Past
Grantees

Olu Famule is a visual artist and filmmaker, co-founder and one of the festival directors of Cinefilmu—a QTBIPOC-centered film festival. He draws on his cultural background as Nigerian American and experience as a cinematographer, video editor, and event organizer to tell stories, mentor emerging artists, and develop innovative ways to bring creatives together.

Famule is also a co-founder of TDM5, a visual arts incubator that supports emerging Black visual artists in releasing their first projects while organizing art and film events that engage the community.

Project Statement

Sister Belonging is a short documentary that follows a group of African women in northern Minnesota and rural Wisconsin and explores their close-knit community amidst the isolating and often hostile Midwest. Blending documentary-style storytelling with an abstract lens and the addition of fictional elements, the film immerses viewers into their world.

Ash Goh Hua is a Singapore-born and raised, New York-based filmmaker. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Goh tells personal stories that reveal the inherently embodied politics of relation, society and culture. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Goh is a 2024 Berlinale Talent and a 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient.

Project Statement

SUBTERRANEA is a short narrative film about Fang Lin, a teenager who does not want to exist. Between her naggy mother, a stifling environment, and a falling out with her best friend, she feels utterly trapped in ennui. Meanwhile, the magic of Singapore’s natural world begins to rumble, threatening to break the levee.

Raven Johnson is a Liberian American filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work explores the realities of Black experiences in predominantly White spaces around the Midwest. Johnson is an assistant professor of Moving Images at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She is a 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow, and a 2022 SFFILM and Kenneth Rainin Fellow. Johnson received her MFA from NYU Tisch and is in development on her debut feature which has already received support from SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Project Statement

Set during the height of Covid-19 and racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd, Ruby: Portrait of a Black Teen in an American Suburb follows the story of Ruby (16), a Liberian American teenager. She copes with her parents’ sudden separation by seeking TikTok fame alongside her best friend, Kiki (16), but when Kiki begins dating a much older man, Ruby resolves to do anything to keep her best friend by her side.

Crystal Kayiza is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. A member of the New Negress Film Society, she is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and the Sundance Ignite Fellowship. Her most recent film, Rest Stop, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the 2023 Jury Prize for Best US Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Crystal is currently in production on her first feature film.

Project Statement

As keepers of one of the oldest Black cemeteries in Mississippi, The Worthy Women of Watkins Street nurture the liminal space between past, present, and future. The Gardeners is a feature non-fiction film that archives the labor of these aging worldbuilders, offering a blueprint to navigate memory, legacy and mortality while revealing the divine spirit residing in their daily lives.

Prakshi Malik is an award-winning filmmaker who works collaboratively to make films that sway our collective imaginations. Raised in Delhi, India, and now based in Minnesota, Malik’s narrative shorts—including Baahar and Embers—have screened at festivals such as the New Orleans Film Festival, PBS Short Film Festival, Jaipur International Film Festival, Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, and the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, among others. Her work has been supported by Austin Film Society, City of Minneapolis and Saint Paul Neighborhood Network. Malik’s background in dance and ensemble theatre influences her empathy as a director and her rhythm as an editor. She holds a BA in Media and Cultural Studies from Macalester College and MFA in Film Production from the University of Texas at Austin.

Project Statement

The Untitled Navigating Faith Project (working title) is an experimental documentary. The film features BIPOC participants who share intimate stories of moving away from their religious upbringings and navigating new paths of faith and belonging. We are often introduced to religion and faith as children from our parents and elders. As we grow up and re-form our worldviews, our relationship with faith can change in profound ways that shifts our connections, celebrations, and ways of being. Weaving together oral history, storytelling, and personal archives with intimate moments ranging from mundane to sacred, the film opens a window onto the experiences of in-betweenness and the evolving nature of identity.

Matt Nadel is a filmmaker and journalist interested in stories about justice, survival, and historical memory. His short documentaries have been distributed by outlets like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and PBS. Matt’s most recent film, Cashing Out (The New Yorker 2025), tells the story of a controversial industry that emerged in the early days of AIDS—and his own unlikely connection to it. Previously, Matt directed An Unlikely Last Resort for Getting Out of Prison, a first-person documentary about clemency released by New York Times Opinion, and CANS Can’t Stand (The New Yorker 2023), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. Matt is from Florida and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Project Statement

In the shadows of the American prison system, a network of self-taught legal warriors, known as jailhouse lawyers, are using the law to dismantle the carceral machine from within. Jailhouse Lawyer, the debut feature documentary from director Matt Nadel, enters this hidden world through the story of Quentin Lewis, a veteran jailhouse lawyer in New York who defends his peers against the abuses of the prison system—and, in the process, offers them hope, protection, and a path to rehabilitation. But even with an extraordinary record of legal victories, there's one case Lewis is still fighting to win: his own. Blending vérité captured in prison, intimate longitudinal interviews, and never-before-digitized archives, Jailhouse Lawyer offers a rare portrait of the hidden figures who, from behind prison walls, are using the law to transform themselves and the system that confines them.

