Past
Grantees

LeilAwa [Leila Awadallah] is an artist working with movement through embodied research and storytelling. She is a Palestinian-American who engages culturally and politically with her ancestral roots and the geographic soils in which they are growing. LeilAwa lineages are Mediterranean, yet her body was born and lives on Dakota / Anishinaabe lands.

LeilAwa’s work manifests in dance pieces, durational performance installations, and short experimental film. Her dance examines the body’s resistance to settler colonial violence and systematic distortions and erasures, and the choreography of occupation in the context of Palestine. Her physical movement seeks connection to place, land, home and memory and is created within a framework of the Arab imaginary.

While at Camargo, LeilAwa plans to focus on a daily practice of body watani (Arabic for “my homeland") in order to build a clearer physical practice for future work and collaborations. She seeks to learn from land based, durational improvisation practices rooted in traditional dances of the region: baladi, raqs sharqi, and tarantella. The physical work will be paired with historical / cultural / spiritual research questions in order to merge what subconsciously manifests during the embodied practice, with active and reflective thought that helps guide the mind-body through the terrain of memory.

Jessica Beshir received $30,000 for Faya Dayi, a visual meditation on the unprecedented growth of Ethiopia’s khat industry. Khat, a mild narcotic leaf that induces fantasy, has become one of Ethiopia’s most lucrative cash crops due to the massive unemployment of the youth. Beshir’s film weaves footage of the Khat trade with a series of intimate portraits of Oromo khat farmers and urban youth exploring the boundaries between fiction and real-life in this powerful visual and sonic experience.

Shirley Bruno received $30,000 for Just-Come/Been-To, a triptych narrative exploring intimate spaces of women, their inherited land conflicts, and buried family legacy. Three stories unearth an interwoven tapestry in Haiti: a dream-well of collective memory reflecting on one’s spiritual connection to a land, its primitive memories, and the Caribbean dilemma of exodus and return. Drawing on her own Haitian heritage, Bruno explores philosophies, aesthetics, and rhythms of lived moments found distinctively in the Caribbean, particularly as it pertains to the lives of women. Her intimate and participatory approach recreates modern myths that expose the spaces between the physical and spiritual world.

Ram Devineni is a documentary filmmaker, publisher and founder of Rattapallax films and magazine. He produced The Russian Woodpecker, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. He is the creator of the augmented reality social-activist comic book series, Priya’s Shakti which received the Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund from the Ford Foundation and was supported by the World Bank. Devineni was honored by UN Women as a “gender equality champion” for creating India’s first female superhero character.

While at Camargo, Devineni will develop an interactive comic book that focuses on migration of women from Syria and other countries into Europe resulting from recent conflicts. The comic book will be based on real-life interviews and stories and use augmented reality to bring the artwork to life.

Arisleyda Dilone received $30,000 for This Body, Too/Y Este Cuerpo Tambien. In this personal documentary, Dilone is faced with the decision to replace her expired breast implants or have them removed. She grapples with the concepts of femininity and gender norms as a Dominican immigrant intersex-woman. She simultaneously deconstructs her body and the multiple cultures and class perspectives that impose their values on her being. As a Latinx filmmaker, the intersections she inhabits resonate with both a queer and non-queer Latinx audience.

Charlotte Glynn received $30,000 for The Gymnast. A 14-year-old aspiring Olympic gymnast, Monica, and her single father, “gym dad,” fight to reinvent themselves after a potentially career-ending injury. Set in early 1990’s Pittsburgh, this feature-length narrative explores issues of sexual consent, cycles of mistreatment and the everyday struggles of poor working class families. Using her own experiences, Glynn brings nuance and compassion to the film, highlighting Monica’s attempts to make sense of her incredibly complicated father and her own struggle to find out who she really is.

Jon-Sesrie Goff received $30,000 for After Sherman, a film exploring coastal South Carolina as a site of cultural pride and racial trauma. Goff’s documentary looks at the layered socio-political implications of the Mother Emanuel Church slayings in Charleston, where his father was interim pastor. Goff’s relationship with his father is the focal point for intergenerational questions of Black American spiritual survival. This personal film grapples with how a new generation in the South approaches forgiveness, faith and healing in facing this repeated and painful history.

Alison Guessou received $30,000 for Happily Married After, a short satirical film that takes on the perfections and imperfections of marriage and individual versus societal expectations. A young couple has been selected by a documentary crew to be followed for a few weeks and interviewed as part of a series for what makes a marriage successful. Both partners (unbeknown to the other) overcompensate for the perceived shortcomings of the other until the hidden flaws are exposed. The couple finds themselves in a situation that can either make their marriage stronger or pull it apart. Through a series of flashbacks, character dialogue, and talking-head interviews, we see how they navigate for the sake of their relationship.

