Past
Grantees

Leslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and artmaking is both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling. Her life-sized oil paintings are inspired by community and personal experiences and often serve as monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Barlow is a recipient of the 2025 and 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships, and the 2021–23 Jerome Hill Fellowship. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow is an assistant professor of drawing and painting at the University of Minnesota and supports emerging artists as a part of the Public Functionary team. Barlow is also the founder of ConFluence, a BIPOC arts and science fiction convention, and co-founder of Creatives After Curfew, a mural collective.

During her residency, Barlow looks forward to spending her time in cross-disciplinary exchange with the Camargo community while working on Us, Becoming, a project examining Black cosplay and fandom as a site of world-building, alchemy and embodiment, and collective imagination. She plans to engage with local fandom communities, attend regional multi-fandom events, and conduct archival research to inform an upcoming exhibition.

Kayla Hamilton is a Leo Sun with Aquarius Rising and Moon, which means she’s equal parts bold dreamer and perpetual draft-in-progress. A Bronx-based choreographer, educator, and Disability Futures Fellow, Hamilton’s choreography has been seen at The Shed, Gibney, Gibney, and New York Live Arts. She co-directs Angela’s Pulse’s Dancing While Black program, directs the Access. Movement. Play Residency at Movement Research, and co-facilitates How We Move, a summer dance intensive centering disabled artists. Her legs are her favorite body part (flat feet and all), and her guilty pleasure is protein coffee before a long rehearsal. When she’s not in the studio, you’ll find her watching the WNBA—New York Liberty first, Indiana Fever close behind. She grew up in Texarkana, TX, in a CME church, and those roots continue to shape her work’s rhythm and care. Hamilton is also on a journey of healing her inner child through therapy, TikTok wisdom, and a growing collection of self-help books. She has consulted for Mellon Foundation and New York Live Arts, danced with Kinetic Light and Gesel Mason and is still figuring out how to get out of her own way.

While at Camargo, Hamilton will explore more deeply the relationship between access and artistry within her practice as a Black Disabled choreographer. This residency offers her the opportunity to step into a slower, more spacious mode of inquiry, translating years of lived experience and artistic labor into writing and moving from constant “doing” toward reflection, synthesis, and articulation. Through a daily writing practice, she will document these evolving processes and ways of being in order to better understand the larger landscape of what the work is becoming—not only what is being made, but what is being built.

Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker working across experimental documentary, performance, and installation. Her practice examines invisible mechanisms of empire, tracing how ideology materializes through law, infrastructure, and theology. Working with video, sound, archival research, and alternative mapping, she translates these systems into visual and narrative forms grounded in lived experience across human and more-than-human worlds alike. Rooted in collaboration, pedagogy, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, her work aims to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries. Keren’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum, NY; The James Gallery, NY; MOCA Tucson, AZ; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, among others. She is a 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2022 Artadia Award recipient and has received support from the Desert Humanities Institute and the Leonardo–ASU Planetary Health Research Seed Grant at Arizona State University for her current research. She is an inaugural artist-in-residence at ASU’s Water Institute, where she collaborates with hydrologists, climate scientists, and students.

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Keren will focus on her current in-progress trilogy, Water/Power, examining the entanglements of water infrastructures, ecologies, and colonial histories across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Tracing desalination technologies as they circulate between regions, the project surfaces ecological consequences, political stakes, privatization, and the militarized and corporate powers embedded in the techno-utopian desire to “drink the sea.”

Halee Kirkwood’s debut poetry collection, To Think of a Match, is forthcoming with Curbstone Press in March 2027. They were a 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, an inaugural and returning Indigenous Nations Poets fellow, a Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Individuals grant recipient, and a 2019 Loft Mentor Series Fellow. Kirkwood was the recipient of the 2022 James Welch Poetry Prize for Indigenous Poets, published with Poetry Northwest. Kirkwood is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

