Past
Grantees

Lea Kalisch is a Swiss Jewish singer, actor, entertainer and creative producer. Lea makes multi-cultural, multilingual art that brings together music, dance, drama, and comedy, on stage and on screen, always leading with Yiddishkayt (Jewishness). Some know her as the Eshet Chayil of Hip Hop, others as Rebbetzin Lea with her Yiddish comedy skits.

Lea had multiple appearances in the US and Switzerland with her one woman show In love with a dream! Lea released her first solo album of the same name in 2022. She’s performed solo concerts in NYC, Boston, Munich, Zurich and Vienna and has played leading roles in various Off-Broadway productions and regional theaters such as The New Yiddish Rep, The Six Points Theater, National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, HERE Arts Center. Lea is also the 2020 recipient of the Omanut-Zwillenberg prize which awards Swiss Jewish artists.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

It is my mission to share the rich Jewish culture with ALL people by creating new, deep and entertaining Jewish content that CLASHES with other cultural traditions. As a Swiss polyglot living in the US for many years, I see myself as a citizen of the world, building bridges across different groups of people connecting Europeans and Americans, Jews and non-Jews.

The stories I tell are rooted in reality. I focus on Judaism, women, sexuality, the female body, the roles of men and women. My work often questions beliefs, religion, identity, sexuality, and dreams.

I will dive into my project Tango- A Prayer For Two, a film and/or a stage play, that brings together Yiddish and Tango. Through music, dance, and dialogue I will tell the incredible, tragic, and true story about Zwi Migdal, a Jewish mafia who brought women from Eastern Europe to brothels in South America. Where do I fit in the story? You will see…

Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture Woman Filmmaker Fellowship and Sisters in Cinema Documentary Fellowship. Kayiza is the recipient of the 2022 Documentary Development Initiative grant in partnership with HBO Documentary Films and The Gotham. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Crystal was the winner of the 2020 Tribeca Through Her Lens grant with her film Rest Stop, which premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and was selected for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. She is currently working on her first feature film, which received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a filmmaker, my work has been defined by exploring the in-between. The space between scripted and non-fiction cinema, the western world and the African Diaspora, all of the lines separating communities in my hometown in Oklahoma, the interior of my home as a child of immigrants and my access to space as a US citizen. The emphasis on location, memory and time in my work is largely rooted in a desire to define this gap and to make this nuance more legible. I am interested in how all of these things intersect with the most mundane elements of our lives. The everydayness that we often overlook, particularly within the inner lives of Black folks, is what I find most compelling. During the fellowship period, I plan to continue to work on my first scripted and non-fiction feature projects as well as pursue joy and rest in the most unremarkable and quiet parts of my daily life.

Sam Kebede is a first-generation Ethiopian/Eritrean-American writer/actor/comedian. He's performed at/had his works presented at venues including The Public, Ars Nova, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the Venice International Film Festival. His award-winning play ETHIOPIANAMERICA premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago (produced by Definition Theater Company), and he currently writes for the show Tough Bobas, an anti-CCP series shot and produced in Taiwan. Sam also loves to perform stand up, and has an hour long set titled I’m Ostracized because I'm Ostrich-Sized. You can also stream his solo show Lack History through Ars Nova Supra, or catch a production at Caveat on the LES.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The goal of my fellowship period is to further develop my show Lack History, which is a comedy variety game show about the history we ignore and ramifications of that ignorance. Through a combination of games and stand up, I bring the audience on a journey to confront the ills of our past through comedy. They are asked to complete tasks/answer questions to earn money for non-profits that attempt to address those ills. The long-term goal for this development is to make three tiers of shows. The first form would be a complete non-profit model that creates a set production that can be performed continuously. The second is a form of the show that is freshly made on a regular basis that examines our current historical moment for schools or communities throughout NYC/the tri-state area. The third form would be a for-profit version of the show that markets itself to corporations as a DEI event. Companies could pay for an in-office show that would include a talk-back afterward to unpack how their company can do more to benefit their immediate communities.

Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn. Her videos, installations, and performances center on the formation of political ideology, historical mythologies, and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Through poetic intervention into archival sources and legal documents, her work seeks to unsettle foundational national myths. Her practice is grounded in collaboration, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, as a way to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries.

