Shirley's shorts have received awards at major festivals including the Off-Limits Prize in Competition for her experimental short AN EXCAVATION OF US at Annecy International Animated Film Festival (2018) and the Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (2018). Her docufiction TEZEN was awarded prizes from the National Greek Film Centre (2017) and the StudioPrix Collector (2016) initiated by art collectors Isabelle and John-Conrad Lemaître. She has received funding and support for her work from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, La Cité International, and LIM—Less is More part of Le Groupe Ouest.

Fellowship Statement

Shirley’s films draw from her heritage preserving and radicalizing her ancestral traditions and mythology. She creates modern myths that expose the slippery spaces between the material and metaphysical world, documentary and fiction, between collective memory and history. She explores the everyday, the Sacred, and the intimate violence in the things left unsaid that mark us generation after generation. Her work often takes its point of departure from neglected histories as well as from rumors, dreams, superstitious beliefs, and memories both real and imagined. Currently, Shirley is developing her first feature film, an intimate meditation on women, land, and family legacy.

Photo by Léa Girardin.

Chia-Lun Chang (she/her) was born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Her work appears in Literary Hub, PEN America, Hyperallergic, Bettering American Poetry Volume 2, Vinyl, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, and Bone Bouquet, among other publications. She’s the author of a chapbook, One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2016) and has been supported by fellowships from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, and Poets House.

Fellowship Statement

I came to the United States to continue my studies, earning a second bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a master’s degree in poetry. In these programs and through my work in the writing community, I have deepen my understanding of colonization, women’s rights, and patriotism. Even today, it is difficult to find authentic representations of Taiwan, written by ethnic minorities and native people. Seeking representation, I found two books which spoke to me—Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire and Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I admire Césaire for combining anger, violence, colors and temperatures. In Dictée, Cha uses the text as an extension of her body and demonstrates the possibility of developing one’s own multilingual, hybrid-genre voice. With Cha and Césaire as my guides, I have been working on a poetry memoir in which I grapple with the conflict and confusion of identity issues, the lost history of island residents, postwar survival, the causes of female oppression, and the act of speaking out. As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will expand my first chapbook, One Day We Become Whites, into a book-length project—a Taiwanese poetry memoir.

Jason Coyle (he/him) and Laska Jimsen (she/her) work across nonfiction forms from video documentary to 16mm filmmaking. Their individual and collaborative work has screened at festivals and venues including Ann Arbor, Athens, Big Muddy, IC Docs, Los Angeles Filmforum, Cellular Cinema, and Walker Art Center. Laska and Jason are individual recipients of Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and a Jerome Foundation Minnesota Film & Video Grant. Laska is Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College; Jason is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

Fellowship Statement

Our experimental nonfiction film and video work foregrounds acts of observation in sustained investigations of human-animal relationships, systems of management and classification, and representations of the everyday. Our ongoing series Almanac is a collection of formal studies of light, motion, and time, exploring sensory dimensions of seasonal states through singular moments in afternoons across the year. Research is integral to how we conceive of and create longer-form documentaries. We are currently developing new projects that draw on the history of automation and pose questions about contemporary labor and workplace transformations.

Photo (Jason Coyle and Laska Jimsen’s Deer of North America 2017) courtesy the artists.