During their residency, Kirkwood plans to study the plot and structure of historical fiction novels while considering the long and complex economic relationship between Great Lakes Native nations and France intertwined with the involvement of Native code talkers in the world wars. Kirkwood will also continue their work investigating the cultures, identities, and so-called “vice-zones” of port towns, feeling for similarities and differences between the towns of Provence and their hometown of Superior, Wisconsin.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a Brooklyn-based dance artist, choreographer, and educator. Originally from Albany, New York, he is a 2025 graduate of the DAS Choreography master’s program in Amsterdam and holds a BFA from The College at Brockport. His choreographic practice moves between refined visuals and imagined realities. He investigates how the social codes of place, identity, and encounter shape movement, perception, and presence. His work guides audiences through sensory worlds where choreographic gestures operate as character, image, and lived memory. Lloyd has collaborated with and performed for artists including Beth Gill, Netta Yerushalmy, Tere O’Connor, David Dorfman Dance, Monica Bill Barnes, Donna Uchizono, Joanna Kotze, and more. His work has been presented by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, and the Center for Performance Research. His teaching practice has brought him to the American Dance Festival, Montclair State University, Movement Research, University of the Arts, Rutgers University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Mark Morris Dance Center.

During his Camargo residency, Lloyd will pursue a period of slow, place-responsive research, combining reading, writing, improvisation, and site-based movement studies in Cassis and Marseille. This project extends a practice-based research trajectory that integrates critical theory and embodied improvisation, positioning choreography as a mode of knowledge production. Through video documentation, daily scores, and reflective writing, he aims to seed future choreographic work grounded in quietude, opacity, and the poetics of environment.

Anaïs Maviel is an artist, vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist dedicated to translating spiritual concepts to sensory experiences, using sound as medicine & alchemy. With traditional and experimental approaches, her works investigate the power of sound to shape reality and emphasize the relevance of cultural hybridity. She navigates song, choral, instrumental, orchestral music and staging with a strong connection to cosmologies of sound and speech rooted in oral traditions such as mantra and ring shout. Recent collaborators across mediums include Alarm Will Sound, Sean Webley, The Rhythm Method, Nene Humphrey & Aruán Ortiz. Maviel facilitates vocal liberation with a focus on the body, its environmental, archetypal and cosmic resonances. Both of Maviel’s solo albums received international acclaim; among the generous press shout outs, Jazz Right Now has called her a “unique aesthetic visionary.”

During her residency, she will study and experiment with healing, spirituality and embodiment through sound, to bridge esoteric knowledge such as Vedic cosmology of sound, nada yoga (yoga of sound), psychoacoustics and meditation with composition tools such as just intonation, sound design, rhythm and harmony as they relate to sacred geometry.

Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe homeland (Minneapolis). Her work invokes poetics and experiences re-membered through research, play, and ancestral dreaming to imagine liberated futures shaped by sweetness, healing, and the sacred. Her debut novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. Her children’s book, Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers? was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023. She is the 2025–2026 poet laureate of Minneapolis and a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She wrote, directed, and co-produced the poetic circus-play There Are Other Worlds. In 2021, she served as librettist for The Cartography Project at the Kennedy Center, writing about Minneapolis and the ancestor George Floyd. As a filmmaker, she directed Sweetness of Wild, a poetic episodic web series and Erotics of Abolition, which she also performed in centering the embodied erotic for Black liberation. Petrus’ work is steeped in abolitionist dreaming, ancestral listening, and Black queer feminist poetics.

For her Camargo residency, Petrus will be researching a body of literary and performance works entitled Erotics of Abolition. She will research how loving her body, nature as medicine, ancestral conversations, queer motherhood, creative resistance, kink as revolutionary self-love, and abolitionist relationship practices are pathways to this decolonial framework. She will be spending a lot of time in creative rituals and practice with her Caribbean ancestors and tapping into their rootedness, their alchemy of land, and how living slower and by the sea is a way to return to the sacred.

Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist, researcher and robotics maker. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by The New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by WIRED Magazine. He is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2023–2025 for combined artistic fields. He was a resident at The Kitchen in 2021. He is recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts/ Wavefarm Media Arts Assistance Fund, Jerome Foundation/Harvestworks New Works Commission, and Knockdown Center (NYC) residency for time-based art. He has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Roulette Intermedium, Levitation Festival, Museum of Contemporary art of Lima and Central Park Summerstage Fania Records 50th anniversary. His album Roza Cruz with his Latin American experimental project La Mecánica Popular was named one of the best Latin American albums of the decade by Zona Sucia and Estereofonía. Featured at CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Daily News, and NPR. He holds a PhD from NYU on new integrations of body, mind and technology through ritual and rhythm. He published the book Fusión: a soundtrack for Peru.

