Past
Grantees

Ikechukwu Ufomadu (he/him) is a comic entertainer, named one of five “Comics to Watch in 2018” by Time Out New York. His original projects include: Ike at Night (The Public Theater), Nightcap | by Ike (Joe’s Pub at The Public), Ike Night (Ars Nova, San Francisco Sketchfest), Ike for the Holidays (Joe’s Pub at The Public), Ike by Chance (Ars Nova), Inspector Ike (Comedy Central Corporate Retreat), Ike’s Wonderful World of Leisure (Exponential Festival) and more. His short-form series Words with Ike has aired on VICE and IFC.

He trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; the International Theatre Workshop in The Netherlands; and Studio Five’s theatre and dance programs in Indonesia. Ikechukwu has been an artist-in-residence at Joe’s Pub at The Public and SPACE on Ryder Farm.

Fellowship Statement

As a comic entertainer, my primary objective is to entertain, comically.

My work often takes the formats of classic American variety and talk shows and sets them in performance contexts that make them feel both familiar and strange. This results in humor that is disorienting and plays with people’s expectations, while maintaining a warm, welcoming “big tent” sensibility that invites an audience of diverse life experiences to come along for the ride.

Crafting intimate entertainments that can serve as sites of shared laughter, improvisation and play is a pressing need in a time marked by deep divisions, fragmentation and social deadlock. Indeed, our deepest impasses, individually and collectively, are marked by the absence of such play. My hope is to build a body of work that succeeds as entertainment while stimulating those human qualities necessary to not only cope with the problems of our time, but resolve them.

Photo by Mindy Tucker.

Imani Uzuri, raised in rural North Carolina, is an award-winning vocalist, composer, librettist, improviser and conceptual artist. She composes, performs and creates interdisciplinary works including concerts, ritual performances, albums, sound installations and compositions for chamber ensembles, voice and theater (including experimental and musical theater). Uzuri recently finished her tenure as a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow in support of her international travel and research for her forthcoming composing of a large music work celebrating the iconography of the Black Madonna which she is currently developing as a HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) Fellow. She was a 2018 commissioned composer for Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity where she presented the world premiere of her choral composition “Sustenance” with 31+ voices from around the world. Uzuri is a 2018 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works composer commissionee. Dubbed “a postmodernist Bessie Smith” by The Village Voice, the New York Times calls her work “stirring” and Time Out New York says “Uzuri never fails to mesmerize audiences with her narcotic blend...of ethereal sounds.”

As a 2019 Composer in Residence at Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, Uzuri will visit Black Madonna shrines in Marseilles and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, integrate her research from previous international Black Madonna sojourns and begin developing the libretto and composing the score for her forthcoming aformentioned large music work Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna. www.imaniuzuri.com

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Republic, the Southampton Review, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), Blunderbuss Magazine, the Offing, Brooklyn Rail, Joyland Magazine, the Scholar and Feminist Online, the Rumpus, and has received honorable mention from Glimmer Train Press. He was a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction, and a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–2018 Workspace program. He is also an associate editor at Apogee Journal. Alejandro holds a master's degree in Public Health from the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to his writing career, he managed cancer-screening studies, designed HIV/AIDS health worker curriculum, and taught public health advocacy.  alejandrovarela.org

Fellowship Statement

I write about the complexities of class-jumping. I see strength within community, and solidarity across communities, as health intervention. I draw from public health research on stress and inequity to craft tales that paint a way forward. My hope is for readers to finish my stories and think, “Reparations for the descendants of slaves, of course!” Or “A minimum wage of $30 per hour (pegged to inflation), duh!” But I also want my writing to make people ask themselves: “How do Ben Affleck and George Clooney each have Oscars while Alfre Woodard has only been nominated once... 35 years ago?”

I’m currently finishing a collection of short stories, and I'm working on a novel about a man who returns home to care for his parents. Several of his high school friends also struggle to survive. He traces the roots of their poor health to the isolation of their formative years.

