Past
Grantees

Based in Brooklyn New York, guitarist / composer Liberty Ellman has performed and or recorded with a host of stand out creative artists including: Joe Lovano, Myra Melford, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, Greg Osby, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Nels Cline, Somi, Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Ledisi, JD Allen, Michele Rosewoman, Adam Rudolph, Stephan Crump, Jonathan Finlayson, Okkyung Lee, and Ches Smith. In 2014 Ellman participated in Luanda Kinshasa, a video installation by visionary filmmaker Stan Douglas and Jason Moran.

Mr. Ellman is perhaps best known for his long tenure in Henry Threadgill's groundbreaking ensemble, Zooid. The group has recorded several critically lauded albums. Their most recent recording In For A Penny, In For A Pound earned a Pulitzer prize for Mr. Threadgill. In addition to playing guitar, Mr. Ellman is credited as producer and mixing engineer on that recording.

His compositional style has been described as "At once highly controlled and recklessly inventive,” and the Wall Street Journal said: “Ellman, along with his peers, is helping to define post millennial jazz.” Voted #1 Rising Star Guitarist in the 2016 Downbeat Critics Poll, he was also honored in the 2015 Jazz Times expanded critics poll, as one of the four guitarists of the year alongside Bill Frisell, John Scofield and Julian Lage.

Moriah Evans works on and through forms of dance and performance. Her choreographies navigate utopic/dystopic potentials within choreography/dance/body, often approaching dance as a fleshy, matriarchal form slipping between minimalism-excess. She initiated “The Bureau for the Future of Choreography,” a collective apparatus, to create research processes and practices to investigate participatory performances and systems of choreography in 2011. Evans was an artist-in-residence at Movement Research, The New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Issue Project Room, Studio Series at Νew York Live Arts, ImPulsTanz, MoMA/PS1, MANA Contemporary, Onassis AiR. She was editor-in-chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal 2013-2020, curatorial advisor for the Tanzkongress 2019, co-artistic direction and editor of 2019.tanzkongress.de/salons (2019), and co-curator of Dance and Process (The Kitchen 2016-present).

She received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists (2017) and a Bessie Award nomination for Emerging Choreographer (2015). Notable works: BASTARDS (NYU Skirball, Νew York, 2019); Configure (The Kitchen, Νew York, 2018); Figuring (SculptureCenter, Νew York, 2018); Be my Muse (Villa Empain, Brussels, 2016; FD13, Minneapolis, 2017; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2018); Social Dance 9-12: Encounter (Danspace Project, Νew York, 2015); Social Dance 1-8: Index (ISSUE Project Room, Νew York, 2015); Another Performance (Danspace Project, Νew York, 2013); and Out of and Into (8/8): STUFF (Theatre de l’Usine, Geneva, 2012). Her choreographies have been commissioned throughout Νew York and internationally at Kampnagel (Hamburg); Theatre de l’Usine (Geneva); Villa Empain (Brussels); Atelier de Paris (Paris); and Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai). She received her BA in Art History & English (honors), Wellesley College, and her MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism (20th Century Art) from UCSD’s Visual Arts Department.

Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker, and educator. She creates performances, public programs, and games that invite audiences to participate in a theater that rejects passive reception. Dispatching from Caribbean Diaspora, Diane’s work, which intersects performance and poetry, concerns itself with what she calls the 4L's: love, loss, legacy, and land. Her work has been presented at Haiti Cultural Exchange, Westmont College, Sibiu's International Theater Festival in Romania, University of California: Northridge, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and more.

Her writing appears in The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, amongst other publications. Her play Good Blood received a 2017 Kilroys List Honorable Mention. Her book The Math of Saint Felix is forthcoming from The 3rd Thing Press in 2021. Diane holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts is an emerging company combining filmmaking, photography, and dance. Her company has been commissioned by Gibney Dance Inc (2020-2021), Danspace Project Inc (2019), Pepatian and BAAD! (2018), and beyond. Farrish has been supported by creative residencies including Gibney New Voices, Barysnikov Arts Center (2020), Keshet Makers Space Experience, BAX Space Grant (2019), Pepatian Dance Your Future (2018), and Chez Bushwick (2017). Pieces sprouted outwards including Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier (my dear America) live production and film, With grit From, Grace, Spectacle Film and Live Production, and anticipated Martyr's Fiction. Performed at venues like Judson Church, Danspace Project Inc, Jacob's Pillow, BAAD!, film festivals, and beyond.