During the Jerome@Camargo Residency, Rozas will continue his research into how our relationship with technology has existed since the dawn of human history, and how art has served as a critical space for transforming technology into a means of expanding our notions of the body, the mind, and community.

Anna Samo is a director, animator, and process driven artist. She carved out her path as independent filmmaker notable for the playful use of materials and analog animation techniques. Samo sees animation as a way to think with her hands in order to process what happens outside of the studio walls. Her work explores the human condition and questions the place and responsibilities of the artist in a world troubled by disasters and violence. Anna’s award-winning short films are screened around the globe at film festivals and spark conversations in classrooms as part of educational programs. She is one the co-founders of Animation Speak/Easy a bi-monthly screening and discussion series in Brooklyn, New York celebrating the art of animation. Anna has received fellowships from the Toepfer Stiftung, the Rotary Foundation, and Jerome Foundation.

During her residency at Camargo, Samo plans to focus on developing her new animated experimental sci-fi short The Friend. The project examines the hopes, dreams, and fears of humans in relation to Artificial Intelligence and questions how our biological nature and self-consciousness inform our experience of the world around us.

Witt Siasoco is a visual artist using public space to catalyze civic dialogue and collective action. For 25 years, he has worked at the intersection of the arts and civic life as a community-based artist, organizer, and educator. His work arises from a belief that art lives everywhere—in neighborhoods, on streets, where people live and work—and is most impactful when created in collaboration with local people and placed and performed in public. His creative process channels person-to-person conversations around community issues into hybrid work that blends painting and drawing, design, sculpture, and/or site-specific installation.

During his time at Camargo, Siasoco will research play in public space, in particular, the formal and informal rules that guide it. His residency will consist of field visits to local plazas, skateparks, and playgrounds; academic research about plaza architecture, civic space, and placemaking; and experiments with technical aspects of printmaking outside of a studio environment.

So + Bex are best friends who first met in 2015, who craft immersive performances that feel like a cross between stand up comedy, campfire conversation, and the best kind of history lesson. Both alumni of EMERGENYC—the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program, So and Bex’s first performance together was a part of a partnership with Art in Odd Places. They began developing their collaborative artistic vocabulary at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), first as participants in the Upstart Program 2017, Space Grantees 2018, and then as Artists in Residence (2019-21). They were selected to show work at The Brick’s Trans Theatre Festival in July 2018, Spring 2019 BRIClab residents, and were featured at the Highline’s Out of Line series in July 2019. As solo artists, they have been invited to present at theaters, galleries, and universities in Singapore and the U.S., including La MaMa, the National Asian American Theater Company, and 3LD. So + Bex were 2021–22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellows and are 2024 MAP Fund Grantees.

At the Camargo Residency, So and Bex are thrilled to have the opportunity to dive deeper into their research for REUNION, their full-length, live performance styled as a historical thriller.

Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator based in Minneapolis. Through diverse methodologies that include archival research, collage, drawing, writing, and installation, Turner engages histories of labor, fascism, and resistance, with a particular focus on the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike in Minneapolis. Solo exhibitions include Voters in Revolt at Hair+Nails, Pedagogy and Propaganda at The Perlman Teaching Museum, and Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum. Turner was a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2024 Visual Artist Grant recipient from the Harpo Foundation. His work has been collected by the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. He is the author of numerous essays published by Labor Art Review, Art Papers, MnArtists, HAIRandNAILS, TEMP, and Headlands Center for the Arts.

At Camargo, Turner will expand his ongoing inquiry into how aesthetic forms circulate ideology by studying histories of fascist collaboration and resistance in Cassis and Marseille during World War II. Alongside this research, Turner will make reflective drawings contemplating the temporal distance since Nazi occupation and the accelerating force of fascism in the United States today.

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American artist and the founder and director of Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop, which supports Native, Black, and IPOC in creating puppet theater. She loves sharing joy through music and transporting people to other worlds through puppetry/stop motion and the magic that comes with bringing a puppet to life.

