Past
Grantees

LaJuné McMillian is a new media artist, and creative technologist making art that integrates performance, virtual reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code’s Weird Reality. McMillian was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and figure skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Abrons Arts Center, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist, I leverage embodied and digital technologies to research and develop various artistic works across platforms (digital, and in person). During this Fellowship I plan to continue my work on The Black Movement Library. A library for Black people to learn about digital technologies in relation to Blackness, our movements, our histories, and our liberation.

Catherine Meier creates drawings, animations, and large-scale installations of earth, sky, and horizon – of vast, open landscapes. Large in scope, her projects develop through time spent deep listening and giving attention to specific locations. She holds a BFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an MFA from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries, and film festivals as well as in the very land that gives rise to her work. Meier’s project Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek, a hand-drawn animation that records the temporality and vastness of the land, was a featured project in Creative Capitals’ online web forum On our Radar. She has held place-oriented residencies at Badlands National Park and Cedar Point Biological Station. Meier received a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board and Arrowhead Regional Arts Council grants, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for graduate study. Meier lives with her family near the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Fellowship Statement

I work to describe in visual artistic form the human encounter with vast, open landscape. My drawings, animations, and installations speak to the intricate, beautiful, and unseen understandings of land and place.

A settler descendent, I grew up in a small town at the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, and for seven years I worked as a truck driver hauling cattle throughout the Great Plains. While my personal and family history is tied to the Plains, my work is not based in nostalgia—it originates from a deep physical, mental, and emotional need to move in and through open land. My interest extends beyond visceral, personal need into a deep and abiding engagement with the history, culture, and environmental concerns of these large but delicate grasslands. I am deeply rooted in rural working class experience, and I find inspiration and guidance from contemporary Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, the study of place and language, and environmental activism.

My work has become the story of time told through the language of place.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City, who focuses on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop and Art Omi. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Centro León Jiménes in the Dominican Republic.

Fellowship Statement

My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.

It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S.A. and the global North, using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a gaze thrust upon me which “others” me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency.

Through various visual disciplines, my work questions historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical nature, questioning ideas projected onto these identities and spaces from a feminist and decolonial position. I’m interested in the body, landscape, discourse, framing, (in)visibility, opacity, hybridity.

Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and multi-dimensional performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on Dakota land in Minneapolis. She employs poetics, the erotic, and experiences re-membered via ancestral dreaming within her writing. She’s written for the stage, including the aerial-poetic-play, There Are Other Worlds and co-wrote the puppet show, Queen with Erik Ehn. She wrote and directed, Sweetness of Wild, an experimental, episodic film project inspired by wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder of performance collective Free Black Dirt with Erin Sharkey. Her writing can be found in several anthologies, including Queer Voices, How I Resist and Pleasure Activism. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist. She is currently writing her second young adult novel, Black Circus.

Fellowship Statement

For my fellowship, I’ll center on healing and balance as an artist. I’ll get professional career counseling, as well as take more walks, rest and reflect. I will spend intentional time researching Black and queer ancestors of my artistic lineage. I’ll spend time connecting with my artistic mentors, including Alexis DeVeaux and Sharon Bridgeforth. I’ll be writing, researching and editing new books including a young adult book, Black Circus, set in the 90s about a young, Black woman studying aerial acrobatic arts with a mysterious and mystical former circus performer. I’ll work on a collection of poetry, pum pum, as well as an experimental interdisciplinary work called Erotics of Abolition.

Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist and vocalist known for large multidisciplinary projects and for his use of music to examine sociopolitical issues. Samora is the director and creator of The Transformations Suite, an acclaimed project combining music, theatre, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African Diaspora. Samora’s collaborators include Sara Bareilles, Titus Kaphar, Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Daveed Diggs, and Lalah Hathaway. He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is a featured member on the new albums, August Greene and Let Love, with Common and Robert Glasper. A Sundance Composers Lab fellow, Samora scored the award-winning documentary Whose Streets? and the Field of Vision film Concussion Protocol. He is a member of Blackout for Human Rights, the arts & social justice collective founded by Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay, and was musical director for their #MLKNow and #JusticeForFlint events.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist, my primary goal is to ensure that whoever experiences my work will be altered in some way that affects their daily lives; how they think and act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationship to their country and world. I hope to bend the conventions of artistic genre and discipline to create pieces that deeply pierce the soul, grasping at the foundational elements of what it means to be alive in this moment. My work deeply criticizes the oppressive systems of American corporatism and colonialism, and reveals the many ways people are wounded by these systems as well as the many ways they fight back, imagining possibilities beyond what is allowed. I am a prison and police abolitionist. Current projects I'm working on include The Healing Project (about trauma & healing from incarceration and violence), Venus Smiles Not (about how traditional masculinity distorts the ways men learn how to deal with loss), and Grief, a collection of songs reflecting on the past two years. I'm honored to receive this support from the Jerome Foundation to continue my work.

