The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is proud to announce its 2023 Alumni Micrograntees! Currently in its eighth year, the Alumni Microgrant Program supports creative projects by alumni of the Scholastic Awards. The continual support of The Maurice R. Robinson Fund allows the Alliance to award ten grants to Awards alumni.
Judge Alexandra Pechman selected Lumi Barron, Beihua Guo, Luke Hodges, Kelsey Ann Kasom, Ella Nowicki, Christell Victoria Roach, Kaitlin Santoro, Jordan Tiberio, Carmin Wong, and AnQi Yu.
Congratulations to all of our grantees! Read more about their inspiring projects below.
Silver Keys: Drawing and Illustration (2015), Painting (2016), Drawing & Illustration (2016), Art Portfolio (2016); Gold Keys: Painting (2015), Drawing & Illustration (2015), Painting (2016), Drawing and Illustration (2016), Art Portfolio (2016)
Hibernation | Chicago, IL
Lumi Barron is an artist working in experimental and stop-motion animation. Her works are often inspired by the materials she comes across, and the possibilities they present to try new means of making. Her animations explore the question “I wonder if I could do this?” and peek into small worlds and stories.
With this microgrant, Lumi will create Hibernation, a stop-motion animated piece created with and among living and growing plants. It uses the time it takes to create stop-motion as a piece of the work itself, and allows for the setting around a small story and characters to move and grow on its own.
Silver Key: Photography (2016), Photography (2017), Art Portfolio (2017); Gold Key: Photography (2016), Photography (2017); Gold Medal: Photography (2016)
Water Is Thicker Than Blood | Agoura Hills, CA
Beihua Guo (b. 1998) is a Chinese artist based in Los Angeles and Shanghai. He received a BA in studio art and environmental analysis from Pitzer College, California. His lens-based and installation works explore human’s fragile relationship with nature, as well as the vanishing boundary between the natural and the built environment. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Photo Open Up International Photography Festival, and Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts. He is the winning recipient of the Lucie Scholarship Program; he has received recognition in the Three Shadows Photography Award, BarTur Photo Award, and PDNedu Student Photo Contest, among others. He has been awarded artist residencies in Yellowstone, Lassen Volcanic, and Petrified Forest National Park.
In Water Is Thicker Than Blood, Guo will attempt to illuminate the ignored and forgotten history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the California Water Wars, a story of greed, violence, oppression, and disastrous environmental consequences. The Los Angeles Aqueduct project began in 1905 and opened in 1913. By the mid-1920s, Owens Lake was drained by Los Angeles, and toxic dust storms swept across the dry lakebed; the Owens Valley was financially and ecologically destroyed, farms and ranches abandoned; furious Owens Valley residents repeatedly attacked infrastructure and dynamited the Aqueduct. In 1928, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam killed more than 400 people. In the 1940s, the LAWDP extended the Los Angeles Aqueduct system farther northward into the Mono Basin; 40 years later, the water level of Mono Lake had dropped more than 40 feet. Even today, people living in the Owens Valley still deal with the environmental consequences of the Aqueduct. In addition to his photographs and archive-based art, he will use an outdoor projector to project newspaper headlines, texts, and historical images onto the surfaces of ruins, monuments, and engineering features along the Aqueduct.
Gold Medal: Writing Portfolio (2011); Gold Key: Writing Portfolio Non-Fiction (2011)
Cashing Out | New York, NY
Luke Hodges is a documentary producer based in New York City, with roots in Columbia, South Carolina. He is currently the lead producer on two projects for director Matt Nadel. One of those projects, Cashing Out, is supported by the Catapult Film Fund, and is Executive Produced by Oscar-nominee Julie Cohen (RBG). For his work, Luke has received grants and fellowships from the National YoungArts Foundation (2022 Large-Scale Project Grant for Alumni), the South Carolina Arts Commission (2021 Emerging Artist Grant), Indie Grits Labs (2019-2020 “Real Fiction” Fellowship, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts), and others.