Haisi Hu received $30,000 for The Garden of Earthly Delight, a fifteen-minute claymation and hand-drawn animated film about a woman addicted to virtual reality sex. When her waking life and dream life begin to overlap, she recognizes the danger she is in and the threat this technology poses to society at large. Tackling a taboo subject matter, Hu investigates new roles in a post-feminist society, looking at how the advancement of technology can better serve female needs, instead of putting women back into a conformist box of isolation.

Chithra Jeyaram received $30,000 for Our Daughters (working title), a transracial open adoption story that flips the narrative. A single white mother makes a bold departure from the norm and chooses an Indian American couple to be her twin daughters’ adoptive parents. Drawn to stories at the intersection of race, religion, immigration, and family, Jeyaram’s documentary provides an immigrant’s perspective on interracial adoption while examining the development of cultural dexterity in familial settings.

Shalini Kantayya received $30,000 for Code for Bias (working title). Merging cinema vérité and sci-fi elements, the film captures MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that most facial recognition software does not accurately see dark-skinned faces. Through Joy’s journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern this technology, Code for Bias sheds light on the threat artificial intelligence poses to civil rights and democracy.

ManSee Kong is a filmmaker and cultural worker born and raised in New York City. Her film and collaborative media works are inspired by narratives rooted in immigrant life and grassroots social movements. Along with artists Tomie Arai and Betty Yu, she co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade in 2015, a cultural collective that facilitates and creates community-led public productions to advance social change.

ManSee has worked as a camera assistant, camera operator, and a teaching artist with Third World Newsreel, Global Action Project, and Tribeca Film Institute. She holds an MFA in film directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has received support from Asian Women Giving Circle, Puffin Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Davis-Putter Fund for Peace & Justice, Spike Lee Production, and Jerome Foundation. Her creative interests in recent years have expanded from film/video to new media art and technologies applied in accessible, community-based and socially-conscious ways.

During her residency at Camargo, she will review her personal archive of nearly two decades of photo, video, and print material documenting tenant organizing in Manhattan Chinatown as a youth organizer with CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, and develop a film and multimedia project with community-based multilingual accessibility at its core. She plans to visit tenant organizing groups in nearby Marseilles to learn about local housing conditions and tenant activism efforts. Having time and space at Camargo to reflect and meld these materials, memories, and experiences will allow her to close out years of archiving and community-building towards developing a film and multimedia project that will serve as a chronicle of gentrification in Chinatown and a tribute to a fierce elder Chinatown tenant leader who transitioned in 2019 at the age of 97.

Catherine Licata received $23,360 for The Lobby (working title), a narrative short film about Josefina, a hotel housekeeper determined to improve her life with the aid of her favorite self-help audiobook. A cinematic response to the performative “hustle” of late capitalist America, Licata entwines the issues of economic and class mobility with the contemporary immigrant experience.  This short character-driven drama deals with structural inequalities beyond any one person’s control, playing with audience expectations on class and societal roles.

Keith McQuirter received $30,000 for The 3,000 Project (working title), a documentary film exploring how Wisconsin, one of the states with highest rates of incarceration in America, abolished parole and changed the fate of 3,000 parole-eligible inmates in its prison system. The film shares personal stories of the impact parole laws and delves further into the state’s heated debates over solutions to reduce its massive inmate population.

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Martha Colburn, and Loren Connors. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, and keyboards, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008 Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, the 2016 Art Matters Grant, the 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency and the 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency. She is also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Ortman lives in Brooklyn, New York.

As she embarks on the creation of a new work at Camargo, she plans to do ambient field recordings at the Calanques National Park and in Cassis to gather new compositional textures.

Laimah Osman is a queer Afghan American visual artist, educator, and graphic designer. She makes multidisciplinary art that celebrates her cultural heritage and experiences. Osman’s family left Afghanistan for the U.S. when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Since then, she connects to her Afghan culture through her family, community, and the media. Particularly after 9/11, Afghan and Muslim people are singularly portrayed in the media in connection to violence and war. Osman wants to present the richness and diversity of her Central Asian culture and hopes to challenge the one-dimensional representation of Afghan and Muslim people that fuels today’s atmosphere of racism and xenophobia.

Osman’s visual work is based in the research, study, and practice of various printmaking and book arts processes. The origins of these different techniques are tied to global histories of communication and offer limitless possibilities for storytelling and socially engaged work. She is drawn to the nuances and possibilities for chance, repetition, multiplicity, improvisation and collaboration in generating work, as well as the materiality as a counter to the digital age.

While at Camargo, Osman plans to explore ideas around migration, safety and security in dialogue with others who are considering and expressing similar global concerns. She will travel to Marseille to see how this large modern “port city” is shaped by its immigrants. She also plans to experiment with different folds and bookbinding methods to make structural decisions and prototypes for the artists’ books.