American Artist

Queens, New York

Shaper of God

Sculpture, Digital Media

Shaper of God is an installation of sculpture and video work connecting the life and mind of Octavia

E. Butler to the migration of Black Americans to California, the epicenter of the science fiction

movement, and the rocket science industry.

Germane Barnes

Miami, Florida

Restructuring Blackness

Architecture and Design, Social Practice

Restructuring Blackness uses architectural drawings and analyses to examine African diasporic

contributions and legacies to architecture, creating a new column order that reimages American

monuments to allow for alternative histories of site, space, and identity.

Black Quantum Futurism (Rasheedah Phillips, Camae Dennis)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Time Zone Protocols: Confederate States

Multimedia, Sound Art

Time Zone Protocols: Confederate States highlights how Black people re-envision, rewrite, resist, and

dismantle material realities of clock time.

Maura Brewer

Los Angeles, California

Private Client Services

Video Art, Performance Art

Private Client Services is an essay video and performance that documents the process of laundering

money through art acquisition.

Dakota Camacho

Seattle, Washington

TÁTAOTAO

Dance, Multimedia Performance

TÁTAOTAO is a ritual performance that activates the transformative potential of Indigenous worlds.

Crystal Z Campbell

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Post Masters

Installation, Video Art

Post Masters is an experimental film, performance, painting, and publication project considering

intersections between the United States Postal System and US Military through the lens of both

Filipinx and Black histories.

Etienne Charles

Meridian Charter Township, Michigan

Earth Tones

Jazz Performance, Multimedia Performance

Earth Tones is a multimedia jazz performance featuring original compositions that document and

feature peoples and regions that are, and will be severely affected by climate change.

Alexandra Chreiteh

Somerville, Massachusetts

Sweetmeats or, Who Killed Issam Sukkar?

Literary Fiction, Multimedia

Sweetmeats or, Who Killed Issam Sukkar? is a novel written in Arabic, set in a border town between

Lebanon and Syria that explores relationships between gender and labor, global migration and

ecological disaster, mounting nationalism, and domestic violence.

Ilana Coleman, Jamie Gonçalves

Los Angeles, California

The Inventory

Documentary Film, Experimental Film

The Inventory is a feature film that juxtaposes the nonfiction testimonials of four mothers searching

for their sons who were disappeared in Mexico and an absurd fiction of a bureaucratic committee

searching for a dictionary’s missing word. At the heart of the film is the questioning of the word

disappearance, and language as a whole, in the construction of our realities.

Xavier Cortada

Palmetto Bay, Florida

The Underwater

Social Practice, Ecological Art

The Underwater utilizes socially-engaged art, community partnerships, and data visualization to

activate citizens as problem-solvers who form an equitable environmental plan as Miami faces a

future with rising seas.

Mónica de la Torre

Long Island City, New York

Parallel Interiors

Poetry, Literary Nonfiction

In a book-length literary hybrid whose working title is Parallel Interiors, Mónica de la Torre weaves

together research centering on the Cuban-born industrial designer Clara Porset and memories of

growing up in a part of Mexico City built upon modernist utopias developed by architects such as Luis

Barragán.

Du Yun

New York, New York

For Ever More—FutureTradition: An XR Opera Garden

Multimedia Performance, Installation

In For Ever More—FutureTradition: An XR Opera Garden, Du Yun experiments for the first time with

bringing centuries-old Kunqu opera to life using augmented reality, web-based virtual reality, and

large-format projection.

JJJJJerome Ellis

Virginia Beach, Virginia

ANTIPHONARY

Multimedia Performance, Poetry

ANTIPHONARY is an open-ended, ongoing song engaging the forms of book, album, and live

performance. The project seeks to transfigure archives of so-called “runaway slave advertisements”

and celebrate black and disabled freedom practices.

Alia Farid

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Migration of Forms (Working Title)

Social Practice, Installation

Migration of Forms (Working Title) is a social practice project and ever-expanding tapestry that

traces the history of Arab, South Asian, and African migration to Latin America and the Caribbean. At

the center of this wide-ranging work is Puerto Rican-Palestinian solidarity movement.

Teresita Fernández

Brooklyn, New York

Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz

Bloomington, Indiana

Ada Ferrer

New York, New York

Aponte: An Opera

Opera, Installation

This opera brings to life the fascinating story of Aponte, a free Black carpenter in nineteenth-century

Havana who created a “Book of Paintings” to inspire and organize an island-wide rebellion against

slavery in Cuba, then one of the richest, most powerful, and violent slave societies in the world.

Deborah Goffe

Holyoke, Massachusetts

Liturgy|Order|Bridge

Dance, Multimedia Performance

Liturgy|Order|Bridge is a performance installation that centers dance as the organizing principle in a

liturgy, and asks: What might it mean to engage dance practice as faith practice, performance as

communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and audience as a fellowship of

shared witness, place, and inheritance?