With his microgrant, Hodges will help fund Cashing Out. At the height of the AIDS crisis, many gay men sold their life insurance policies to investors for quick cash. Cashing Out is a documentary short that charts the rise and fall of the hundred-million-dollar “gay-death-profiteering” industry that grew out of their desperation, and that spotlights one of its earliest investors: the filmmaker’s father.
Silver Key: Drawing (2012); Gold Key: Drawing (2011), Drawing (2012)
Dancing With My Hands | Columbus, MI – London, UK
Born in Detroit, and raised in the countryside, after being awarded by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Kelsey began her creative journey in Chicago where she earned a BFA in Fashion Design at Columbia College Chicago in 2016—with an award-winning thesis sponsored by Fashion Group International. She exhibited her work at the International Textile and Apparel Association prior to working for Anna Sui and Valentina Kova through back-to-back seasons at NYFW. Kelsey moved to London in 2019 to pursue a Graduate Diploma in Fashion at Central Saint Martins. In 2020, she began her MA in Womenswear at the Royal College of Art, in the School of Design. While at RCA, Kelsey exhibited her work in Detroit’s Annual XLVIII Exhibition. She was a finalist in several competitions including the British Library x BFC Competition. Kelsey was featured in Grazia Magazine as part of Grazia X CSM: A New Age for Women in Fashion and her work was published in WWD, S/ Magazine, 1 Granary: Reimagining Materiality. Kelsey was also published in The Dyslexian where she was identified as 1 of 5 creators whose dyslexia gives them the ability to design, build, and define the embodiment of the dyslexic aesthetic. Since graduating Kelsey’s work has been exhibited throughout England and the USA. Kelsey’s work was commissioned to exhibit during neurodiversity month in San Francisco at The Arion Press Gallery for the Dyslexic Dictionary, Zari Gallery for London’s Graduate Art Showcase, and Vanner Gallery in Salisbury, England. Her work was recently selected to be exhibited in this year’s Creative Climate Awards held in NYC as part of the Human Impacts Institute.
With the microgrant, Kelsey will continue to evolve her most recent work, Dancing With My Hands.
“The work explores an indescribable need to exhaust material iterations – to challenge the properties of what we know to then celebrate what something can become. My research began with analyzing the obsessions within my creative process—how can I make a finely woven fiber stronger? Why is this important to me? Am I the fiber?”
Through conflicting sensations, Kelsey unveils the intimate relationship she shares with her material language. “Draping for me is like dancing with my hands. A rhythm of make – allowing me to translate how I feel into form. A reflection of intensity beyond reason that consumes the self, by creating so passionately that pain takes the form of pleasure. Through my creative process, I heal.” Kelsey is building sculptures in relation to the body that are made up of thousands of silk satin-faced organza patterns, individually laser cut on the bias, hand dyed into 11 hues, and then French seamed at 3mm. The inverted seams control a narrow space between a gradual transition of color while concealing what exists from the inside. The rods within each seam want to explode out of their channels equally as much as they want to feel its protective barrier—creating a desire of their own to put pressure on confinement.
Silver Key: Poetry (2016); Gold Medal: Critical Essay (2018); American Voices Award: Critical Essay (2018); Gold Medal: Critical Essay (2018)
Printing in Prison: Artists and Writers in the Penal Press, 1933-1963 | Madison, WI
Ella Nowicki is an emerging museum professional from Madison, WI. She holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and has worked for art institutions in Wisconsin and Connecticut. Her research focuses on twentieth-century American art and politics. She is interested in digital art history and recently produced a short film about 1930s British muralism with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. This fall, she will begin a master’s degree in art history.