During her Jerome@Camargo residency, Wanduragala will be experimenting with her modular synths as sound design for her puppet theater and films as well as exploring the manipulation of puppets herself. (In her previous work, she has always directed others in performing her puppets). She’s excited to see how these two aspects might influence each other.

Charlie Ainsworth is a Deaf filmmaker, writer, and founder of Angry Deaf People, an indie company committed to expanding deaf narratives on screen. Since 2018, he has written nine short films, directing six, with his work—notably How to Caption Your Movie and Dinner Table Syndrome—widely recognized in Deaf film communities worldwide.

Ainsworth has an MFA in screenwriting from the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts. He blends the Deaf experience, social critique, and the absurd in his works. His next project, The Road South, explores how sometimes the Deaf experience can become quite absurd, especially in the eyes of the norm.

He remains committed to growing the next wave of Deaf Cinema. Not just writing and directing but ensuring that untold Deaf stories are produced, seen, and… oh, god. I’m about to drop a cliche… heard.

Project Statement

When a deaf mortician is asked to embalm her estranged grandmother, she’s pulled back into the orbit of the hearing family she was never truly part of. The Road South explores the divide between deaf and hearing relatives caused by a lifetime of language barriers.

Siji Awoyinka is an award-winning multidisciplinary aural and visual storyteller. Born in London to Nigerian parents, he spent much of his early childhood in Lagos and London before moving to New York to further pursue his creative ambitions. His documentary feature film, Elder’s Corner, premiered at Sheffield Docs, UK, DOC NYC, Blackstar Film Festival, HOTDOCS, and went on to win an Ethnomusicology Commendation Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Sounds Feature at Indie Memphis Film Festival (2021). His projects have received funding support from NYSCA, Open Society, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lucius & Eva Eastman Foundation.

Project Statement

Ejire is a feature-length documentary film that explores the mysticism of twins through the power of memory, ritual, restitution, and song. It follows the iconic Lijadu Sisters, a beloved Nigerian musical duo, through the final years of Kehinde’s life and Taiwo's reemergence.

Using archival footage, family pictures, vintage memorabilia, and scenes reenacted and captured on 16mm film, the film seeks to invoke and explore the past, and how memory/alternate memory may act as a catharsis for healing, guidance, and transformation. Ejire serves not only as a tribute to the unique twin connection but also as a broader exploration of identity, loss, and the human desire for wholeness in the face of profound change.

Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator, director, writer, musician, etc. She is the creator of Agoraphilia, a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film Our Bed Is Green, which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide, winning “Best Animation” at the Tacoma Film Festival. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital about mall kiosk owners. Before moving into animation, she created comics, some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Fader, Inverse, and other publications. Her work often focuses on fiddly characters, technology, and perplexing visual minutiae.

Project Statement

Venerations is an animated short film about a religious mother and her very online daughter who independently obsess over two different sets of mysterious human remains: the relics of a beloved virgin Saint and the case file of an unidentified murder victim. Surreal and subtly comic, Venerations reflects on things like mythmaking, materiality, and the strangeness of womanhood.

Julia Chien is a Taiwanese American filmmaker and animator born and raised in suburban Maryland, currently based in Brooklyn. Julia’s films all center lonely, lowly animals. There is something extremely genuine and relatable about being alone at the bottom of a food chain. Her films explore the internal, the textural, and the gooey. Julia’s practice plays with traditional mixed-media animation techniques, live puppetry, and how the two can intersect. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as Animafest Zagreb, Sweaty Eyeballs, Athens Animfest, Animafantasia, and more. Julia recently performed her first theatrical work, a multimedia puppet piece, as an artist-in-residence with the Object Movement Festival at the Center at West Park. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 with a BFA in Film/Animation/Video. She now teaches traditional animation techniques at RISD. She works professionally as a VFX artist and has worked on Emmy Award-winning productions.