Clement Hil Goldberg

Los Angeles, California

Let Me Let You Go

Narrative Film, Animation

Let Me Let You Go is a comedic science fiction feature film which follows two artists who are queer

and trans that are inoculated with a serum created by a biotech billionaire, turning them both into a

fungal cross-species as the earth collapses.

Graham Haynes

New York, New York

Requiem for Young Black Men Assassinated by Police in America

Music Composition, Music Performance

Requiem for Young Black Men Assassinated by Police in America is an evening-length performance

for a 40-voice chorus and orchestra with Latin and English text reflecting on the killings of George

Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ataiana Jefferson, Stephon Clark, Philando Castille.

Jasmine Hearn

Houston, Texas

Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr

Dance, Cultural Organizing

Memory Fleet: The Return to Matr is a migrating performance and archive celebrating the living

memories and work of eight Black women of the neighborhoods of Third Ward and Acres Home on

occupied lands now known as Houston, Texas.

Randall Horton, Devin B Waldman

Bloomfield, New Jersey

Radical Reversal

Artistic Activism, Music Performance

Radical Reversal works within two correctional facilities to provide a way for incarcerated women

and men to reclaim their humanity through the creative process.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Brooklyn, New York

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

Experimental Film, Narrative Film

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire tells the story of the Caribbean writer, activist, and surrealist.

Brandon Kazen-Maddox

Brooklyn, New York

The American Sign Language Dance Theatre Project

Musical Theater, Multimedia Performance

The American Sign Language Dance Theatre Project creates a world in which authenticallyrepresented

deaf and signing dancers embark on a musical, textural, and gestural journey through

the seedy underbelly of the deaf community during the Prohibition era of the “Roaring ‘20s.”

Lucy Kim

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Melanin Images Via Genetically Modified E. coli

Bio Art, Photography

By developing a unique process for creating screen prints from melanin produced by genetically

modified E. coli, Lucy Kim explores human pigmentation and the disingenuous use of vision to justify

racial categories and inequities.

Tan Lin

New York, New York

Our Feelings Were Made By Hand

Literary Fiction, Literary Nonfiction

Our Feelings Were Made By Hand narrates the cross-generational history of a Chinese-American

family—from China to southeastern Ohio.

Marina Magalhães

Los Angeles, California

Body as a Crossroads

Dance, Multimedia Performance

Body as a Crossroads is a live dance performance and ongoing methodology that seeks to generate

(re)membering practices of body and land to mobilize the possibilities of dance-making as changemaking.

Ramón Miranda Beltrán

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Madeline Jiménez Santil

Mexico City, Mexico

Canibalia

Sculpture, Painting

Canibalia is a book and two-person exhibition which uses photography to document the natural

environment of Puerto Rico and Mexico and reappropriate colonial narratives.

Christopher K. Morgan

Takoma Park, Maryland

N(8)tive Enough

Dance, Theater

N(8)tive Enough is a dance-theatre piece built from the personal stories of a Hapa-Hawaiian, hula,

modern dance, kitschy pop culture images, and humor, asking audiences to reflect on what it means

to be Native while highlighting the expectations, misperceptions, and misinterpretations of Native

identity.

Cyrus Moussavi

Chicago, Illinois

Somebody’s Gone

Documentary Film

Somebody’s Gone is a documentary about 94-year-old spiritual singer Brother Theotis Taylor, told

through a remarkable archive of footage collected by his son, Hubert.

Cheswayo Mphanza

Chicago, Illinois

Zambia: Tomorrow the Moon!

Poetry

Zambia: Tomorrow the Moon! is a meta-documentary hybrid poetry/prose project that imagines and

re-imagines a cavalcade of fictional Zambian writers, political and historical figures from the 17th to

the 20th century.

Mimi Onuoha

Brooklyn, New York

Ground Truth

Software, Installation

In Ground Truth, Mimi Onuoha will build a machine-learning model that finds counties in the US that

contain convict-leasing-era mass burial graves.

Karthik Pandian

Harvard, Massachusetts

Lucid Decapitation

Experimental Film, Literary Fiction

Lucid Decapitation is a feature film that conducts the energy of loving destruction into mythic form,

interweaving Indigenous prophecy, Black music, and Hindu cinema to challenge the colonial

monument’s claim on space and time.

Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana

Denver, Colorado

Backside

Documentary Film

Backside is a feature documentary film that intimately explores the daily work, friendship, dreams,

and expertise of the underrecognized migrant workers behind the Kentucky Derby, the most famous

horse race in the world. Following a racing season from beginning to end, this observational film

reveals the web of class, labor, and wealth in the American South.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Brooklyn, New York

Black Orbits

Digital Media, Photography

Black Orbits is a digital [an]archive of Black vernacular photographs that lives at the intersection of

Black privacy and interiority, the archival impulse to collect and share, and contemporary

controversies over the ownership of Black vernacular photographs.

The Revolution School

Jennifer Moon

Culver City, California

Clara Philbrick

Long Beach, California

Devin Alejandro-Wilder

Austin, Texas

Jessie Closson

Claremont, California

My Little BEI🤖 🐱 : Robot Animal Familiars

Software, Social Practice

My Little BEI 🤖🐱 : Robot Animal Familiars are AI in the form of an app or robot animal companions.

