Past
Grantees

Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg, workshop facilitator, and activist. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (2016), queers Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Selected by Bhanu Kapil, Andrea’s debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) is a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. Andrea has toured with Sister Spit in 2018 and has performed at RADAR, The Poetry Project, The STUD, Basilica Soundscape, TransVisionaries, Southern Exposure, Counterpulse, & Radius for Arab-American Writers. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). Chosen by Simone White, Andrea’s second book, Villainy (Nightboat Books, 2021) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. Villainy was a 2022 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a Relentless Award, Mark O’Donnell Prize, Jonathan Larson Grant, and Princess Grace Award winning writer and director. Misha was an inaugural Project Number One Artist at Soho Rep, where he is directing the world premiere of his play, Public Obscenities. Recent works include: SPEECH (Philly Fringe); Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop); MukhAgni (Under the Radar).

nicHi douglas is a Brooklyn-based artist, educator, activist and 2021 Princess Grace Award winner. You can refer to her/him/them/us using any pronoun said with Respect. They have developed original theater work at The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, New Victory, Lincoln Center, Long Wharf, Pig Iron, Denver Center, and Berkeley Rep, among others. nicHi has been commissioned by Mimi Lien & Itohan Edoloyi to create a social sculpture on Lincoln Center's campus for Spring/Summer 2023. nicHi is adjunct faculty at NYU/Tisch and guest lectures at Yale School of Drama. Their website:  www.mynameisnichi.com

Amber Fares is an award-winning director/producer. Her directing debut, SPEED SISTERS (2015), won the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Adelaide Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Irish Film Institute Doc Fest and Best Documentary at the Vail Film Festival. Amber also co-directed Emmy Award nominated Convergence: Courage in Crisis (2021), a Netflix production, with director Orlando Von Einsiedel. She co-produced and was the cinematographer on the Peabody award-winning documentary The Judge (2017). Additionally, she was a cinematographer on Boycott (2021), Field Director and Cinematographer on And She Could Be Next (PBS 2020), a Supervising Producer on the National Geographic doc series America Inside Out with Katie Couric (2018), and Associate Producer on Amazon’s Transparent, season 4. Fares’s short film Reckoning with Laughter can be seen on The New Yorker website. She is currently directing a feature length documentary called Coexistence, My Ass!

Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of choreography. Their practice situates Black and contemporary life through research-based processes, usually generated collaboratively, employing forms of performance, pedagogy and time-based media. In 2019, González was a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” nominee for Breakout Choreographer and their work ZERO (2018) was nominated for Outstanding Production. Their writings have been published by EAR | WAVE | EVENT, Dance/NYC, Regiones:CENTRAL, Movement Research, Contemporaryand, The Creative Independent, Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela's Pulse. They have received fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Art Matters Foundation and have been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Trinidad Performance Institute and Loghaven Artist Residency.

Seong Ae Kim is a Korean-born composer based in New York City. An awardee of New Music USA grant and Composers now/ Rockefeller Brothers fund fellowship, her recent works spanning the past 5 years have been acutely focused on amplifying self-truth and voicing social justice concerns. As an advocate for social justice, she collaborated with fellow artists and ensembles to address and confront today’s practitioners of social injustice in our society – those who oppress others through acts of racial discrimination and immigrant scapegoating.

Marcie LaCerte is a mixed Chinese-American animator based in NYC, originally from Minnesota. She was most recently a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center. She is interested in making personal films that use surrealism and satire to explore themes of identity, memory, and alienation. Beyond film, she is also interested in interactive multimedia art.

As a former journalist and a descendant of immigrants displaced by conflict, Eunice Lau (she, her, hers) is drawn to stories about journey of the immigrant. Her feature documentary Accept the Call, set in Minnesota’s Somali community, explores the impact of injustice and intergenerational trauma. It aired on PBS’s Independent Lens after screening at acclaimed film festivals. Her work is supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, Tribeca Film Institute, Woodstock Film Festival, ITVS, Chicken & Egg Pictures, North Point Institute, YouTube Impact Lab and New York State. A Masters of Fine Arts in film graduate from NYU, Lau was born and raised in Singapore and now lives in Queens on Lenape land. Her latest feature Then They Came For Us is currently in post-production.

Jiabao Li creates works addressing climate change, interspecies co-creation, humane technology, and perceptions. Her mediums include wearable, robot, AR/VR, projection, performance, software, installation. In Jiabao’s TED Talk, she uncovered how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. She is a member of NEW INC Creative Science at the New Museum. Jiabao is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her lab explores the intersection of art, design, technology, and biology. She graduated from Harvard GSD with a Master of Design in Technology with Distinction and thesis award.

