2024 USA Fellowship
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Multi-Disciplinary Maker, Musician, Actor, and Writer
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Haida Artist
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Sweetgrass Basket Weaver
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Narrative Miniaturist
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Glass Artist
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Transdisciplinary Weaver
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Design Scientist
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Ceramicist
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Playwright and Filmmaker
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Choreographer
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Filmmaker
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Choreographer, Dancer, Educator, and Trans Activist
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Dance Artist
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Composer, Vocalist, Clarinetist, Producer, and Performer
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Visual Artist
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Theater Maker and Story Weaver
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Musician
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Writer and Performer
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Artist, Musician, and Educator
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Artists and Filmmakers
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Multidisciplinary Artist
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Poet and Writer
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Composer and Percussionist
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Interdisciplinary Artist
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Writer
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Writer
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Installation Artist
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Choreographer and Dancer
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Artist
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Artist Activist
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Textile Artist
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Fiction Writer
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Artist and Filmmaker
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Artist
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Chickasaw Classical Composer
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Dancer
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Choreographer, Conjurer, Corporal Spellcaster, and Storyteller
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Multidisciplinary Composer
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Architect in Training
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Jewelry Artist and Object Maker
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Filmmaker
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Theater Director
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Visual Poet
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Architects and Artists
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Afro-Electronica Composer, Turntablist, and Drummer
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Interdisciplinary Social Practice
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Architect, Artist, and Community-Designer
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Architectural Designer
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Ceramic Sculptor and Installation Artist
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Filmmaker, Writer, Director, and Producer
2024 USA Fellowship
“I need rooms of compassion and I need my Art to be able to be the container of my pain, my tears, and the joy that I deserve. The joy that you deserve too. We are a tired nation. A tired world.”
Diana Oh “Zaza D”
Multi-Disciplinary Maker, Musician, Actor, and Writer
“I am on a constant quest to learn all that I can about my culture and the Haida art form.”
Sgwaayaans TJ Young
Haida Artist
“[Sweetgrass Basket Weaving] is one of the rare arts of our country that is found nowhere else in America. Gullah Sweetgrass Baskets are a national treasure.”
Corey Alston
Sweetgrass Basket Weaver
“I enjoy researching history and creating something out of nothing with my own hands but my real fuel is the impact my work has on the next generation; it feeds our youth’s sense of self and identity as well as their cultural awareness.”
Karen Collins
Narrative Miniaturist
“My work materializes the relationship between words and things; it manifests my ambition to understand loss and absence and how we ask words to hold meaning in the same way glass holds light.”
Helen Lee
Glass Artist
“I am defiantly a weaver. Through this position, I reconsider tapestry as a modality in which image, matter, technology, and embodiment provide productive conflicts for constructing form.”
John Paul Morabito
Transdisciplinary Weaver
“Through design praxis I explore tangible responses to systemic injustice in space and the environment, taking action where and when people, living beings, and the planet are unfairly constrained from opportunity or access to quality of life.”
DK Osseo-Asare
Design Scientist
“With verbal meaning so imprecise and mutable, visual language became my way of expressing the world. Clay, whose malleability allows me to create objects that appear soft and playful, has allowed for endless possibilities.”
Linda Nguyen Lopez
Ceramicist
“To tell the Asian-American story, it must be the whole story of this country. One must investigate not just one’s own community but its intersectionality with other marginalized communities.”
Philip Kan Gotanda
Playwright and Filmmaker
“In my methodologies of working with the body I look for authenticity: an exploratory dance composition that is combative, romantic, sublime, sexual, absurd, and indecipherable. For me, this achieves changes in the behavior of human thought.”
Petra Bravo
Choreographer
“As a filmmaker living in the empire, I have the unique position to use my privileges to create films that contribute to efforts to decolonize US imperial legacies.”
PJ Raval
Filmmaker
“I love my transgender body, and I love choreographing dances from the graceful, informed, and powerful location of my transgender body.”
Sean Dorsey
Choreographer, Dancer, Educator, and Trans Activist
“My dance work lives at a place where social environments, contemporary performance forms, and dancing collide. With an aesthetic orientation that sits on a pop-fringe borderline, my work is born from house parties, mosh pits, spectacle, music videos, nightlife, and dance teams.”
Erin Kilmurray
Dance Artist
“Emotionality, spirit, presence, and transformation are the foundation of my composition and performance style; the kind that triggers a cathartic experience — this is where I dwell as an artist.”