Keren’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Eyebeam, New York; The James Gallery, New York (forthcoming); The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv; Goethe Institute, New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park among others. Her projects received support through fellowships and awards from Artadia, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Artis, Socrates Sculpture Park, A-Z West, ISCP, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

In this ongoing moment of crisis, I ask myself what it means to be a cultural producer? How can re-telling of history and collaborative artmaking counter hegemonic narratives while having a transformative potential?

I often think about these questions from a comparative, transnational lens. I moved to New York from Jerusalem in 2014 at moment of rising populism and ethnonationalism in the world. This geographical shift allowed me to look at the overlapping messianic political power structures and settler-colonial imaginaries which connect Israel and the United States. Through immersive and participatory environments, I try to render how state-violence is often disguised under a veil of beauty and mythology. Each project sends me on years of archival research and filming, resulting in an exhibition that becomes a space of collective inquiry, counter-narratives, resistance, and an investigation of political imagination.

Halee Kirkwood is a poet, teaching artist, and bookseller living in Minneapolis. Kirkwood earned their MFA from Hamline University. They are an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) fellow, a Loft Mentor Series Fellow, a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a recent artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Artists, published with Poetry Northwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Kirkwood is the faculty editor of Runestone Journal, a national undergraduate literary annual. Originally from Superior, Wisconsin, they are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My primary concern as a writer is to radically redefine nature and place-based poetry. Rather than poetry that presents a static, passive portrait of nature and place, I am invested in writing that embodies living ecologies and histories, poetry that necessitates deep attention, specificity, humility, justice, and action. I am currently focused on two landscapes in my work that I plan to continue work on during my fellowship period. First, I plan to continue my poetry manuscript-in-progress on collisions of class within manufactured ecologies, braiding my experience as a life-long retail worker from a low-income background with a sense of scientific observation. Second, I plan on advancing my writing on the Lake Superior region by beginning a lyric essay manuscript, tracing the Ojibwe migration path along the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river areas. Through this nascent project, I want to explore what it means to be a mixed white & Ojibwe traveler through prose, inviting in periods of research, interview, and lyric immersion.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use the fellowship term to explore possibilities for layering sound, integrating graphics and text into literary readings, and imagining new possibilities for venues where literary readings take place. I am interested in how technology and other approaches can expand access to live performance. My interests are inspired by a desire to connect with audiences in a more meaningful way and by my recent work focused on thinking about the potential uses for paper and the physical page.

Simone LeClaire is a queer woman director and editor whose work spans genres from parabolic feminist fairy tales to grunge comedies. Her seven narrative shorts have screened at over 30 festivals around the midwest and world, including the Indianapolis LGBT Festival, the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Fest, and Festival de films féministes de Montréal. Their latest film Bathroom Break received awards for writing, acting, and comedy on its festival circuit before being distributed by Tello Films in February 2022. LeClaire has edited three narrative features, including the hit queer romcom Merry & Gay, and edited the 2018 Our Space is Spoken For documentary. Locally, she has been interviewed on Film in Minnesota and Where To From Here, and invited to teach her approach to life-affirming filmmaking at Moonplay Cinema, Film North, and various educational institutions. LeClaire’s creative lineage also includes countless childhood movies made with her sister in northern Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My most effective films to date have all used a minimalist, observational cinematography, ultimately inspired by the Danish filmmaking approach of the Dogme 95 manifesto. But, there’s an ongoing tension in my practice between an attraction to the intimacy and organic spontaneity that minimal crews can achieve, and my love for highly composed imagery and elaborate production design. I aspire to now explore more expansive visuals by working with more complex camera and lighting setups and experienced production crews. The fellowship presents the space to take all that I’ve learned and taught myself in my eight years of short-form, indie film directing, and support my transition to more elaborate production processes, longer-form storytelling, and new-to-me genres. Current works-in-progress include two narrative shorts and a documentary feature in post-production, and my debut narrative feature, Pat & Glo Save the World (Sort Of), a queer, sci-fi rom-com set 100 years in the future.

Yo-Yo Lin (林友友) is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary artist who explores the possibilities for self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. She often uses animation, live performance, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.” Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care.

Refusing the Western medicalization of the crip body, she works towards a “soft data” archive that holds space for illness in its wholeness. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives.