Photo by Charly Debrosse © LMCC.

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) (she/her) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis. White Hawk earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). Recent support of White Hawk’s work includes 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, 2019 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Contemporary Art, 2019 Forecast for Public Art Mid-Career Development Grant, 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, and a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. Her work is represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

As a woman of Sičangu Lakota and European American ancestry, I was raised within Native and urban American communities. My work reflects these cross-cultural experiences through the combination of modern abstract painting and abstract Lakota art forms. Some works are executed strictly in paint while others incorporate beads and porcupine quillwork onto a painted surface, weaving aesthetics and conceptual influences from each respective history.

I strive to create honest, inclusive compositions that acknowledge all parts of my history, Native and non-Native, urban, academic and cultural education systems. This platform allows me to start from center, deepening my own understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and indigenous and mainstream art histories.

The work encourages conversations that challenge the lack of representation of Native arts, people and voices in our national consciousness while highlighting the truth and necessity of equality and intersectionality.

Richard Wiebe’s (he/him) award-winning work has screened widely at international film festivals including IFF Rotterdam, Media City, Cannes Cinéfondation, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma Montreal, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and several others. He is the recipient of grants from the Princess Grace Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Richard teaches courses in sound design, screenwriting, and the art of the short at Hamline University and FilmNorth. He is the Experimental Cinema programmer for the Minneapolis/Saint Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) and a member of the collective Cellular Cinema.

Fellowship Statement

My current project-in-progress is a feature-length experimental documentary focusing on World War I cameraman Leon Caverly, the first official war cinematographer of the United States military. Using Caverly’s pro-war cinematography found in the National Archives, I will fashion an anti-war film. Caverly shot the film 100 years ago, I will edit and do the sound design. This constraint-based collaboration with Caverly will also include materials from early American cinema, television, and other archival sources, alongside contemporary footage I have shot. Ultimately, this project will result in a de-stratified history of American militarism from the canons of the Confederacy at the Siege of Petersburg to depictions of unrest today. World War I propaganda, where cinematic propaganda first blossomed, is the center that holds it all together.

Nia O. Witherspoon (she/her) is a black queer writer/director, vocalist/composer, and cultural worker. Described as “especially fascinating” by Backstage Magazine, and named in Phoenix’s “Top 100” Artists, Witherspoon’s work creates contemporary ritual-space grounded in African Diaspora sensibilities to speak to the issues of our times. Currently in residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Witherspoon has received New York Theatre Workshop’s (NYTW) 2050 Playwriting/Directing Fellowship, BRIC’s Premiere Residency, Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund Grant, Brooklyn Arts Fund (BAC), Downtown Urban Theatre Festival’s “Audience Award,” Lambda Literary’s Emerging Playwriting Fellowship, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Her works, including The Messiah Complex, YOUMINE, and SHE have been developed or featured at BRIC, HERE, NYTW, National Black Theatre, BAAD, Dixon Place, The Fire This Time Festival, and Movement Research. Witherspoon holds a PhD from Stanford University, and is currently a Playwright-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts (Amherst). She has works commissioned in the 2019-20 season by The Shed, Playwright’s Realm, La Mama ETC, and JACK.

Fellowship Statement

I am a concept-driven artist invested in creating spaces where black/queer/trans/female folks, and, more largely people of color, are able to be seen in their full humanity, and their full divinity. This means that while contemporary tragedy and inter-generational trauma often trigger a project’s inception, ultimately, I aim for my works to place my communities in a context that far exceeds the 500-years of colonial time and instead to find the palimpsest of wisdom in liberation. Freedom is not something I have achieved yet, but it is something I feel pulled uncontrollably toward. I am working to cultivate freedom in myself, in my works, and in my collaborators, by any means necessary. I am also learning that freedom is very much about surrender to the imperfect, and so I try to create spaces (from plays to rituals to rehearsal rooms) where vulnerability is the most valuable currency.