BEIs 🤖🐭 help us process cyclical underlying traumas and feelings that are produced by and

perpetuate systems of oppression.

Sarah Rosalena

Los Angeles, California

Standard Candle

Craft, Digital Media

Standard Candle rethinks astronomical observatory instrumentation through feminist and decolonial

perspectives by using digital weaving and indigenous beading to reinterpret telescopic images in

textile form.

Viva Ruiz

Brooklyn, New York

Thank God for Abortion Telenovela Pilot

Artistic Activism, Narrative Film

Thank God for Abortion Telenovela Pilot is a scripted narrative, utilizing the hallmark drama of the

form to disseminate the message that abortion is healthcare.

Suneil Sanzgiri

Brooklyn, New York

Two Refusals (Working Title)

Experimental Film, Documentary Film

Two Refusals is a feature-length experimental essay film that looks to sites of refusal, rejection, and

revolt across India and Africa, and the bonds of solidarity that developed across the two continents

against the Portuguese Empire.

Jacques Schwarz-Bart

Medford, Massachusetts

Mosaic (music from the African Diaspora)

Music Composition, Music Performance

In Mosaic (music from the African Diaspora) Jacques Schwarz-Bart will collaborate with master

musicians from the Caribbean, North Africa, and South America to create jazz arrangements from

their specific musical traditions.

Paola Segura Cornelio

New York, New York

Bal Trips

Installation, Artistic Activism

Bal Trips is a fictional travel agency, website, and installation that help tourists travel to “developing”

nations without fear of spreading colonization, eurocentrism, and exploiting their privilege.

Nyugen Smith

Jersey City, New Jersey

See Me See We

Sculpture

See Me See We is a series of contemporary sculptural portraits of Nyugen Smith’s African ancestors

represented through brass busts in the artist’s image and likeness, informed by research on facial

scarification, hairstyles, and body adornment traced back to their ethnic groups of origin dating back

more than 500 years.

Mikaal Sulaiman

New Haven, Connecticut

Project Black Plague

Music & Theater

Project Black Plague is a sound performance experienced through headphones, revealing a

comprehensive diagnosis and trial-tested antidote for racism through deep epigenetic research.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi

Waban, Massachusetts

R.S. in Cody: Heart Mountain

Theater, Sound Art

R.S. in Cody: Heart Mountain is an evening-long work for music theater whose subject involves the

fluidity and malleability of identities in the light and shadow of Japanese-American Internment during

World War II.

Sam Tam Ham

Portland, Oregon

Te Moana Meridian

Opera, Performance Art

Te Moana Meridian is a sweeping interdisciplinary collaborative art project, site-responsive

experimental opera, and bona fide proposal to the United Nations to relocate the international Prime

Meridian from Greenwich, England to its antipodean coordinates, the open waters of Te Moananui-ā-

Kiwa —the South Pacific Ocean.

Steven Tamayo

Omaha, Nebraska

4 Years

Cultural Organizing, Painting

For 4 Years, Steven Tamayo and the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Wóuŋspe (Defenders of the Water

School) will paint twelve traditional buffalo robes to help revive lost but essential pieces of Lakota

culture.

Justin Randolph Thompson

Florence, Italy

Surveying Gravity

Jazz Performance, Artistic Activism

In Surveying Gravity Justin Randolph Thompson will explore his grandfather’s legacy in a

performance that engages the labor of legacy maintenance.

Marcos Varela

New York, New York

ICE Storm

Jazz Performance, Multimedia Performance

Through an album and multimedia site-specific performances, Marcos Varela will explore the events

of 2020 and 2021—including the pandemic, reckoning on racism, 2020 election, and ongoing sociopolitical

divisions.

Edisa Weeks

Brooklyn, New York

3 RITES: Life, Liberty, Happiness

Dance, Multimedia Performance

3 RITES: Life, Liberty, Happiness is a three-part performance that interrogates why life, liberty, and

happiness were included in the U.S. Declaration of Independence as inalienable rights.

Pioneer Winter

Miami, Florida

DJ Apollo

Dance, Multimedia Performance

DJ Apollo is an immersive physical theatre piece that reimagines the Greek myth of Apollo and the

subsequent 20th-century neoclassical ballet as a story of a fallen idol who has traded the lyre for

vinyl.

Pinar Yoldas

La Jolla, California

Dark Botany: the Dark Banana Plant and other Accelerated Photosynthesis Species

Architecture and Design, Ecological Art

Dark Botany is a speculative design installation that explores the tension between technophobia and

technophilia through the lens of a plant world altered to facilitate faster carbon capture.

Zhalarina

New Port Richey, Florida

As Good As Mine

Theater, Performance Art

As Good As Mine is the story of a family seized abruptly with supernatural ability at the worst possible

time. Based on the real-life events of Zhalarina’s family, this production investigates what truly makes

a hero and how far a father might go to save his child.