Holland Andrews
Composer, Vocalist, Clarinetist, Producer, and Performer
“I’m uninterested in the traditional hierarchical structures of filmmaking and am much more informed by experiences with collective creation and improvisation in theater, which is a practice based on mutual trust and care.”
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Visual Artist
“Stories are at the heart of my work; they are where Indigenous knowledge lives.”
Muriel Miguel
Theater Maker and Story Weaver
“It’s no surprise that when I came into my own, the music I would compose and perform would be informed by the world that came before. Balancing the aesthetics of today and yesterday has been a challenge and a guide for me.”
Michael Winograd
Musician
“What others have hidden I seek to reveal. When boxes constrain, when legacies oppress, I seek to liberate.”
Jeffery U. Darensbourg
Writer and Performer
"Hunting Memories of the Grass Things: An Indigenous Reflection on Bison in Louisiana" (Excerpt)
If someone were to ask me what Indigenous Peoples ate in Southwest Louisiana, I would mention things that people eat now, such as crawfish or turkeys. I would also name things people forage now, from the popular pecan to the less popular bull thistle. I would describe standing on a midden of rangia clam shells at Four Mile Cutoff, a ship channel in Vermilion Parish. After tasting a rangia clam, a mollusk smaller than an oyster with a somewhat spoiled flavor even when fresh, I find past attempts to commercialize this item laughable in the highest degree. I would also point out that Indigenous People ate bison in Louisiana. To some, this is surprising.
I live in Bulbancha, “the place of other languages,” which colonizers renamed as New Orleans. But some of us still refer to it by its older name, a bit of single-word decolonization. The earliest French colonial visitors to Bulbancha, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and crew, recorded seeing three bison napping on the banks of the river. There are Louisiana places named after bison. One such place, Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, in St. Bernard Parish near Bulbancha, still has a significant population of Indigenous People…
The bison available from Costco was a typical capitalist product — ground with machinery, properly labeled, ready for consumption — but the ribs were different. They had been exported from Texas to Bulbancha, from Old Mexico to New France. They still looked like ribs, even after processing. The pastrami ribs at Costco were much closer to the bison products of the Ishak of old than the actual ground bison of the meat section. Smoked bison ribs were exported by the French from the port across town during the eighteenth century. A box of plat côté, as these ribs were called, appears in French polymath Alexandre de Batz’s 1735 painting Desseins de Sauvages de Plusieurs Nations, which also features an Ishak man and even has a version of the word “Bulbancha” in it.
“In my work as an artist, I have witnessed firsthand how a handful of dedicated visionaries are able to band together, source materials, create something new, and then offer it up into the world.”
EJ Hill
Artist, Musician, and Educator
“We aim to collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices in order to create sites of acknowledgment that promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth.”
New Red Order (Adam Khalil, Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil)
Artists and Filmmakers
“I work beyond borders and linguistic boundaries, emphasizing the importance of considering historical contexts through a multitude of artistic languages, resulting in an approach that allows for a more holistic understanding of these complex narratives.”
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Multidisciplinary Artist
“The entanglement that drives my work is political because it orients us away from ideas of an integrated, singular subjecthood and toward a sense of being that is mutually created and cared for.”
Farid Matuk
Poet and Writer
Mimesis
Thinnest sliver
New moon light
At the horn tips of mule deer
Turned toward us
Their dark eyes don't know
Our dry heels imitate the mountains
"Women imitate the earth"
House finches, quaking,
Imitate chambers
Like Daniel's prints saying, freedom
without love posted at the outskirts
Men wield mirrors at men
Making of each other's baby
Spun 'round
While the rest of us stay in bed
And in our closed eyes sense the touch
Of light is a given to use
If we feel like it
We will get up
In a movie about us
We'll go to a lower desert
Only the thinnest air in our way
Released, certain moods will flare
Our mouths saying,
"Suppose one is bred an immigrant"
Citrus groves having been husbanded
Somewhere behind you
And you don't get too precious
Like things are very small, really
They just turn over
And get lost
Across several versions of the portrait
Ragged edged, the mirror
Its useful mercury
Sonorous behind the glass, almost a return
Before first light assembles the blue
Then what can we tell?