I am deeply inspired by the resonance inside of dissonance—particularly in reparation of the sacred/secular binary. I am also invested in the concepts of layering and unfolding, as the nature of diaspora is palimpsestic, cyclical, and always in motion. In The Dark Girl Chronicles, Yoruba divination scripture lives alongside verbatim investigation-room testimony, court transcripts, and Cardi B to unearth the stories of black women warriors against state violence. I am excited by the potential of theatre to allow us to see what we would otherwise not see—the moonlit vision—the “magic eye” that offers a window the Great Mystery. In The Messiah Complex, the nightclub has permission to become the ritual ground and sacred cemetery. A heteronormative Black Panther has permission to love a transwoman. And his transmasculine child has permission to become the Messiah, leading the next generation of the black liberation struggle.

Photo by  Zavé Martohardjono.

André M. Zachery (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and founding artistic director of Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group (RPG). Zachery’s practice, research and community engagement artistically focuses on Black/African Diaspora cultural practices through the mediums of choreography, site-specific projects, film, digital projection, audio installations and responsive technology. He is a former Jerome Foundation supported Movement Research artist-in-residence and a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship/Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography. He has served as a guest faculty artist in dance departments at Florida State University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Ohio State University. His works have received acclaimed reviews from the New York Times, Culturebot and other notable publications. RPG has presented work at Danspace Project, The Kennedy Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Harlem Stage and the Brooklyn Museum. Zachery extensively collaborates with artists of various genres and mediums to create innovative projects that expand notions of performance and space.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in dimensionality as a means to disrupt and dismantle hierarchy. Currently, my work and research in Afrofuturism reconsiders the relationship of the Black body in digital landscapes to recoding (virtual) reality. The presence, experiences and narratives of the African Diaspora are severely lacking in the field of performance and technology. For me dimensionality offers the ability to shape and form our stories, legacies, myths and sense of place with complexity and nuance in consideration to time. Moving forward, I want to find ways to actualize the conversation and theory of Black futurity into physical and material spaces.  I want people to input their information into a constructed environment where the material and physical architectures interact cohesively with supporting sonic and visual elements, exploring how Afrofuturism can be a generative mechanism to address societal issues with parity, equity and resourcefulness

Photo by Rachel Neville.

Pallavi Sharma Dixit (she/her) earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships and has taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children and is at work on a novel.

Fellowship Statement

I was born in India and raised in Edison, New Jersey – a Little India in America – and this history informs all my writing.

When I earned degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania I didn’t know how I would use them, but it turns out this is how: my fiction examines Indian immigration, Thomas Edison’s work ethic, anti-Indian racism, the evolution of Indian film, and the transformation of an American suburb into an ethnic enclave.

My novel-in-progress, Edison, deals also with romance, obsession, anxiety and the pressure of the American Dream. It is influenced both by the Bollywood movies and American sitcoms I grew up on. At every turn it bears the imprint of my life.

I try not to let my process be all agony; I find the humor and amuse myself. I like when movie stars unexpectedly enter my scenes. And I like em dashes so much.

Peter Nelson received $30,000 for Whiteness at Work, which weaves together five narratives of individuals reflecting on their whiteness. Historically, race has been viewed as a non-white issue, and the burden to understand race and racism in recent years has been overwhelmingly put on people of color. This project seeks to engage white people in a self-examination of their whiteness. Nelson will use stop motion animation and recorded interviews to reveal white perspectives, biases, and blind spots as individuals consider their roles in white privilege, white solidarity, and white fragility.

Xiaolu Wang received $30,000 for Wet Togetherness. The film follows the spirit of a drowned child who leads the filmmaker on a pilgrimage to dismantle their fear of water. By visiting with the humans and marine mammals who explore interdependence and collective organizing, new forms of engaging with the water and each other emerge.