Rodrigo Olivar is a multidisciplinary director from Mexico City, based in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to shining a light on multicultural narratives. He holds a BFA in Media Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana (CDMX) and an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts (New York). For over eight years, he served as Head of Video at Remezcla, the leading Latino media company, where he directed and produced award-winning content. His films have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, NY Latino Film Festival, and Morelia Film Festival, among many others. His latest short, Thank You, Have a Nice Day, won the Max Latino Short Competition. Through his work, Rodrigo explores the intersections of culture, identity, and resilience, crafting visually compelling stories that connect communities and spark dialogue.

Project Statement

We Save Us (El pueblo salva al pueblo) is a feature-length documentary about Indigenous Mexican delivery workers in New York City confronting a wave of violent robberies. With no support from authorities, they draw on the traditions of their hometown to form a civil guard, reclaiming safety and dignity. As their organizing grows, new challenges test their resolve and expand their solidarity, revealing the strength of collective action.

The film blends cinematic vérité with on-body cameras, social media content, and motion graphics to create an immersive portrait of workers who keep New York running yet remain invisible. Supported by Gotham Week Project Market and Tribeca Work-in-Progress, We Save Us reframes narratives of labor, migration, and justice—showing not only the hardships these workers endure, but also the power of community to envision change.

Sara A. Osman is a legal advocate, documentary filmmaker, and cultural practitioner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a co-founder of The Qalanjo Project, a Somali cultural organization and creative arts studio in Minneapolis that promotes cultural production, community archival work, and grassroots social change through the arts. She develops programs that uplift artistry in community; the themes of home, belonging, and cultural preservation are central to her work. Osman is a lifelong community organizer and anti-racism advocate who has worked extensively on migration and human rights issues across multiple regions, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Her legal and creative interests lie at the intersection of cultural and legal frameworks, how policies shape identities and narratives, and how filmmaking can serve as a form of advocacy and resistance. Her artmaking has received support from organizations including NeXt Doc, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, Firelight Media, the City of Minneapolis’ Department of Arts & Cultural Affairs, Mamá Papaya, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Project Statement

When the Sky Mourns With Us is a feature-length experimental documentary film that investigates Somali death culture and grieving practices across space and time. The film examines how communities have honored the dead through precolonial rituals, Islamic burial rites, and the collective traditions that once shaped everyday life. It simultaneously traces the disruptions and adaptations brought by war, displacement, and migration. Through poetry, oral testimony, and intimate observation, the film traces how Somalis honor the dead, carry memory, and navigate loss across generations and geographies. At once elegy and inquiry, the film seeks to explore what endures when mourning is fractured, how rituals evolve and change over time, and what remains when grief is experienced both collectively and in isolation.

Chloe Sarbib is an American and French Algerian DGA filmmaker drawn to characters who get in their own way. She is a 2025 Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Lab fellow whose previous shorts have won Best Student Short at Provincetown Film Festival, Best New York Short at NewFest, and the DGA Student Film Jury Award, and have played many Oscar- and BAFTA-qualifying festivals. She was selected for Tribeca/Chanel’s Through Her Lens program and directed an episode of the CW/Netflix’s In the Dark. An alumna of Yale (BA) and Columbia (MFA), where she won the Zaki Gordon Award for excellence in screenwriting, she’s received support from Cine Qua Non, Saltonstall, Indian Paintbrush, and more. She also studied at La Fémis in Paris and FAMU in Prague. Based in Brooklyn, she teaches at Montclair State University.

Project Statement

Brace Yourself is a dark comedy fiction short film about 15-year-old Mia Boukris, who is going to kill herself… but not until she gets her braces off.

Sally Tran is a NYC-based writer and director, originally from Vietnam and New Zealand. Her work centers on stories of underrepresented communities, often drawing from her Vietnamese roots. She blends scripted and unscripted formats, creating a distinct narrative voice whose tone carries through both story and execution.