Lin was a 2019 artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and a 2020 Open Call recipient for the Shed. She teaches at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns fellow. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Over the years of building my interdisciplinary art practice, I have committed myself to making work that expands dominant notions of what filmmaking, technology, or space-making can be. Some of the questions I asked and continue to ask include: How do we tell cinematic stories spatially, physically and virtually? Can we reclaim data-gathering as daily practice for soft knowledge? What are the ways we can reframe the body as a technology? How do we build care and community-building into how we work with and develop technology? I am interested in how we continue to practice ways of working with technology that deepens and strengthens our relationship to our bodies, our communities, and the earth. This fellowship will allow me to expand and deepen my artistic practice in a research-oriented manner while simultaneously offering me the space to continue to create care-focused, tech-driven performances, tools, and spaces with and for disabled, chronically ill, POC communities.

A.P. Looze is a transgender multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practice supports them to turn toward the history of pain in their family and this nation in order to end lineages of violence and open up portals to love. Their original solo performances have included The Ways I Wished to Love Her at Pillsbury House + Theater, Foray Softly at The Guthrie, The Grief Experiments through 20% Theatre Company, A Dream of Brightness at the Red Eye Theater, God Made Me Crooked at Queertopia, and Finding Loaded Guns in Weird Places at Pleasure Rebel. Their tennis-inspired music video musical C’Mon Baby Stroke It premiered at Trylon Cinema in 2021. They were a 2016 20% Theatre Q-Stage Fellow, a 2018 Pillsbury House + Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Northern Lights Artist on the Verge Fellow, and part of the 2022 Red Eye Theater Isolated Acts Cohort.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use this fellowship to deepen my contemplative practice and continue to explore decoloniality, making interdisciplinary work inspired by spiritual/economic/political liberation. For the past ten years, I have explored questions of embodiment as a trans person. As my gender’s boundaries dissolve, I am more interested in surrendering to the vast pluriverse of non-human wisdom. This fellowship will support my work with the Akashic Records, a realm of consciousness that holds unconditional love for all souls. The Records have provided insights through music, poetic words, and imagery that I have integrated into recent performance and installation work. I will continue to open the Records, holding pressing questions related to whiteness, embodiment and decoloniality. I will follow the inspiration of what emerges to create new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with my creative process and spiritual explorations.

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a Filipino American artist, writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work and research have revolved around an interdisciplinary reflection on how legacies of empire inform social and economic value systems. She received her MFA through both the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work has been included in new media festivals and galleries including Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Initial Public Offering, Reddit, online (2019); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Meitzler’s work has received support from HarvestWorks, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work relates Filipino etiological myths to a sense of personal, economic and historical rupture. As the climate crisis continues to grow, I use the mythic, origin stories of tropical storms as a way to connect to the unresolved moments of the past and powerfully propel beyond them. A lot of the writing and storytelling that I do, interweaves colonial history and this climatic turbulence alongside my own personal experiences, which is as someone who grew up between the tension of two cultures deeply defined by Americanism. Currently, I am working on an animation that follows three Filipino nurses, inspired by my mother and her community, as they engage with Philippine etiological myths of earthquakes as a response to the embodiment of colonial debt.

Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. Her artistic practice spans mediums and genres, engaging dance, music, physical and scripted theatre, design, burlesque, literature, construction, performance, theory, composition, devising, and the culinary arts. Her work has historically been concerned with identity, simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and expectations of “truth” in queer performance. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a leading QTGNC focused arts organism in the Twin Cities. Her original work as been presented by Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening), Red Eye Theater (NW4W), Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, Northern Spark, Right Here Showcase, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Wanderlust Productions, and 20% Theatre Company, where she worked in many capacities from 2015 to 2021, ultimately serving as Artistic Director in its final years. She is a 2019 mentee of The National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theatre/Art2Action), and a member of Actor’s Equity.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am arriving at this fellowship in my 31st year. Virgo Sun, Gemini Moon. Venus in Libra, Mars in Cancer. I know so much of Transition and am a new Student of Time. Southern child, eldest cousin. Self-named, Wed, I feed. Without apology, a new score. Autonomous entrances and exits. Available to possession and exorcism, avoidant of martyrdom and apotheosis. Curbed censor, encouraged teacher. Naming, creating, re-naming, re-creating. Of course there will be New Works Multi-Cross-Trans-Inter-Extra Disciplinary (eek). Of course the humor the wink the glint the cheek the nod the glance the smile the ode homage collage décolletage. An Icon in the making, hunny. Always gild the lily, why else be Gay? I'm over joy resistance rage. Down with meaning and conjuring and proselytizing didactics. Here’s to the dilettante the liar the raccoon the conduit the Transsexual aesthete. The charlatan dances and still we clap laugh cry eat come. It’s all in the making every second even now.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested and compelled by communal memory, tall tales, and Black expressions of gender and divergence. Inspired by the Black American diaspora to which I belong, I am working on a book about the intersection of family, American surveillance, and Black radical faith. Following the life and lineage of protagonist Alphonso–descendant of a slave and slave owner in a small cotton town of Edgefield North Carolina–as he evolves and shape-shifts from petty criminal and womanizer to sober foot soldier and eventual minister of Islamic Temple No. 1 in New York City. BORN AGAIN is biomythography exploring the consequences of melanin, locomotion, and generational curses.