Project Statement

My mother grew up on a farm in a small village just outside of Taichung, Taiwan, during the Kuomintang’s takeover of the country. She lived in a big family of four daughters and three sons. Her father, my grandfather, was a stern and often abusive patriarch, but he adored his animals. He kept dogs, pigs, turkeys, and chickens. When my mother was nine, her uncle visited the farm with a gift: a Formosan Rock Macaque in a cage. My grandfather named her Saru. Based on my mother’s true story, her name was SARU is an experimental animated narrative short film using a mixture of ink, paint-on-glass, shadow, and manipulated live-action footage. Through the character of Saru, the film explores the complex family dynamics my mother experienced as a child and still experiences today. Saru spent years caged and chained to my family. She deserves an honorable end to her story.

Safiyah Chiniere is a Jamaican American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She uses film to amplify the stories and voices of people of color, women, femmes, and the LGBTQIA+ community, often disrupting the gender binary and expanding how we see identity on screen. A self-taught filmmaker, New Jersey-born and Virginia Beach-bred, Chiniere grounds her work in the interior lives of these communities and has developed a visual style that moves with care and intention. Chiniere’s short film You Don’t Have to Like Me premiered at NewFest, Frameline, Inside Out, and BFI Flare London and presents a fresh, intimate approach to capturing faces, bodies, and the many expressions of closeness. She slows the pace and magnifies space to make room for vulnerability, authenticity, and catharsis, highlighting people and moments that are often overlooked, dismissed, or delegitimized while maintaining wholehearted and sincere storytelling. 

Project Statement

All For Her is a portrait of a granddaughter’s love and care for her grandmother while she fights to hold on to her own independence and navigate dating as a lesbian woman. The film explores the complexities of caregiving and how it can quietly pull you away from yourself. During COVID, Chiniere cared for her grandmother, who was unexpectedly diagnosed with dementia and passed away silently in 2023, the day after her birthday. That loss moved her to honor her grandmother’s legacy while staying true to the meaning of caretaking and the realities of balancing a social and romantic life.

Many caregivers sacrifice personal dreams to show up for the people we love. This film highlights the resilience and beauty in that choice—the constant push and pull between duty and the need for selfhood. Grounded in queer experience and tender intimacy, the story makes room for stillness. All For Her gives voice to those caring for family while trying to live their own lives and shedding light on the emotional toll caregiving often hides.

Lydia Cornett is a filmmaker, composer and artist. Her work explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression across nonfiction and experimental forms. Her films have screened at festivals such as True/False Film Festival, Camden Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Sheffield DocFest, Slamdance, BAMCinemaFest, Hamptons International Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker in 2023. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, POV Shorts, Vimeo Staff Picks, Nowness, and Paper Magazine.

Cornett has held residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Jacob Burns Film Center, UnionDocs, BRICLab, and Marble House Project. She has received support for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Pulitzer Center, the Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Field of Vision, the Fulbright Program, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Project Statement

The Grain of Voice, Lydia's feature directorial debut, explores the ineffable essence of the human voice and its bodily origins, weaving together portraits of vocalists who blur the boundaries of genre, gender, ability, and technology.

Sekiya Dorsett’s thought-provoking films have won her much praise. The Revival: Women and the Word, which premiered in 2017 and was quickly acquired by Women Make Movies. Dorsett also directed a four-episode documentary series for NBC News titled Stonewall Revolution which is currently on Peacock—an achievement that earned her both a GLAAD Media Award and NLGJA’s Excellence in Digital Journalism accolade. Barnard College named her their inaugural Artemis Rising Foundation Fellow for excellence in non-fiction storytelling. Her most recent film, Caribbean Queen in association with Caribbean Equality Project, addressing LGBTQ stigma in Caribbean communities, premiered at BAM during NewFest 2023, earning both the Audience Award and recognition for her directing. She is a Firelight Media Fellow for 2024–2026. Her films have been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Urbanworld Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Outfest Film Festival.

Project Statement

Amid shifting borders and rising intolerance, a Black lesbian couple from the Caribbean looks back on twenty years of love and longing. As they attempt to become mothers in a country that threatens to erase them, their story becomes a tender, urgent act of resistance. 20 Years of Longing is a personal memory, a collective memory, and an ongoing future. It is an intimate, character-driven documentary that follows a married Black lesbian couple from Haiti and the Bahamas, as they navigate love, immigration, faith, and queer family-making in a country that refuses to fully see us. It is not just a love story. It is a testimony.