With this microgrant, Nowicki will undertake archival research on illustrated periodicals that were mailed between prisons in the early and mid-twentieth century. A short film will highlight specific works of art and writing from the penal press. Through a combination of video and text, the project will explore how incarcerated artists and writers used the penal press to reshape the experience of time, space, and community in prison. Working primarily with the Wisconsin Historical Society’s collection of prison newspapers, Nowicki will also trace connections between early twentieth-century sites of incarceration and current debates about carceral spaces in Wisconsin.
Silver Key: Poetry (2012), Short Story (2012), Poetry (2013), Poetry (2014); Gold Key: Poetry (2014), Dramatic Script (2014), Personal Essay/ Memoir (2014), Writing Portfolio (2014); Silver Medal: Writing Portfolio (2014)
“Love in a Decade of Death,” a section of my book entitled, “Bluesing” | Oakland, CA
Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated poet and performer from Miami, Florida. As a descendant of Miami’s first Black Pioneers, she writes about Blackness, the Blues, and many different types of love. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami after graduating from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing & African American Studies. She writes poetry that embraces and expands the Southern Gothic to the tropics. Her recent work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, Obsidian Literary Journal, Scalawag Magazine, The Miami Rail, and SWIMM Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poetry entitled, “Bluesing.”
As Roach explores land and lineage through relationships, she finds herself drawn to her literary landscape: South Florida. Her grandparents fell in love in Overtown and honeymooned in South Beach. Their relationship weathered the Vietnam War, and her grandmother says her husband, “never came back” from the war. Similarly, Roach’s first love asked her to be his girlfriend the day we heard about Trayvon Martin. By overlapping the BLM movement and the Vietnam War, she plans to write a series of ekphrastic epistolary poems while exploring exhibits, archives, and the landscape of Miami. This examination of Black love in the wake of Black death engages the resiliency, absurdity, and spirituality of those seeking freedom and safety in love.
Gold Portfolio (2009); National Silver Portfolio (2009)
Fractured Consciousness | Riverside, CT
Kaitlin Santoro is an interdisciplinary artist who splits her time working between New York City and Philadelphia. Working across photography, video, glass, and printmaking, her work explores time, impermanence, loss, and memory. Santoro’s work has been exhibited internationally and was recently included in exhibitions at the International Center of Photography and the International Print Center of New York. She has attended residencies at the Manhattan Graphics Center, Pilchuck Glass School, Sculpture Space, and Oxbow School of Art. She received her BFA from the University of Connecticut, and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
With this microgrant, Santoro will explore the theme of memory and its alternating state through the medium of glass. In a process that exemplifies experimentation, she will work with fractured glass, laser etching, and pigment to create imagery that reflects the personal experience of losing one’s memory and doubting one’s mind. This body of work will push her exploration of memory, impermanence, and ephemerality in material that is long-lasting, but highlights the fragility of time and the fleeting nature of one’s life. These works will be developed during the Emerging Artists in Residence program at Pilchuck Glass School, showcased in an exhibition in Philadelphia, PA, in her teaching portfolio, and at a presentation at the Glass Art Society Annual Conference.
Gold Keys: Photography (2010), Photography (2011); Gold Medal: Photography (2010), Photography (2011)
A Good Place to Dream | Brooklyn, NY
Jordan Tiberio is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She began making photographs at the age of 15 in her hometown of Rochester, NY; a city rich in photographic history that helped inform her visual vocabulary and understanding from a young age. She has coined her work as ‘the odd in the ordinary’— where mundane, everyday objects and landscapes come to life in beautiful displays of light and color. She received her BFA in Photography from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015 and has since gone on to teach high school students in the medium at the university. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and North America, and she is a recipient of the Macy’s/Gordon Parks Foundation Scholarship. Working full time as a freelance photographer, her work spans both the editorial and commercial worlds, having worked for clients such as FILA, Urban Outfitters, Steve Madden, Everlane, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, Vox, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Self Magazine, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
With this microgrant, Tiberio will create a print run of a new body of work titled A Good Place to Dream, which was created during her time at the Chateau Orquevaux Artist Residency in the summer of 2022. While our current way of life is heavily focused on screens and digital archives, Tiberio feels a strong need to create a printed archive of her work, acknowledging the great drawbacks and potential long-term complications of having artistic work live only in digital spaces. Having prints made of the project will also help facilitate studio visits as she proposes a solo show of the work to galleries. These prints will in turn be used for her future exhibition.