Bessie awardee, Davalois Fearon, was named one of Dance Magazine’s “7 Up-and-Coming Black Dance Artists Who Should Be On Your Radar” in 2018. Fearon is a critically acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and educator born in Jamaica and raised in the Bronx. She danced with Stephen Petronio from 2005-2017 and founded Davalois Fearon Dance in 2016 with the mission to push artistic and social boundaries. Her choreography is said to reflect a “tenacious virtuosity,” which has been presented nationally and internationally, including at renowned New York City venues such as the Joyce Theatre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Victory Theatre. Among others, Fearon has completed commissions for the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Harlem Stage, and Barnard College and is a recipient of numerous awards, including New Music USA Project Grant, Map Fund Grant, Dance NYC Dance Advancement Fund Award, and the Alvin Ailey New Dance Direction Choreography Lab residency.

Moko Fukuyama is a Japanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is driven by the art of storytelling and personal narratives. Through art, she creates open and sympathetic spaces to explore the socioeconomic realities and psychology of everyday life. Fukuyama has received grants, fellowships and commissions from notable art institutions such as Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Foundation For Contemporary Arts, SOHO20, MacDowell, Yaddo, Recess, The Shed, and more. She is a current resident at ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, New York), and is a 2021 Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, Minnesota. Her current project will be presented at The Kitchen, New York in spring 2021.

Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo has written for acoustic and electro-acoustic formats, for short films, videos, dance, installations, and multimedia stage productions, and has performed and written for jazz and improvisatory groups. He has published eleven albums as a leader or co-leader.

Gallo has received commissions from Colombia National Symphony Orchestra, Big Band Bogotá, and contemporary ensembles in New York and Bogotá.

His current projects as performer/composer include his Bogotá-based quartet, duos with guitar player Alejandro Florez and with singer Juanita Delgado, and an ongoing collaboration with Cecilia Vicuña. With the multimedia group La Quinta del Lobo, he participated as composer and performer on two large scale stage pieces.

He holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of North Texas and a Masters's and Ph.D. in music composition from Stony Brook University. He maintains a strong connection with Bogotá's music scene and is currently based in New York.

Ritika Ganguly, PhD., is a Minneapolis-based singer, composer, performance artist, and anthropologist, born and raised in New Delhi, India. She applies anthropological insights to practical problem-solving in the areas of equity in the arts and cross-cultural medicine. Her consulting practice and artistic practice both strive for an equality based on difference, rather than on the similarity of things, people, and knowledges.

Ritika was commissioned to compose and create new musical work by The Cedar Cultural Center in 2016, received the Naked Stages award in 2017, and an MRAC Next Step Fund award in 2018 for her research and new musical work in Baul (Bengali Sufi music/poetry). She has trained in multiple genres within Bengali music and in contemporary Indian musical theater. Her vocal and compositional work bring disparate musical styles, literatures, and disciplines together. She was commissioned in December 2020 to write an opera for MN Opera.

Katie Gee Salisbury is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in The Ringer, VICE, Roads & Kingdoms, the Asian American Writer's Workshop, Slant'd, and On Being, among other publications. She is drawn to narratives that explore culture, food, race and identity, and the lives of extraordinary women. Her past projects have been supported by the TED Residency, Think!Chinatown, Chashama, and Dashboard.

She is currently at work on a nonfiction book that chronicles the life and times of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, for Dutton Books. Born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California, she is half Anglo-Irish, half Chinese, and a 4th-generation Chinese American.

Beatrice Glow is an artist-researcher leveraging interactive multimedia installations and multi-sensory experiences in service of public history and just futures. Her ongoing projects on the social histories of plants provide vignettes into the entangled historical realities of dispossession, enslavement, diasporas, trade and extractive economies.

She has been named a 2021 Yale-NUS College Artist-in-Residence, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Artist, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, Smack Mellon Studio Program Artist, ZERO1 American Arts Incubator artist and US Fulbright Scholar.

Notable activities include solo exhibitions Forts and Flowers (2019), Taipei Contemporary Art Center; Spice Roots/Routes (2017), NYU Institute of Fine Arts; Aromérica Parfumeur (2016), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile; Mannahatta VR, Wayfinding Project and Lenapeway (2016-17), Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU; Rhunhattan Tearoom (2015), Wave Hill; Floating Library (2014) aboard the Hudson River’s Lilac Museum Steamship; and group shows at Honolulu Biennial 2017, Park Avenue Armory and Galeri Nasional Indonesia.