(b. Costa Rica) Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Visually Impaired choreographer and Disability advocate based in NYC. His work traces the ideological narratives contained in immigrant and disabled bodies. Nunez is a Dance/USA Fellow 2022, a Princeton University Arts Fellow 2022, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 2018. His performances have been presented by The Joyce Theater, The Brooklyn Museum-The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. He has held residencies at Danspace Project, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2020, Núñez was invited by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs to share his story as a disabled and formally undocumented immigrant during Immigrant Heritage Week. Núñez received his green card in 2018 and continues to be an advocate for undocumented, disabled immigrants.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My practice comprises three elements: physicality (named vortex), sound and audio description.

Vortex centers movement in circular motion supported by diaphragmatic breathing. It is born out of the principle that the human body is 70% water and has a 95% level of oxygen. By moving the body in circles, water and air rotate, causing internal whirlwinds and tornadoes that renew energy. Vortex teaches principles of proprioception to Visually Impaired dancers using the sagittal, transverse and frontal planes safely.

Music and sound are created with a frequency of 432 Hz, known as the frequency of the universe. It allows the body to re energize through the power of the creative source.

My Audio Description is manifested through storytelling, song and poetry as a form of resistance, preservation, cultural continuity, and perseverance of my indigenous identity.

Margaret Ogas is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in the Twin Cities. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance and informed by Chicana cultural sensibilities, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Ogas has been presented by the Walker Art Center, Candy Box Dance Festival, Red Eye Theater, Center for Performing Arts, FD13, Mizna, Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio and others. She was awarded a 2022 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre.

Margaret is a core collaborator and performer with the Taja Will Ensemble. She has also performed for Laurie Van Weiren, Chris Schlicting, Sequoia Hauck and others. Margaret is a teaching artist, specializing in modern technique, improvisation, and composition. She is currently a youth instructor at Young Dance. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a dancer and improviser who is interested in the way choreography can be used to tell stories and traverse the messy, layered nature of identity.

My dances weave personal narrative and thoughtful aesthetic choices to connect with audiences through humor and heartfelt storytelling, intentionally blending the everyday with the surreal. I am inspired by the political spirit of the Chicano art movement and the vibrancy of communities I find myself within and around.

During this fellowship, I will root into my choreographic practice, taking time to develop my voice and experiment in interdisciplinary modes. I will build on my connections with BIPOC and queer artists to develop and present a new ensemble work.

Valerie Oliveiro is a dance and performance maker based in the Twin Cities and from Singapore. While they currently engage movement as their primary motor for expression, they also engage in other expressions, such as design, writing, drawing and photography, as generative, complexly relational proposals. Their choreographic work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery and Bryant Lake Bowl and Cowles Center and has been supported by Minnesota State Arts Board, MRAC, Jerome Foundation and MAP Fund. Currently, they are a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater, ensemble member at Lighting Rod (QTBIPOC-led performance organism) and co-run a small performance incubator MOVO SPACE.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Valerie is creating new work in 2023/2024 and will foreground their own artistic research in North America and Asia.

MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium.

A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College CUNY. www.mxoops.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

During this fellowship I will develop UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL, a party and multimedia performance that uses the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture to reveal how cognitive bias connects us all. This piece tells the story of humanity coming to grips with our collective inheritance, a ramshackle meshwork of cognitive processes evolved to survive, not for self-awareness. An interdisciplinary approach invites the audience to meditate on what might be unfinished about human cognition and how these biases keep us from building a better world together.

With support from the National Performance Network Creation Fun, this work will be developed in the Live Feed Residency at New York Live Arts toward a Spring 2024 premiere. Additionally, this fellowship period will incubate [NONFATAL_ERROR], a multimedia ensemble of artists engaged in collaborative world-building. Ensemble members work in dance, new media, interactive video projection design, sound design, voice, and costume, fashion, sculpture and more. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming.