Her short Grandma Four Color Cards premiered at SXSW 2025, while her narrative short Don’t (2024) received support from NYCWF, NYFA, MOME, Panavision, and the Vimeo BIPOC Fund, premiering internationally at TIFF. She is in post-production on Still a Go Between and received funding for Love Cycle from NALIP and Netflix. 

Project Statement

Born to Kill: Love, Money, Sin is a raw feature-length mixed media documentary that uncovers the untold stories of Vietnamese refugees in New York City after the fall of Saigon. Confronted with systemic neglect and racial hostility, many were forced to navigate two worlds: one of hard-fought survival and another of crime and violence.

Through the voices of refugees, the film explores the desperate choices that shaped their lives. Some fight for a better future. Others are drawn into the notorious Born to Kill gang, which was founded by fellow refugee David Thai as both a brotherhood and a weapon against a city that treated them as disposable. The mantra Love, Money, Sin became their code, binding them together through loyalty, blood, and sacrifice. The film has also received support from BRIC and the Tribeca Film Institute.

Yasmin Yassin is a filmmaker, photographer, and scientist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her artistic practice explores subcultures and the invisible networks that hold them together. Her storytelling follows the friction—and harmony—between tradition and modern identity, guided by her East African oral-storytelling heritage.

Her directorial debut, Dhaanto, a short documentary on a Somali dance troupe, screened at the 2024 Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival, the Millennium Film Workshop in New York, and internationally in East Africa and Canada, alongside community screenings across the Twin Cities. Yassin recently completed her short film Woman Land and is currently writing her first narrative feature. She was awarded the SPNN Fresh Vantage grant and is a member of FilmNorth. She has directed for Nike and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and has collaborated with Apple, the New York Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and the Walker Art Center.

Project Statement

Call Me Back is a narrative short exploring emerging adulthood and social connection. Sofia is a young twenty-something professional woman. Against the wishes of her culturally traditional family, she is living a fairly mundane and repetitive life alone in a new city. Things begin to change when she receives a voicemail that wasn’t meant for her.

The film explores themes of isolation—how we may sometimes reach for intimacy and belonging in unexpected places. It digs into the concept of para-social relationships and the ways digital spaces can offer both comfort and escape. Call Me Back offers a glimpse into how technology can be used to self-protect, substituting fleeting connections for otherwise more meaningful, and sometimes difficult-to-build, relationships in the real world.

Tarek Abdelqader is a Minneapolis-based composer and musician. He has produced and performed his own work under various monikers and with myriad collaborators, and regularly supports regional and international artists and bands as a drummer. He was a 2018-19 Cedar Commissions awardee and a 2019 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund recipient, which enabled him to travel throughout Palestine for research related to his debut EP, Ramallah, 8/22. Abdelqader also works as an accompanist, composer, and sound designer for dance collectives based in the Twin Cities and New York, including Ananya Dance Theater, Paula Mann, and Limón Dance Company. Most recently, he composed the score for Palestinian-American dance collective Body Watani’s After the Last Red Sky, a dance performance and ritual gathering to hold the weight of—and imagine healing for—the Palestinian sky.

Fellowship Statement

During this fellowship period, I intend to honor my existing commitment to deep instrumental practice while expanding the edges of my artistry. I will write and create with familiar Minneapolis faces and with new collaborations forged in Beirut, Lebanon. I will begin writing with the goal of a 2026 release of my debut album, which will feature many dear collaborators and friends. More concretely, I will continue my work with Body Watani dance collective on After the Last Red Sky, which will tour within the U.S.—and hopefully beyond—in 2025/26. I look forward to continuing my support of artists within and outside of my Midwest ecosystem while giving my own work the time and attention it needs to flourish.

ỌLÁKÌÍTÁN ADÉỌLÁ is a writer and experiential artist working between the lyric, multimedia installation, and theatrical performance. Kìítán’s artistry is in flux with ÌSÈSE of the Yorùbá tradition and continually devoted to storytelling eros and wayward survival. He authored the interactive memoir, Whiskery Squid and the experiential art box, Perfekt Trans~. Kìítán’s work has been exhibited and published in The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Wrong Biennale, Five Myles, NY Art Book Fair, Swiss Art Awards, For Space, Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast Journal, amongst others, and has received support from CUE Art Foundation, Recess Art, the Toni Beauchamp Award, Lucky Risograph, and The School for Poetic Computation.