Honorable Mention: Writing Portfolio (2014)
Black Power, Dub Poetry, and the Shaping of Global Consciousness | State College, PA
Carmin Wong (she/her/We) is a poet, playwright, and educator, whose disposition, intentionality, and care for humanity invokes a tradition of Black feminist thinking. Immigrating from Georgetown, Guyana, to South Jamaica, Queens, New York, Carmin became a first-generation college student earning a BA in English with a minor in Playwriting from Howard University. She also holds an MFA in poetry writing from the University of New Orleans and served as an Associate Poetry Editor of Bayou Magazine. Carmin is currently pursuing a dual-title PhD in English Literature and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and she teaches poetry reading and writing at Centre County Correctional Facility. Her poetry, plays, and research center transnational Black identities with attention to written and oral poetries/literatures in the United States and Anglophone Caribbean. Carmin’s poetry has received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, and her poetry was broadcast on WRBH 88.3 and featured in Obsidian; The Quarry; Sou’wester; Xavier Review; and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist grants from Poets & Writers Magazine and Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr, along with fellowships from Furious Flower Poetry Center, Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT), The Watering Hole, and Wild Seeds Writers Retreat. She is the co-writer of A Chorus Within Her, a Choreopoem produced by Theater Alliance. To learn more about her and her work, visit theCarminWong.com.
With her microgrant, Wong will travel to Kingston, Jamaica to continue tracing the literary history of Dub Poetry, a genre of spoken-word poetry that emerged out of Dub Music and post-independent Jamaica. The genre became popular in Jamaica and among Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Toronto, Canada; London, England; and elsewhere. She plans to use this grant to access 20th-century poets and communities of practice and expound upon womanist perspectives of Dub Poetry and its relevance as a ‘black cultural renaissance.’ She seeks to examine the many social, political, and aesthetic influences of the genre, its connection to the global Black Power Movement, and its shift to the outskirts of public attention. This research trip is important to the development of Wong’s creative and critical practices because of her connection and attention to Black literature and orature and the African Diaspora, specifically as a Guyanese-American writer and researcher.
Gold Key: Writing (2015); Best-in-Grade Award: Writing (2015); Gold Medal: Writing (2015)
Junktown Cinema Club: Cinema Summer 2023 | Grand Junction, CO
AnQi Yu grew up on Ute Land, in a region also known as Western Colorado. A multidisciplinary artist, she makes films, puts on plays, and writes fiction. AnQi is also the Artistic Director of Junktown Cinema Club, a space for watching independent films in Western Colorado. Inspired by the fairytales she read as a child and her upbringing in small-town America, she hopes to create work that spins wondrous mythologies out of seemingly ordinary people, places, and histories. AnQi received her B.A. in Film & Media Studies from Stanford University in 2021.
With her microgrant, and through her film & media organization Junktown Cinema Club, Yu will organize “Cinema Summer 2023,” a summer film screening series in Grand Junction, CO. Junktown Cinema Club’s mission is to build a more compassionate, resilient, and imaginative local community through the medium of cinema, by programming film screenings to facilitate eye-opening encounters between local and global perspectives, and organizing filmmaking workshops to empower local residents to tell their own stories. The organization was founded out of Yu’s deep, personal longing for more arts & culture institutions in her hometown of Grand Junction, a small city located in Western Colorado. Cinema Summer 2023 will be the second iteration of JCC’s summer screening series and will highlight the region’s vibrant artistic communities by screening films at different artistic spaces and accompanying each screening with local food, drink, and music.