Creative Research Grants
Zain Alam
Visual Arts
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Zain Alam, an artist and composer, will conduct fieldwork for the next iteration of his multi-channel installation series, Meter & Light, which reimagines the rhythms of sacred time in Islam through a mix of choreographed and documentary material. Alam will travel across South Asia to study social and ritual life as well as poetic and musical forms such as ghazal, naat, and qawwali. (Photo by Marissa Alper)
Carmen Amengual
Visual Arts
Los Angeles, CA
2025
Carmen Amengual, an interdisciplinary artist, will begin a new phase of her long-term, moving image project exploring the legacy of the 1973 and 1974 Third World Filmmakers Meetings. Amengual will trace the afterlives of specific films by traveling to European archives to access and assess the condition of rare and endangered works and train in analogue film processing and preservation.
Ian Andrew Askew
Performance Art/Theater
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Ian Andrew Askew, an artist working in music and performance, will develop a new interactive sonic instrument and performance installation exploring the moshpit as a site of ritual and release. Askew will spend time with core collaborators and community to design and prototype the SLAMDANCE pit simulator—a new instrument that converts physical impact into live sound. (Photo by Machel Ross)
Eliza Bagg
Music/Sound
Los Angeles, CA
2025
Eliza Bagg, a vocalist and composer, will develop a sonic and physical language that merges polyphonic vocal writing, ambient electronics, and movement to reimagine Renaissance vocal forms. Her research into 16th- and 17th-century madrigals will inform her use of complex electronic processing to compose a multi-layered vocal work that investigates historical and contemporary concepts of femininity and maternal identity.
Morgan Bassichis
Performance Art/Theater
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Morgan Bassichis, a comedic performer and writer, will begin their research for a new performance about Amy Winehouse. They will convene an ensemble of musicians to revisit her first show in the US (at Joe's Pub in 2007) and participate in fan-led walking tours in London to commune with Winehouse as musician, messenger, and martyr. (Photo by Bronwen Sharp)
Maura Brewer
Visual Arts
Astoria, NY
2025
Maura Brewer, a video and performance artist, will develop an essay film and multi-channel video installation tracing the origins of art-backed lending and the role of financial instruments in shaping the contemporary art world. She plans to conduct interviews and take out a loan against one of her own artworks to investigate how debt operates differently across class.
mayfield brooks
Dance
Rockaway Beach, NY
2025
mayfield brooks, a choreographer and performance artist, will develop dArK oXyGen, a sonic dance exploring the spiritual and ecological dimensions of Blackness, gospel sound, and breath. brooks will study mouth anatomy with a vocal coach and a dentist (among others) and travel to the Azores to pursue an open water diving certification to research underwater sound, breath, and movement. (Portrait photo by Emily Farthing)
Rashida Bumbray
Performance Art/Theater
Baltimore, MD
2025
Rashida Bumbray, a choreographer and curator, will develop a new performance work inspired by the porch parties of Piedmont Blues musician and dancer Algia Mae Hinton. Bumbray will travel with collaborators to North Carolina to study the Blues and flatfooting traditions associated with Hinton, whose dynamic buck dancing style and porch performances embodied community, music, and movement.
Wally Cardona
Dance
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Wally Cardona, a choreographer and dancer, will return to the intimacy of experimenting with dancers in the studio after nearly a decade of working solo. Plans involve several multi-week working periods, with intentional breaks between, to provide space to initiate, integrate, discard and return, via improvisation and the extremes of familiarity and estrangement.