Fellowship Statement

I dwell with lived experience, poke underneath the hood of time, slice and cut things apart to unravel submerged—historical, bodily, and psychic—realities within. Survival is also laying our stories bare. I am crafting a house—a novel—honouring ancestral thrums, heat and native rhythms. For a verse novel that crawls across generations, striding through time drenched in wild love and grief, it is important to give ear and eyes abundantly to its grunts, where it breaks and desires to be stitched back with crimson and gold streaks. This Fellowship will support my time to drill more into the lyric as a form to animate history and as a poetics of being. Perhaps epics choose us. I’ve had a realtime experience of this. The lyric and I continue to have the most intricate relationship.

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work explores the cybernetic and temporal entanglements within societal dynamics. She aims to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. Aliyu is a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation. Her work has been presented internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design Week (Vienna, Austria), Film at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh, PA), Centre for Heritage, and Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.

Fellowship Statement

I draw upon my body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculptures, videos, installations, virtual environments, publications, archives, and social practice. Grounded in antiracist, decolonial, and feminist critiques of technology, my work situates personal, familial, and ancestral histories within broader sociopolitical frameworks. During the fellowship, I plan to research, conceptualize and build new works that experiment with sculptural and digital media, with an aim to expand the narrative possibilities of my practice.

Katayoun Amjadi is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator, and curator. Her work considers the sociopolitical systems that shape our perceptions of self and other, such as language, religion, gender, politics, and nationalist ideologies. Her art probes relationships: between past and present, tradition and modernity, and individual versus collective identity. Her work simultaneously seeks to spur discussion about our place in the temporal arc and the interwoven roots of our histories. Amjadi holds an MFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her work has been exhibited at Minnesota Museum of American Art, Weisman Art Museum, South Dakota Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center, Beijing Film Academy, and Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts among others. Selected awards include MCAD-Jerome Emerging Artist (2020/2021), Artist Initiative Grants (2015/2019), and Creative Individual Grant (2024) from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Fellowship Statement

My work is essentially a form of social practice based in ceramic objects and installations, with an emphasis on aesthetic clarity and public engagement. Colloquially I am the village potter, the storyteller. I want the stories I tell to resonate, illuminate, inspire or provoke: to cause one to think deeply, see differently, to feel passionately.

I have always been intrigued with the fluidity of ceramics moving between art and craft, the sacred and profane. My work is in constant dialogue within this realm, exploring curios and collectibles, the lost artifact, or forgotten story, consumable goods and souvenirs. I seek to carry the many references of their original voice, and to develop a grammar of objects; to discover the narrative threads that bind local to global, personal to universal. The question always remains: how do I develop a language, and thus tell a story through gathered artifacts?

Calley N. Anderson (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright from Memphis, TN. Her work has been staged at several colleges and 10-minute play festivals around the country, including commissions by the Davidson College Theatre Department and the University of Memphis Department of Theatre and Dance. Anderson is currently a National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Resident Playwright. Her work has been supported by Page 73, SPACE on Ryder Farm/RE Endeavors, American Theatre Group PlayLab, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, MacDowell, Liberation Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, and the Dramatist Guild Foundation. Anderson holds an MFA from New School for Drama and a BA from Davidson College.

Fellowship Statement

Almost everything I do (personally, professionally, and artistically) is inspired by, in service of, and/or a reflection of Southern Black folks. My Memphian-ness is the heartbeat of my work. Even if a particular play is not set in Memphis or the South, both are woven into the work—alive and pulsing in the background because it is my frame of reference for being in this world. I believe it creates an on-ramp for other Southern Black folks: to fully see themselves as the critical part of someone’s journey, the main and supporting characters on someone’s stage, and the audience, whose opinion matters most to at least one person in the world. Like many before me, I hope to use my work not just to build new narratives for Southerners to hold, but also for those beyond our Mason-Dixon to witness, engage with, and take seriously.

Sam Aros-Mitchell (he, him, his) is an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an Indigenous art-maker and scholar, Aros-Mitchell’s work spans the disciplines of choreography, performance, sound/light/scenic design, and embodied writing.  Aros- Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theater from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego/UC Irvine, an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego, and a BFA from UC Santa Barbara. Since 2017,he has worked with Rosy Simas Danse (RSD) as a performer, teacher, and community engagement organizer. He has performed with RSD in Skins (2018), Weave (2019), Simas short film, yödoishëndahgwa’geh (2021), and she lives on the road to war (2022-2024). Aros-Mitchell is currently collaborating with Dante Puleio, Director of Limón Dance in New York City by restaging/reconstructing two original Limón pieces, the Indio solo from Danzas Mexicanas (1939) and “the Deer solo” from The Unsung (1970). This marks a new passage for Aros-Mitchell and for Limón Dance, in sharing the proud lineage of Yaqui ancestry. Aros-Mitchell is a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow.