Michael Prior (he/him) is a writer and a teacher. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Global Poetry Anthology (2015 and 2020), and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Sewanee Review, Magma Poetry, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is the author of Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart / Penguin Random House, 2020) and Model Disciple (Véhicule Press, 2016). Michael holds an MFA from Cornell University. He lives in Saint Paul, where he teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College.

Fellowship Statement

As a Yonsei, whose Japanese grandparents were forcibly incarcerated in a camp during the Second World War, my poems explore intergenerational memory, cultural trauma, diaspora, and my own mixed-race identity. My engagement with the lyric often encompasses the ways various verse forms might be reimagined to express my own experience and to attend to conversations about race in North America. I am currently at work on a manuscript of ekphrastic responses to Japanese American and Japanese Canadian visual artists whose work either documents or re-witnesses the Internment.

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Dominican and Puerto Rican Pushcart Prize nominee, 2020 Atticus Review Poetry Contest winner, and a BRIO award winner with fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights Rising Stars, The Frost Place, and VONA. With degrees in education and an MFA in Performance Studies this former teen mother, and initiated priestess in Lukumi and Palo celebrates womanhood and honors cultural rituals. She’s a three-time International Latino Book Award winner who authored Conversations With My Skin (2011), and Homage To The Warrior Women (2012). Through Robleswrites Productions, she created The Abuela Stories Project (2016) and Mujeres, The Magic, The Movement, and The Muse (2017). Her work has been featured on HBO Habla Women, Lincoln Center, and her poetry appears in several anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (2020), and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). For more visit Robleswrites.com.

Fellowship Statement

My poetry honors and questions cultural norms, rituals, and the use of Spanglish and Caribbean slang as valuable forms of communication, and language production rooted in oral tradition. My work celebrates women who don’t break but gracefully stretch through emotional, physical, and socio-economic struggles. With humor, heartbreak, hand me down rituals, and speakeasy belief systems that coax Afro-Cuban deities into clandestine gatherings, problems are handled, and communities are sustained. My work embraces the possibility of repair as related to the body and mind of a people marred by imagined and perceived borders resulting from forced immigration, colonization, displacement, and how spiritual practices involving water and words foster survival. These themes derive from my experiences as a rape survivor, teen mother, initiated priestess in Lukumi and Palo Afro- Caribbean spiritual systems, and a daughter of Dominican and Puerto Rican parents whose footing in America was never secure.

Stefani Saintonge is a Haitian-American filmmaker, educator and editor who won the juried and audience award at BlackStar Film Festival for her short film, Fucked Like A Star. Her work has screened at several festivals and institutions internationally including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hammer Museum and the Smithsonian National African American Museum. As a member of New Negress Film Society, she co-created their annual Black Women’s Film Conference. She has received support from SFFILM, Jerome Foundation and Bronx Arts Council and served as an artist in residence with Haiti Cultural Exchange. Her work as an editor has screened at Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Guggenheim Museum and PBS.

Fellowship Statement

The process of liberation fascinates me. Whether it's physical labor, spiritual awakenings or self-interrogation, my work investigates the minutia (and oftentimes the mundanity) of building a new world. It could be a spiritual plane where meditation yields new imaginings or an actual massive, rapid undoing. I am drawn to the repetitive physical acts that force growth. I will use this time to develop a feature film about the week leading up to the slave rebellion that would spark the Haitian Revolution.

Anna Samo was born in 1980 in Russia. On her first job in Moscow while scanning and coloring hand drawn animation, she witnessed how thousands of separated drawings put together, suddenly turn into a living character. She experienced the tickling feeling of surprise and wonder. This feeling has not left her ever since.

Samo studied animation in Russia and Germany. She was encouraged to create very personal work and to strive for her own authentic voice. As an independent filmmaker she uses a variety of analog animation techniques to create emotional and poetic work. Her films have been screened and won awards at highly acclaimed film festivals around the globe such as Anima Mundi, Krakow Film Festival, Full Frame, DOC NYC, Berlin Film Festival - Berlinale, Annecy Film Festival and Sundance among many others. Samo relocated to the USA in 2013. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Fellowship Statement

I look around and filter what I find through what's inside me. And while doing so I discover something I did not know before. I am inspired by clowns, poets and fools.

Animation is a super power! You can create anything you want – it just takes time. The time spent outside the studio is being condensed, changed through the time spent in the studio. Hours, days, months become pressed into the seconds of film-time. And like the hero of an old tale, who has to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes, I have to paint over thousands of pages and draw down hundreds of pencils before I can arrive at my destination. I don't know where I am heading, but I like walking.