Miguel Alejandro Castillo Le Maitre
Dance
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Miguel Alejandro Castillo Le Maitre, an interdisciplinary performance artist, will develop ELMO-MENTO, an ongoing choreographic and ethnographic collaboration with New Yorkers working as cartoon characters in Times Square. Castillo will conduct Spanish-language interviews with performers, hold labs to translate field research into embodied improvisational scores, and engage in archival and dramaturgical research. (Photo by Jan Rattia)
Yanira Castro
Performance Art/Theater
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Yanira Castro, an interdisciplinary artist, will travel to Puerto Rico to study traditional Vejigante mask-making alongside local artists. Castro will deepen her ongoing practice of using masks as portals for transformation and collective experience. This research will mark a return to ancestral ritual and a critical expansion of her artistic methods of engagement, imagination, and truth-telling. (Photo by Josefina Santos)
Alexandria Douziech
Visual Arts
Los Angeles, CA
2025
Alexandria Douziech, a research-based artist, will initiate a multi-city trip to the U.K. and subsequent studio experimentation with plant-based materials. Douziech will document the materials, stories, and absences embedded within U.K. botanical gardens, archives, ports, and museums tied to slavery and Indian indentured labor, creating a “sensorial archive”—her way of experiencing history through touch, taste, and embodied engagement. (Photo by Shane Coburn)
dean erdmann
Visual Arts
San Diego, CA
2025
dean erdmann, a multidisciplinary artist, will conduct site-specific research in West Texas as part of Artemis: Moon Rocket Regolith (A:MRR), a new, multi-year project investigating the geopolitical and bodily implications of sand, space exploration, and extractive technologies. Through fieldwork at locations including observatories, launch sites, and fracking and frac sand operations, erdmann will explore sand as both material and metaphor.
Yacine Fall
Visual Arts
New Haven, CT
2025
Yacine Fall, an interdisciplinary performance artist and sculptor, will travel to Suriname and Senegal to support an expanding body of work which explores the drum as a vessel of sound, memory, and Black diasporic temporalities. Fall will interview artists, family, and community leaders and take classes in movement and percussion to deepen her investigations into materiality, ritual, and memory. (Photo by Arielle Gray)
Maya Jeffereis
Visual Arts
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Maya Jeffereis, a multidisciplinary artist, will research hibakujumoku—atomic bomb survivor trees—as metaphors for resistance and survival amidst destruction. In Hiroshima, Jeffereis will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum archives, collect leaves for phytograms, interview family and community members, collaborate with local artisans, and explore poetry and oral histories connected to this history. Jeffereis will connect to ecological material practices through film and natural dye workshops.
Kyle Bellucci Johanson
Visual Arts
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Kyle Bellucci Johanson, an interdisciplinary artist, will develop work that interrogates the historical and contemporary aesthetics of political power and how aesthetics and technologies have functioned as tools of domination. Johanson will conduct research in Italy’s archives, undertake a technical workshop in digital Jacquard weaving, and dedicate extended studio time to experiment with fabrication.
DoYeon Kim
Music/Sound
Brooklyn, NY
2025
DoYeon Kim, a composer and gayageum musician, will conduct site-specific research to explore memory, grief, and resistance in connection to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. In Gwangju, Kim will engage with survivors' stories, archives, and historical sites in collaboration with a video artist.
Matthew Lax
Visual Arts
Ridgewood, NY
2025
Matthew Lax, an artist, filmmaker and writer, will begin research and production for HORSE GIRLS, an experimental film installation exploring human–animal interdependence through his mother’s and others’ relationships with horses. Drawing from family archives, interviews and documentation of equine husbandry and veterinary practices, VR simulations, and movement studies with retired racehorses, Lax will investigate themes of parenthood, disability, control, and labor. (Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber)
Erin Markey
Performance Art/Theater
Brooklyn, NY
2025
Erin Markey, a performance artist, will embark on a yearlong, collaborative experiment in deepening their musicianship—specifically through piano, voice, and composition—to support their embodied, somatic approach to songwriting and live performance. Markey aims to become a stronger composer, band leader, and performer through lessons in piano, music theory, improvisation, and classical notation.
Gabriel Mata
Dance
Washington, DC
2025
Gabriel Mata, a dance artist and choreographer, will travel to Puerto Rico and Mexico City for site-specific studio work, interviews, and archival research, including engagement with dance communities, local historians, and cultural institutions to explore embodied practices of resistance. Research activities will inform new choreographic work to interrogate nationalism, queerness, and racialized expectations of conformity through solo and collaborative performance. (Photo by Bill Cameron)
