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.
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.
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.
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)
Cristina Molina
Visual Arts
New Orleans, LA
2025
Cristina Molina, a visual artist, draws from experience growing up in Miami and living in New Orleans—two quickly disappearing landmasses—to explore our spiritual and material relationships to waterbodies. Molina will explore the Mississippi River from headwaters to delta, as well as coastal locations at the Gulf and Atlantic, to develop movement scores, video performances, and ceramic vessels from wild river clay.
