Creative Research Grants

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)

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)

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)

Anh Vo
Dance
Brooklyn, NY
2025

Anh Vo, a choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, will travel to Hanoi, Vietnam, to study Ca Tru, a northern Vietnamese folk singing tradition suppressed by the Communist government due to its historic entanglement with sex and drugs. Vo will immerse themselves in oral history transmission practices with the singers and musicians, to experience how the form survives despite persecution.