Lily Jue Sheng is a moving image artist working across film, animation, collage, text, performance, and 2D mixed media. They were born in Shanghai, China, raised in New Jersey, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Massachusetts. Their work has recently been presented by Mono No Aware and The Poetry Project in New York City. Their work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally including at Roulette Intermedium, ArtBook @ MoMA PS1, the Knockdown Center, and Outpost Artist Resources in New York City; Light Field Festival in San Francisco, Images Festival, Winnipeg Underground Festival, and CineCycle in Canada; and TCAC (Taipei Contemporary Art Center) in Taiwan.

Fellowship Statement

I make films. I also make images, poetry, and other things, within the process of filmmaking, and occasionally perform them. My current work uses my own speech and writing to sort through the noise of language attrition, code-switching, and place attachment. This approach produces sort of patchy, quotidian, and sometimes unwatchable films. It's also the way I know how to tell stories. It’s this storytelling that becomes my breaking process, breaking up hegemonic cinema/narrative traditions, especially continuity, classification, and translation.

I have been researching semi-colonial Shanghai, in an effort to learn more about labor, trade, and changing regimes. I’m hoping to parse the archives by making new readings. I’m also looking to gather stories in Shanghainese, to overlap the pedestrian, political, private, and public spheres of Shanghainese. This will open a line of inquiries. Who or what determines when or which oral tradition continues? How do passages, people, and cinematic media move in tandem?

I also recently completed a collaborative film titled Ikebana that might screen sometime in 2021.

Witt Siasoco (he/him) is a community-based visual artist living and working in Minneapolis, MN. His work actively engages the intersection of the arts and civic process through a variety of roles—as artist, graphic designer, and arts educator.

In recent years Siasoco was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Arts Access grant and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Fund. He has had residencies at the Kulture Club Collaborative, Pillsbury House and Theater, and Minnesota Museum of American Art. Siasoco was selected as a CreativeCitymaking artist, a collaboration between artists and urban planners to develop innovative approaches for addressing the long-term transportation, land use, economic, environmental, and social issues facing Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

My studio practice is rooted in creating art in public space that catalyzes civic dialogue and collective action. Throughout my career, I have created many community-engaged projects including This Home is Not for Sale, a collaboration with Poetry for People and recipient of an Americans for the Arts' Public Art Award; Drawing on Rice Street, a large-scale painting installation distilling over 200 conversations with Frogtown residents; and Carry On Homes Northeast, an installation focused on immigrant participation in the Census 2020. With my experience as a public artist and lifelong skater I brought together Juxtaposition Arts and City of Skate to create JXTA's Skateable Art Plaza, a youth designed, multi-purpose public space in North Minneapolis. Recently, I finished a large-scale mural for the Creative Enterprise Zone and created a new work for the City of Minneapolis’ Public Service Center.

So + Bex (So Mak and Bex Kwan) are not the same person. However, they are best friends who are both queer, gender non-conforming Chinese artists of roughly the same height (Bex is an inch taller), working with shadow, sound, and performance. Both alumni of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program, they began developing their collaborative artistic vocabulary at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), first as participants in the Upstart Program 2017-8, Space Grantees 2018, and then as Artists in Residence from 2019-2021. So + Bex were featured at The Brick’s 2018 Trans Theatre Festival, were 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.

Fellowship Statement

When we first met in 2015, we were finding ourselves in situations of surreal overlapping identity where our housemates were confusing us with each other. It was both absurd and surprised neither of us. Our work always circles back to these questions: how can people like us—queer, gender non-conforming, East Asian people—build power with each other if we are seen as identical? How do our persons stretch to be at once threatening (especially in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic), harmless (especially in comparison to Black people), and interchangeable (especially in media)? How do we shoulder the perpetual foreignness that we are assigned while managing the distance that we feel from our own cultural and ancestral roots? Our process weaves dreamscapes from shadow puppetry, archival audio, and comedy to unearth the absurdity and revelation of our sameness.

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com

Fellowship Statement

My writing often focuses on masculinity through a Mexican-American cultural lens. Currently, I’m fascinated by the idea of capacity, and the capaciousness of art in relation to my own self as brown man in America. Moreover, I’m interested in where this fascination with capacity is rooted.

Since the publication of An Incomplete List of Names, I’ve been working on poems and creative nonfiction prose. The poems approach capacity by way of the metaphysical. The nonfiction work seeks to explore capacity through how I understand my own brown body in its various roles—as father, husband, brother, son, homie, colleague—as I move through life in the Midwest, as I exist in academia, as I consider pop culture, and when I visit California, leaning back in the passenger seat of my homie’s Cutlass—windows rolled down, my right arm hanging out the window.