That we took an accent
From a dialect that never made it
Down the mountains
That we know how to get thin
And turn, saying, "I'm not
really interested in my affect"
However mannered,
"Uh-huh,"
The poem says back
“In many works, the repetition of seemingly banal material reveals unusual depth and variety within sounds and the spaces in which they are heard, provoking the audience to notice and ask questions about the peculiar world we inhabit.”
Sarah Hennies
Composer and Percussionist
“I want to express the Filipino condition of adapting to a changing and overwhelming environment, increasingly overpopulated with colonizers, technology, waste products, and climate change.”
Trisha Baga
Interdisciplinary Artist
“My work is the lens through which I try to understand humanity as a whole and my place within it. Art cannot be substituted for direct action, but I do think it can lead a person there.”
Dantiel W. Moniz
Writer
"Milk Blood Heat" (Excerpt)
“Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady — as if used to slicing herself open — while sunlight falls into the kitchen window and fills her curls with glow. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain.
The girls are at Kiera’s because her parents believe in “freedom of expression,” and they can climb trees and catch frogs and lie on the living room floor with the cushions pulled off the couch, watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from metal mixing bowls for hours. At Ava’s house they are tomboys, they are lazy, they are getting on her mother’s last nerve. Her mother doesn’t approve of Kiera, but they’ve been friends for two months — late August, when the eighth grade started — ever since Kiera came up to her during gym and told her: I feel like I’m drowning, and though there was no water in sight, Ava knew what she meant. It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. Trying to name it was like pulling up words from her belly, bucketful after bucketful, all that effort but they never quite meant what she wanted them to.
“I write the stories I wanted to read as a young Black girl in white spaces that offered me very little reflection of my own image — stories of outsiders who eschew easy categorization, stories of the absurdities of everyday life and the absurdities of Blackness in everyday life.”
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Writer
“The Old Doctor's Story, Or The Haunting of Mill Creek Medical Facility” (Excerpt)
Dr. Burton was having a no-good, very bad day, and I was more than a little proud of my role in it. I watched from the eaves of her beamed kitchen as she burned her coffee and then her tongue, cussing a little, and then as her boys — all five of them — fought her requests, demands, and eventual threats that they had better eat their cereal breakfasts or else no tv that evening and no video games. Te baby gummed a frozen teething ring without comfort and wailed even as she lifted him from his highchair and bounced him between her shoulder and hip around the exquisite space — white glass-paned cabinets and a matching walk-in pantry, turquoise and royal blue hand-cut tilework on the backsplash, stainless steel appliances, and a separate maid’s kitchen, in addition to the bar and island. Not my taste, mind you, but representative of a certain level of comfort she could only afford at the expense of people like me and her husband’s job as a professor of mechanical engineering at the selfsame university where I used to teach.
Outside, the devil beat his wife all morning, the sun glistening through lush raindrops that ran down the street and threatened flash foods on local radio, and while I don’t perform the devil’s bidding, only my own, I delighted in his contribution of additional stressors as Dr. Burton made her way to her car, parked in the driveway despite her three-car garage. I turned her umbrella inside out just as she managed to spill her travel mug onto and partly into her Wellington boots. Her limp brown hair hung about her neck in soaked clumps and dripped onto her collar. She pinched the bridge of her nose before backing out and into her commute to the hospital, stalled four times by detours where workers had placed sandbags and hazard signs. It would be a glorious day for me, to be sure, though I hadn’t outlined my course of actions yet. Rather than a set plan — though there are consistencies — I like to respond to her as the day proceeds. This method seems to cause the most damage.
“My intention is to make poetic an idea-driven, propositional, and self-implicating art situated within social anxieties by reimagining sites of contest, controversy, and consequence into those of generative public pedagogy, curiosity, and discourse.”
Cristóbal Martinez
Installation Artist
“My focus centers around dissecting notions of femininity in myth, metaphor, and the performance of Bharatanatyam — all of which reflects the aesthetics of both the culture in which it is rooted as well as the broader tapestry of global cultures.”
Mythili Prakash
Choreographer and Dancer
“With my community, I dream and steward spaces for radical pleasure, asking ourselves, How can we be together? Building physical, digital, virtual, ancestral pathways to each other again and again.”
Yo-Yo Lin
Artist
“I use traditional teachings from the past to create weavings that share my voice as an artist and activist living in today's world, looking ahead for sustainable solutions to ensure the continuation of traditional teachings and sustainable practices for future generations.”
