Past
Grantees

Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work charts cross-cultural connections and dislocations, while tracing the enmeshed nature of seeing and of being seen. I’m invested in the concept of opacity: the right to be unknowable—and unmarketable—and the implications of being a site of continually shifting contradictions and unstatic experience.

Recently, my poems have been driven by slippages and scramblings in tenses—when the past ruptures into the present, or when the future leaks into the past—and by forms of historical, collective, and personal memory and postmemory that warp, stain, disfigure, and erode.

I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity.

Shen Xin practices empowering alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. Their interests lie in understanding culture on its own terms. Seeing it as an active commitment to the learning, teaching and engaging with relating to places as land, their work opens up to inhabiting the multitudes of the selves through the lens of time. Engaged with moving image, video installation, public event and collective process, Shen Xin imagines and creates affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities.

Xin’s solo presentations include ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) (Swiss Institute, New York, 2022), Brine Lake (A New Body) (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021), Double Feature (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2019), Synthetic Types (Stedelijk Museum, 2019), To Satiate (MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), Warm Spell (ICA, London, 2018), and half-sung, half-spoken (Serpentine Galleries, London, 2017). Their group exhibitions include Language is a River (MUMA, Melbourne, 2021), Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning (Gwangju Biennale, 2021), Sigg Prize (M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2019), Afterimage (Lisson Gallery, London, 2019), and Songs for Sabotage (New Museum Triennial, New York, 2018). They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and held the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam (2018-19).

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I seek to create works that inherit and speak to values concerning culture and ecology. I’d like to develop a body of works that are connected to the role of being a student towards restorative relationship with the land. In these upcoming years, I’d like to learn how to better listen to the unknown and known spaces of one’s multitude, and to become familiar with ways of being accountable to language, image, sound and space. I’d like to affirm both through context of what is spoken and how it is spoken, that the human speech is but a part of what the earth speaks. Through learning and embodying the sensorial affinity within and between languages, I imagine encounters with ways back to the coherence of relations, between human language and ecology. Having worked with translations of many different languages, it is of interest to me to understand the inter-lingual world, where translations between one and others activate the resources of various languages with respect to one another. I’d like to hold languages as soil, and as soil, languages inscribe us into various depths in relation to their expressive vitality through time, to facilitate the relinquishment of language’s human exclusivity.

Alex Bijan Zandi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work explores the social difficulties and enchantments of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Zandi studied creative writing at the Washington University in St. Louis where he received the Howard Nemerov Prize for Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Film/Video at Bard College. Zandi was a 2022 Reykjavík Film Festival Talent Lab fellow and in 2021 participated in the MACRO x The Black List Feature Screenwriter Incubator. His films have been screened internationally at venues such as the Amsterdam International Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award), Abrons Art Center, Knockdown Center, Petzel Gallery, and 15 Orient Gallery. Zandi is currently developing his first narrative feature film, Saffron Threads with Rathaus Films.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work seeks naturalism with fantasy, observation with emotive empathy, narrative logic with poetic enigma. I believe that aesthetic experience is more profound when thinking and feeling is activated both internally and at a critical distance. This mantra reflects my subjectivity as an Iranian-American: the double-consciousness of being a unique individual with desires and flaws, while simultaneously being an “other” projected by a post 9/11 society.

During my fellowship, I will work toward making Saffron Threads. Through the eyes of an Iranian-American teenager, the film chronicles societal crossfire after 9/11 and the rise of the alt-right in suburban Boston. I will also develop a new project that explores the intergenerational trauma stemming from the multiple Iranian Revolutions and the possibility of cultural redemption.

Selwa Abd is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician & designer living in NYC (originally from Morocco). Under the guise of Bergsonist, she uses a variety of media to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism and musique concrète to name a few). Selwa’s extended creative practice uses intuition & fragment-based systems as legitimate and only modi operandi. Through her work, she explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics. She is the founder of the community resource Pick Up The Flow and host of a monthly music show on NTS Radio. In 2020, her first full length album / sonic autobiography: Middle Ouest was released via Optimo Music. She also scored the award winning Moroccan film Jmar by Samy Sidali which is now competing at the 2023 Cesar Awards.

She is a recipient of the SACEM grant (2020), Harvestworks Technology Immersion Program Grant & Fellowship (2022) and the Issue Project Room Residency (2022).

Selwa Abd has shown works at 47 Canal, Fridman Gallery, Boston Museum Of Fine Arts, Center For Performance Research, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, Moogfest, The Brooklyn Film Festival, Meow Wolf & France Televisions to name a few.

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).

Misha collaborated on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. An inaugural Sundance Asian American Fellow, he is also the creator of VICHITRA, a series of shorts including Englandbashi (Ann Arbor Film Festival), The Other Other (Ars Nova), An Anthology of Queer Dreams (Audio Unbound Award finalist), and In Order to Become (Bushwick Starr). Misha has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Fellowships & residencies: NYSCA/NYFA, Fulbright, Hermitage, Kundiman, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, NYTW, Public Theater, Ars Nova, New York Stage and Film, SPACE on Ryder Farm, BRIC, Drama League.

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.

Her recent commissions include Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Amanda Gookin of Forward Music Project, Parhelion trio, Ensemble Ipse, Hypercube, Ensemble mise-en and Popebama among others. Kim’s works were presented at June in Buffalo, Composer’s conference, International Alliance of Women in Music, New York Women Composers Inc. Festival, International double reed society (Japan, Thailand and U.S.), and Audio Trading Manual Festival (Korea) to name a few.

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.

Her films have been recognized by The New Yorker, Vimeo Staff Picks, Ottawa International Animation Festival, GLAS, AFI Docs, and more. She has created work for Vox, Netflix, NPR, Quartz, and Scientific American. She has given talks at the CalArts Experimental Animation program, the Living Room Light Exchange (New York), Bethany Arts Community, and the Light Grey Art Lab Residency.

In her free time, she likes listening to podcasts, looking at vintage clothing, and making websites for friends.

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.

Jiabao is the recipient of numerous awards, including iF Design Award, AACYF 30 Under 30, Falling Walls, NEA, STARTS Prize, Fast Company, Core77, IDSA, A’ Design Award, Webby Award, Cannes World Film Festival Best VR short Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at Ars Electronica, Today Art Museum Biennial, SIGGRAPH, Milan and Dubai Design Week, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Museum, ISEA, Anchorage Museum, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, CHI, Donghu Shan Art Museum, MOOD Museum of Design, Alaska State Museum. Her work has been featured on Fast Company, ArtForum, Business Insider, Bloomberg, CCTV, Yahoo, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, Domus, Yanko Design, Harvard Political Review, The National, Leonardo, and iF World Design Guide.

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.”

In addition to creating contemporary performance work, Stafford competes in the ballroom scene in the categories of hand performance, runway, and new way vogue performance.

Stafford was born in Windsor, Ontario and grew up in Metro Detroit. He is a devoted student of qigong, and can be found either deep in the forest or step-touching on a dim dancefloor.

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.

In her fourth solo album and multimedia project Head Full of Hair, Heart Full of Song, Ms. Threadgill shines a light on hair, adornment and ancestry and the political as well as spiritual implications of race, hair and identity. Using video installations exploring Black hair rituals, interactive poetry fed from a cotton candy machine, hair artists and curated sound, Pyeng sees this album in particular as a digital talisman for young Black women and girls and nonbinary folks and adolescents to use as they move through the world.

Currently Ms. Threadgill is writing her first book, a mixed-genre auto-biographical voice chronicle, that is slated to be published in the spring of 2023.

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.