Past
Grantees

Oanh Vu (she/her) is a puppeteer, educator, and community organizer. As a second-generation Vietnamese American, she employs humor and the playful art of puppetry to weave narratives centered on healing and social change for her communities. Her latest puppet show, Phantom Loss, follows a cast of multi-generational Vietnamese characters as they navigate the legacies of war and what healing can look like in the wake of historical violence. Oanh has been recognized with grants from the Jim Henson Foundation in 2023 and 2024. She began her puppetry journey with Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop and served as a 2024 Maker Series Artist in Residence at Pillsbury House Theatre. Her work has reached audiences at various venues across the Twin Cities, including In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, Minnesota Opera, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), the Playwrights' Center, and Theater Mu.

Fellowship Statement

I hope to use this Fellowship to support the creation of my next puppet show, which will delve into the impacts of labor and capitalism on Asian Americans, whose value is often measured by their productivity. These damaging perceptions contribute to wage inequality and lead to issues such as overextension and burnout.

Additionally, I am excited about using this Fellowship to better balance my role as an artist with my work as an educator, and community organizer. I wrestle with how to effect tangible changes in people's material conditions. This is a question I am actively exploring and look forward to unpacking further. I find that narrative is a powerful tool to shape our understanding of the world and thus a way to create political change. The puppetry field in America is sorely lacking BIPOC artists, so many of our stories are missing from this artform, despite puppetry having historical global roots. As a Vietnamese American I want to continue creating shows that are unapologetically Vietnamese but generally accessible to non-Vietnamese people.

A. E. Wynter is a Black, Jamaican-descended writer, editor, and curator living in Saint Paul, MN. She has received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and has organized various events throughout the Twin Cities, including readings, writing workshops, and multimedia art exhibits. Wynter was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series and a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency. Her poems have appeared in Torch Literary Arts, West Trade Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Wynter received The Florida Review 2024 Editors’ Award in Poetry, the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Fellowship Statement

As a writer, I explore many themes: family and womanhood, home and spirituality, memory and language, ghosts and genetic inheritance, the dissonance between being Black and American. Recently, I have begun to examine these themes through the lens of the body, or rather, body translation—interrogating emotional, spiritual, and physical scars to create a conversation in which the body talks back. Is body memory our most reliable record keeper? How does a body housing fractured histories become whole? Throughout the Fellowship, I will work on in-progress poetry collections and continue to experiment with existing and (re)imagined forms, finding ways of “bodying” the poem to process personal and communal histories. The goal is to create another language in which to understand the world, the self, and the unseen.

Bren Wyona is a filmmaker born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Southern California. Through hybrid narrative and documentary media, their work explores shifting class landscapes, identity loss, and communal recovery. Wyona’s latest short film, that with which ringing is done, held above, in place—supported by Untitled Filmmaker Organization (UFO) and Zeiss—is a dynamic road trip documentary that investigates her own Diné ancestors and the Indian Child Welfare Act through the stronghold lens of Cowboy and Indian cinema. Wyona is a 2021 Flaherty Fellow, a 2021 Oolite Arts Grant Recipient, and a 2023-2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through a fellowship with the UFO Short Film Lab. They are currently in development for their first feature film, a narrative set in New Mexico and Ireland.

Fellowship Statement

I’d like to continue making films that center the unlearning of fast-gratifying plot trauma. My current projects include a short documentary featuring Indigenous drag queens, Meteorite Shepherds, a narrative about two shepherds from New Mexico and Ireland, and Camping a hybrid road trip film following a group of queer Indigenous legends living in Los Angeles. This Fellowship will be crucial in allowing me resources and time to evolve into long-form practices. As I begin to develop my first feature films, I want to ensure that these practices are in collaboration with Diné elders including group therapies, cast and crew education, and mechanical processes like film development with foraged plant materials. The industry is in dire need of intentional film sets that fight for land protection, collaborative labor, and honorable images.

Or Zubalsky is an artist exploring overlaps between trauma, memory, transformation, and healing. They were previously a resident at Pioneer Works (2023), NEW INC incubator member (2023), and C/Change R&D Lab fellow (2023). Zubalsky’s work has been supported by The New Museum, The Museum of Art and Design, Queens Museum of Art, Rhizome, Eyebeam, Culture Push, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Art Matters, among others. They been developing a trauma-informed approach to making and relating to art through practicing, teaching, peer learning, and organizing. They have made video, performance, and software-based work that unpacks how memory operates, specifically in relation to settler colonialism. Since becoming a parent, Zubalsky has been exploring the inner workings of memory in relation to post-trauma and gender. They live in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn) with their partner and child.

Fellowship Statement

The main subject in my work is the gap in fragmented post-traumatic memory. It is a space of absence and disconnection as well as an opening through which resonance can be felt. In the past years, I made work that recognized the existence of the gap and explored some of its characteristics. Now, I am ready to make work from within it. My experience of post-trauma is such that the mysterious operations of memory can be both terrifying and precious. To aspire to make work from within the gap is to seek an opportunity to channel lightness and ease in response to oppression and harm. Having the support to sustain my practice for three years will help me grow into this work. This support will allow me to move at the rhythms that my body will allow, develop a new visual vocabulary, and document the beauty in the interwoven processes of healing and transition.