Rowan Renee creates deeply researched, immersive installations that confront the aftermath of trauma at the intersection of the criminal legal system, State power and the family. They have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015) and they have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. Since 2019, they have developed collaborative projects for people impacted by the criminal legal system, including “Between the Lines,” a series of art workshops by correspondence with LGBTQ+ people incarcerated in Florida, and “A Common Thread,” a co-weaving and transformative justice studio at Recess Art. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, now touring nationally. Currently, they are developing a site-specific installation about class and memorialization in Green-Wood Cemetery's public lots, where they are the 2022 Artist-in-Residence.

Alex Romania makes multidisciplinary work at the crux of expansive tasks and deteriorating forms. Romania has presented works at Abrons Arts Center, Grace Exhibition Space, BKSD, Panoply Performance Laboratory, ABC No Rio (NYC), Glasshouse ArtLifeLab, Rosekill (NY), the Pillsbury House (Minneapolis), Sub Rosa (Athens), Huerto Roma Verde, Casa Viva (Mexico), Human Resources (LA), Encuentro (Lima), UV Estudios (Buenos Aires). Theyhave held residencies at Movement Research, Chez Bushwick, CPR, Chashama, Tofte Lake Center, SPACE at Ryder Farm, BAX, Old Furnace, MacDowell, and Djerassi. Alex has worked with artists Kathy Westwater, Antonio Ramos, Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez, De Facto Dance, Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Sarah White-Ayón - is collaboratively directing the feature film RECKONING with Stacy Lynn Smith. Alex is releasing films with Daria Faïn and Daniela Fabrizi and – is also part of the bands ‘PęRD!EM’ ‘C LT’, and ‘B!G’ / ‘worm’ / ‘Town Ghost’, with collaborator Hegemonix. They look foward to the 2024 premiere of Face Eaters at The Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC).

Kathryn Savage’s Groundglass: An Essay (Coffee House Press), explores topics of environmental justice and links between pollution and public health. A recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, her work across forms has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. A hybrid writer, recent fiction, poetry, and essays appear in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, Guernica, VQR, World Literature Today, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. She teaches creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Scott Stafford is a dancer, movement director, and teaching artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He believes that expression is vital, and accessible to every individual. His most recent evening-length work, Honey—a dance landscape inspired by club spaces, featuring an original soundscore by Grammy winning producer, David Morales—debuted at the Walker Art Center in 2021. The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “Honey pursued expression with luminous flow and pristine technique - acting as a clarion call to new ways of being.”

Jordan Strafer (b. 1990, Miami) is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in video. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. Strafer’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Housing, New York (2020); SculptureCenter, New York (2020); Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020–21); The New Museum, New York (2021); and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin (2021). Strafer’s video, PEAK HEAVEN LOVE FOREVER (2022), was presented as part of the “Currents” section of the 60th New York Film Festival in 2022. Solo presentations of her work include PUNCHLINE at Participant Inc, New York in 2022, and upcoming exhibition venues include Secession, Vienna, CAMH, Houston, Index, Stockholm, and KINDL, Berlin in 2023.

Pyeng Threadgill is an American vocalist, songwriter, writer, video artist as well as a voice and movement teacher. As a vocalist/performer she creates New Porch Music, a form based on the traditions of Black American Folk, Soul, Jazz and improvisational music. She uses these traditions to create connected conversations whereby audiences may reflect on their own life stories and identities for healing and empowerment.

Yuliya Tsukerman is a Brooklyn-based playwright and puppetmaker working in theater and film. In her puppetry, she investigates the body as a living object through fragmentation, abstraction, and distortion of scale. Her plays have been performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Mana Contemporary, The Brick, and on Governors Island. Violent Mercies, her trilogy of short marionette films, has shown in festivals all over the world. Recently, she's been a playwright-in-residence at New Perspectives Theatre Company, an artist-in-residence at LMCC’s Arts Center and the St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab, a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting, and a Franklin Furnace grantee.

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performances focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Danspace, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Center for Performance Research, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. She was a 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their “25 to Watch” issue. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English from Princeton University.

A one-time $7,000 grant to Theater Mu to support early career artists involvement in the AAPI Generations Conference to be convened virtually and in St. Paul in May 2023.

Janani Balasubramanian (they/them/theirs) is a New York City-based multimedia artist, working across installation, image, live and immersive performance, emerging media, poetry, and prose. Their practice aims to bring insights from contemporary science into usable, playful, divine, and mythic places in everyday life. Balasubramanian is an artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History; 2021-2022 Pew Foundation grantee through the Academy of Natural Sciences; inaugural Collider Fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; 2021-2022 Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellow; and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. Additionally, Balasubramanian was a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and their work has been presented and/or commissioned by dozens of venues across North America and Europe.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (he/him/his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 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. His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and he received a 2018 Jerome Travel and Study grant. His work often concerns his family, his lived experience as a Black man in an anti-Black country, and barriers to living in full community.