Fellowship Statement

As a Jerome Fellow, I aim to expand my interdisciplinary practice, rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, to create immersive, contemporary performances that resonate with both ancestral traditions and present-day experiences. With the Fellowship, I plan to develop new works that bridge movement, storytelling, and soundscapes, fostering collaboration with Native and BIPOC artists. Central to my vision is exploring the performance space as a sacred, transformative realm where cultural memory and innovation intersect. The Fellowship will support the creation of a new performance series inspired by Yaqui creation stories, incorporating experimental music and movement workshops with community participants. It will also enable me to refine my technical skills in sound and lighting design, further deepening the impact of my work. By engaging with local and national audiences, I hope to amplify Indigenous excellence in the arts, cultivating a shared space for healing, resistance, and celebration through performance.

Noelle Awadallah نوال )she/her) is a Palestinian-American choreographer, dancer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance alongside Leila Awadallah. For six years (and counting), Awadallah has also been dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre. She holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).  Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. Sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multi-directional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. She has presented work at multiple venues such as Red Eye, University of Minnesota, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, and The Southern Theater. She is the recipient of the 2020 Hinge Arts Residency, a 2023 MOVO Residency, New Works Isolated Acts through Red Eye Theater, and the 2024 Creative Individuals Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Fellowship Statement

Over the next three years, I will be in embodied research concerning the connections between Palestine and South Dakota. I am planning to research Palestinian stories of land, exile, erasure, and displacement to the stolen land I grew up on in South Dakota to where I currently reside in Mni Sota Makoce. I am questioning how these three versions of home converse in birthplace, living place, and roots of origin, while examining principles of Land Back and the Right of Return. My multidisciplinary approach includes site-specific improvisation, writing, dance, and farming explorations. This fellowship will begin my research into farming and dancing side by side, as both laborious and ancestral practices held in the container of Body Watani, with my sister and creative collaborator Leila Awadallah.

Coleen Baik is a Korean American artist and writer based in NYC. Her short films have screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Everyman Cinema in London, and in domestic and international festivals. Her latest film, 엄마 나라 | MOTHER LAND, premiered at Brooklyn Film Festival and is a meditation on loss through animations on a turntable. Her time in North Korea, during a 2015 peace mission now documented in the award-winning Crossings by Mu Films, was a pivotal experience that continues to influence her work through themes of absence, longing, memory, and myth. Baik shares progress from her art studio every two weeks on the-line-between.com, a Substack-featured publication. Her essays have appeared in various serials, including Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. She received a BA in French from Wellesley College; she has no formal training in filmmaking or animation. She is a member of the Korean American Artist Collective.

Fellowship Statement

I currently work in animation, painting, and prose. Visual mediums facilitate connection through ambiguity; verbal mediums do so through clarity. I’m excited to plumb these mechanics in a unified practice during the Fellowship. In storytelling, I've been interested in connecting dots between micros and macros (familial, national; individual, cultural) in the context of my various identities—as Korean, American, and cis-gender woman. I make films because, for one, I believe they make it possible to engage with a general audience, even through such a specific lens. During this Fellowship, I’ll begin working on my next animated short film. I‘m investing in tools such as a downshooter animation stand to explore new filmmaking techniques. I plan to travel for research, and hope to spark collaborations. I look forward to growing in both knowledge and craft with the help of this award.

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist. Her poetry has been published and anthologized in wildness, Interim, and New Letters as the 2023 Winner of the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. She is a 2024 Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). Additionally, she has received fellowships and generous support from New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Kolaj Institute, MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists, Salzburg Summer Academy, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Poets & Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among other honors. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage—a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. Her collages have appeared in Create! Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Southern Cultures, and The BOOOOOOOM Care Art & Photo Book. She has exhibited at LA Zine Fest, Black Zine Fair NYC, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies Ordinary Survival Inaugural Film Festival.

Fellowship Statement

I do Black women’s work. My poetry and collage projects center the lives and experiences of Black women, matrilineage, and ancestors. My practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and I am influenced by beauty, the desert and the cosmos, migration, divination and astrology, archives, Americana, and what remains. My work examines freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Much of my work relies on history as a primary source. My mother, a dark skinned daughter of Texas Juneteenth folk, was born the same week the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Education, and my father was a descendant from one of the original Louisiana Creole families. As a result, I inherited and carry the South with all of its blood, glory, and contradiction. I am grateful that the Fellowship will allow me to work towards my first full length poetry collection, Hoard, and to expand my experimentation and ongoing work with the archive.