Chris Gude (New York, 1985) studied anthropology and geography at Middlebury College. In 2006, he went to Medellín, Colombia to work at a refugee shelter for internally displaced persons. There, he started a friendship with Jorge Gaviria, who would become the body and voice of his first two films, both of them blending documentary and fiction with extensive fieldwork. Mambo Cool (2013) was embedded in the underworld of small time drug traffickers in Medellín and Mariana (2017) in that of gasoline and whiskey smugglers on the Colombian-Venezuelan border. They have exhibited at places such as FIDMarseille, Viennale, Punto de Vista, Mar del Plata, Cartagena, Lincoln Center, MALBA (Buenos Aires), Cinemateca de Madrid, the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Cinemateca Nacional de Colombia, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, among others. Chris is currently working on a film about gold mining in Venezuela.

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures and performances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, among many other venues.

Hall’s writing and interviews have been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art in America, and Bomb, as well as in Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press,), and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge). A volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews, and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Gordon Hall will be 2021 resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title and named a best book of 2018 by The Washington Post, Literary Hub, The New York Post, and Nylon, among others. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner, and has received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Hedgebrook. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Guernica, Elle Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. Crystal is currently working on her second novel and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Darine Hotait is a writer, film director, and the founder of Cinephilia Productions— film incubator championing the next generation of African and Middle Eastern filmmakers. Hotait’s award-winning films can be seen on SundanceTV, AMC Networks, BBC Channel, ShortsTV and at over a hundred international film festivals. Her work received the support of the New York Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Arab Fund of Arts and Culture, The Independent Film Project, and Maison Des Scénaristes at Cannes Film Festival. Her narrative films Tallahassee and Sherman are forthcoming in 2021. She is currently developing her debut narrative feature film Like Salt and two TV shows Dearborn and Kenzi. Darine resides in New York City.

Malik Isasis is a Brooklyn-based, narrative filmmaker whose body of work explores the intersections of the personal and the political. He was offered a development deal with Sesame Street Studio after participating as a 2019 Sesame Street Writing Fellow. Malik is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.

Mafe Izaguirre (Venezuela, 1978) is a New York-based artist, graphic designer, and educator. Her work, known as The Mind Project, is framed by the ideas of the philosophical post-humanism: a movement that poses the human as a plural, fluid, and decentered being living in multiple spaces of interaction with machines, software, other species, and spiritual hybrid systems. Izaguirre is a 2020 MoreArt fellow and a 2020 Queens Arts Council Grant Awardee. She works as an artist member of the Long Island City Artist Association, the Global Posthuman Network, and The Operating System—a global open-source art collective. Izaguirre is the co-founder and Creative Director of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, an online psychoanalytic transmedia magazine created by IPTAR members and a Board Member of the humanitarian organization Cuatro Por Venezuela Foundation. To read more, visit: MafeIzaguirre.com

Naomi Jackson is the author of a novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association named Jackson’s novel an Honor Book for Fiction. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town.

A graduate of Williams College, Jackson’s writings have appeared in Harper’s, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Writer. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Camargo Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Bronx Council on the Arts. Jackson is currently Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

Nicole Shawan Junior was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. She’s a black, queer and poverty-born counter-storyteller. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in What is a Criminal? (Routledge 2022), PEN America’s Handbook for Writers in Prison (Haymarket Books 2021), Emerge, Gay Mag, ZORA, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, SLICE, Color Bloq, CURA, and elsewhere. Nicole has received fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, NYFA, Esalen, Lambda Literary, and more. She’s an alumna of Bread Loaf, Tin House, VONA, and Hurston/Wright’s Writers Week.

Nicole is a creative prose editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly, associate nonfiction editor at Slice Magazine, and serves on the Sundress Publications editorial board. She’s also the founder and Executive Director of Roots. Wounds. Words.: A Literary Arts Revolution. Nicole is completing her manuscript-in progress, Cracked Concrete: A Memoir of Crackheads, Cousins & Crime.

Japanese-born composer Asuka Kakitani has deep love for nature which inspires her to transform her admiration of the natural world into musical stories. Her projects span from 18-piece jazz orchestra, string quartet, women’s vocal quartet, instrumental solo repertoire, and collaboration with a choreographer. An explorer of new challenges, Kakitani constantly pushes her boundaries and expands her musical language to express her inner world. As an advocate of original music, she co-founded the Twin Cities Jazz Composers’ Workshop to foster creative and forward-looking composition.

Kakitani has been the recipient of grants and awards from the BMI Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the American Music Center, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.