Kelly Church
Artist Activist
“In my studio practice, weaving and the loom act as a code-switching device between anachronistic technologies, elusive identities, speculative histories, and illusory desires.”
Kira Dominguez Hultgren
Textile Artist
“I’m interested in the gap between what happened and how we talk about it — how that gap operates in the space of an individual life, in the space of a family, and in the space of a country.”
Danielle Evans
Fiction Writer
“Through portraiture and historical reimagination, I have experimented with both old and contemporary archives as a means for better understanding my own country, its history, and the possibilities that might exist for all tenses of time.”
Garrett Bradley
Artist and Filmmaker
“I aim to trouble the assumptions baked into the beliefs and technologies that mediate our existences. I aim to make sense of the world, so that we can remake it differently.”
Mimi Ọnụọha
Artist
“In classical composition, I use the wonderfully flexible and colorful orchestral tools to express my experience as a Chickasaw person.”
Jerod Impichchaachaaha Tate
Chickasaw Classical Composer
“Catharsis holds a mighty sway over what I choose to make because I believe we often respond to the story that mirrors our humanity. It’s important to me that art helps its witnesses to feel.”
Jerron Herman
Dancer
“My art poses and processes my questions, such as: What might freedom — a reality that elevates culture, life, wisdom, the intangible and mysterious — look like? Can we achieve it?”
Marjani Forté-Saunders
Choreographer, Conjurer, Corporal Spellcaster, and Storyteller
“My work is aimed at directly impacting the prison industrial complex, by creating art that explores the daily realities of structural violence, incarceration, detention, and policing in communities across the United States.”
Samora Pinderhughes
Multidisciplinary Composer
“I want to create channels of access for indigenous populations to engage and embed their worldviews within architectural design and actively reintegrating suppressed identities and indigenous knowledge as valid within the context of the architecture field.”
Selina Martinez
Architect in Training
“Each of my jewelry pieces marks a time, a place, or a memory. They are linked together with a similar visual language where I utilize black and white enamel marks on the surface of copper to indicate my hand and tick marks to represent time passing.”
Tanya Crane
Jewelry Artist and Object Maker
“Whether the content is real or fictional, I want audiences positioned in front of my characters, not above or below, with no chance to look away. It’s not a Dickensian gaze. It’s laser focused on the dirt, so you can see the flowers grow.”
Ciara Leina`ala Lacy
Filmmaker
“I aim to create inclusive, joyous, and inspiring collaborations where the art we create is a reflection of the society we live in and building toward a future society we want to inhabit.”
Kholoud Sawaf
Theater Director
“By integrating design thinking to the production of visual poetry, I’m able to question the conventions of reading, model new publishing futures, and reimagine what poetry readings can be.”
Monica Ong
Visual Poet
“Our work is committed to unlearning the conventions of architecture with hopes of developing a spatial practice that is open and generous.”
AD–WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood)
Architects and Artists
“Vodou culture has always been my source of inspiration as it introduces abstract compositions that encapsulate new ways of thinking and creating. Each rhythm produces its own unique set of resonances, and all of these sounds have at some point influenced one another, merging into a vibrational ocean of Haitian ancestral legacy.”
Val Jeanty aka Val-Inc
Afro-Electronica Composer, Turntablist, and Drummer
“As the sociopolitical climate of the US-Mexico border remains controversial, we continue the conversation of permeability and interrogate how the perception of the actual line of the border can be reimagined as a site of thriving, beauty, abundance, and creativity.”
Fronterizx Collective (Gabriela Muñoz and M. Jenea Sanchez)
Interdisciplinary Social Practice
“My work as a transdisciplinary designer, artist, and urbanist has been rooted in dynamic diasporic understandings of the Black experience, and I have used my craft to advocate for, design, plan with, and visually showcase the stories of communities of color.”
Ifeoma Ebo
Architect, Artist, and Community-Designer
“My work encourages everyday people to dream about liberatory futures in their built environments.”
Maya Bird-Murphy
Architectural Designer
“My artwork contemplates narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, longing, and faith. By weaving together familial and historical narratives, mapping data, and magical thinking, my installations evoke ritual moments of physical, metaphysical, and spiritual escape.”
Tammie Rubin
Ceramic Sculptor and Installation Artist
“My films are personal, psychedelic, and spiritual — aiming to challenge genre norms and authentically represent Indigenous stories, often in the Navajo language.”
Blackhorse Lowe
Filmmaker, Writer, Director, and Producer