Atim Opoka is a Ugandan-American songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist who fuses afro-pop and hip-hop while embracing the power of transformative story-telling. She is most recently a 2021 recipient of a Waters Grant as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Opoka has performed original works at the Stone Arch Bridge Festival and Powderhorn Park Festival. She has a BA in Vocal Performance from McNally Smith College of Music.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We live in a society that is fast paced, go and grab. Looking for the next trend or 7 sec distraction or viral video with no regard to the cost or impact, positive or negative. I believe art is a holistic experience that requires the full body mentally, physically and spiritually. It doesn't judge, but asks for your time and space, modeling and shaping all of our experiences to get us where we are right now. I am growing, and I will continue to grow, and not only feed my garden, but I will add and water those who let me, and one day I will bloom, when I oughta bloom.

Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Phingbodhipakkiya is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has explored microscopic universes, familial memories, and the power of collective action, revealing the often unseen depth, resilience and beauty of marginalized communities. Her work has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, highway tunnels, subway corridors, and on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2020-2021, she was artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and the Guardian and is held in permanent collections at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My artistic practice is about finding joy and belonging even in the face of grief and injustice, and rallying communities to imagine a shared future we can’t yet see. Through defiant storytelling, my work brings forth colors, patterns, textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices that need to be heard. Through listening and partnership, I seek to expand the narrative around the AAPI community and other communities of color and fighting to reveal the unseen labor of women.

As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will continue creating participatory works that invite audiences to commune, connect and lay down their burdens—spaces of healing and wonder that allow us to tell our stories and imagine new pathways forward.

Upcoming projects include a civic practice residency with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and a public art series focused on the prevention of domestic violence with the Asian Women’s Shelter.

Lela Pierce grew up in rural MniSota Makoce, the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She maintains artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Pierce has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). Her work has been presented internationally in both Sweden and India as well as in the Twin Cities at venues including Bockley Gallery, SOOVAC, Franconia Sculpture Park, Walker Art Center, and the Soap Factory. Pierce holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN—where she currently teaches sculpture—and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The persistent practice of imagining transformation is vital for seekers of freedom.

Oscillating between 2D, 3D, and 4D (sonic/performance/film), I currently create spaces, images and situations that expand “inbetweenness,” borders and places of transition. Through a mapping of internal and external experiences of sensation of the corporeal body, I attempt to map vehicles of life force and interconnected processes of transformation. My current body of work is deeply influenced by the concept of “Sankofa,” moving forward with knowledge of the past.

Through practice and attention, I speak a personal decolonized aesthetic language—centering ancestral connections, the 5 elements of nature and feminist sentiments.

The Narcotix is a West African art-folk band based in Brooklyn, with feathers all over. It is many-limbed and limber, a five-piece with voices, guitars, bass, keys and drum set. Reverb-laden vocals blur and swell in dissonant intervals, buoyed by a riverbed of shimmering Congolese guitar riffs, thumping P-bass, cavernous synths and traphouse hi-hats. The result of this band's cohesion is a compelling musical statement whose relationship to identity is as fraught, complex and ever-changing as anything else in this time.

The rave reception of the debut EP Mommy Issues, released in summer 2021, paved the way for The Narcotix to take their musical compositions to new heights. With this fuel, composers/instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas have reimagined the boundaries with which to push the musical landscapes usually bound by the automatic resignation of conformity. With the instrumental prowess of Adam Turay (rhythm guitar), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Matt Bent (drums), Foinchas and Quansah have amassed the Will, and now means, to harness the creative force and pour it into their upcoming debut album, Dying.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We’re currently working on completing our debut album, a 10-song homage to the practice of exercising unwavering vulnerability whilst creating. The recording process for the album began on September 24, 2022. So far we’ve recorded the foundations of each song and we plan to incorporate the full instrumentation and production elements over the next few months. Following the release of the album, we’d like to plan a series of concerts and a proper US tour. During the fellowship, we are especially keen to sharpen our technical skills through various lessons and workshops. This upskilling will serve as a vehicle through which we will be able to explore broadening our live performances. For example, we’d like to expand on live arrangements by adding elements of improvisation where appropriate. Studying composition will enable us to incorporate additional instrumentalists such as horns, strings, and percussion players.