2019 Fellowship Award Recipients
Fellowship in Ethnic and Folk Arts: Liz Carroll, Mundelein
A native of Chicago’s South Side, internationally acclaimed fiddler and composer Liz Carroll is one of Irish music’s brightest stars. Her talent and dedication to her craft have earned her a National Heritage Fellowship; a Grammy nomination; and Ireland’s Gradam Ceoil TG4 Composer of the Year Award, honoring her contributions to the repertoire of Irish music. Liz has toured as a solo artist and with the Greenfields of America, Trian, as the duo Liz Carroll & John Doyle, String Sisters, and most recently as a duo with guitarist and pianist Jake Charron. Liz's commitment to the past and the future of Irish music has been demonstrated in myriad ways. Her recordings and her compositions bow to tradition but also take the music in surprising and new directions. Liz's performances range from concert stages as far away as China and New Zealand, to sessions with local musicians in Chicago and Milwaukee. She is passionate about sharing the music she has learned from her Irish-born father (who played the accordion), and from Chicago's immigrant community of musicians, as she spends part of each year teaching Irish fiddling and Irish music at festivals and music camps throughout the world.
Fellowship in Media Arts: Tirtza Even, Chicago
A documentary-maker and video artist, Tirtza Even has produced both linear and interactive video work that has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Israel and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight, Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts Award, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Awards, Chicago (winner of top award); Golden Gate Awards Certificate-of-Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival; Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation; Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. Even has been an invited guest and featured speaker at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA) and others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France, Video Data Bank (VDB) and Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), Canada. Even is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.
Fellowship in Media Arts: Carlos Javier Ortiz, Chicago
Carlos Javier Ortiz is a visual artist who uses film and documentary photography to focus on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty and marginalized communities. In 2016, Carlos received a Guggenheim Fellowship for film/video. His films We All We Got, A Thousand Midnights and Shikaaw have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles International Film Festival, AFI Film Festival (2016 winner of best cinematography short film), New Orleans International Film Festival, PBS Online Film Festival and Art Basel, Black and Blue, Stadtkino Basel Cinema. Carlos Javier Ortiz photography and films have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and live in the collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Library of Congress. In addition, his photos were used to illustrate Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations (2014) article, which was the best-selling issue in the history of the Atlantic Magazine. His photos have also been published in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, among many others.
Fellowship in Music Composition: Jacob Bancks, Moline
Praised as “colorfully orchestrated, invitingly lyrical” (The New York Times) and “highly caffeinated” (The Boston Globe), the music of composer Jacob Bancks has been performed by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, the Sarajevo Philharmonic, the Annapolis Symphony, the South Dakota Symphony, eighth blackbird, Pacifica Quartet, American Modern Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, and many others. Among his most significant projects are close collaborations with marimbist Makoto Nakura, mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, pianist Kuang-Hao Huang, the United States Marine Band, and the Quad City Symphony. He has earned awards, honors, and commissions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, BMI, the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the U.S. Department of Education, and Sigma Alpha Iota international music fraternity. Recordings of his music have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, American Public Media’s Performance Today, and WFMT. He studied composition with Shulamit Ran, Marta Ptaszynska, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, and Augusta Read Thomas, earning degrees from the University of Chicago, Eastman School of Music, and Wheaton College. In 2020, the Quad City Symphony will stage his first opera Karkinos, co-commissioned by Living Proof Exhibit and inspired by over thirty in-person interviews with people whose lives have been impacted by cancer. He serves on the faculty at Augustana College.
Fellowship in Music Composition: Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Chicago
Janice Misurell-Mitchell, composer, flutist and vocal artist, teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has taught and performed in the US, Europe, Morocco, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, India, Taiwan and China. For over 25 years she performed in Chicago as a member and Co-Artistic Director of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble; she is now a member of the Chicago’s 6Degrees Composers. Her honors include grants from Meet the Composer, the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and awards and commissions from the National Flute Association, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Northwestern University and numerous performers. Her CD, Vanishing Points, was described by Frank J. Oteri on NewMusicBox.org as “seamlessly weaving elements from high modernism with jazz, Latin, blues, and even funk into an amalgam that is completely its own thing”. Her solo CDs are on Southport Records; other recordings are on MMC, OPUS ONE, Capstone, meerenaishim.com and Arizona University Recordings. Her videos Karawane, After the History, Sermon of the Spider and others are available on Youtube; an interesting footnote is that her video, Scat/Rap Counterpoint now has over 132,000 hits. https://www.jmisurell-mitchell.com
Fellowship in Performance-Based Arts (Choreography & Performance Art): Jennifer Monson, Urbana
Jennifer Monson (Artistic director of iLAND-interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance) uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections between environmental, philosophical and aesthetic approaches to knowledge and understandings of our surroundings. She creates large-scale dance projects informed and inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. Her projects include BIRD BRAIN (2000-2006), iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir (2007) Mahomet Aquifer Project (2009), SIP(sustained immersive process)/watershed (2010), Live Dancing Archive Vol. I & II (2012 and 2014), in tow (2015) and bend the even (2018). Monson has been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign since 2008 and was a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont (2010-16). She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including The Doris Duke Impact Artist Award 2014, Guggenheim Fellowship 2004, Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship 1998, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. www.ilandart.org
Fellowship in Performance-Based Arts (Choreography & Performance Art): Ginger Krebs, Chicago
Ginger Krebs makes performance and sculpture, which she’s presented recently in Chicago at Sector 2337, the Cultural Center, Loyola University, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists Coalition, and the Hyde Park Art Center. This year she was awarded residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) and the National Center for Choreography – Akron. These supported the development of Escapes & Reversals, an ensemble performance that premiered in March as part of the In>Time festival. In 2018 Krebs performed solos at the Seattle International Butoh Festival and elsewhere, and in 2017 she presented Minor Local Slumpage, a solo exhibition of sculpture, along with an artist’s book and interactive “sculpture tasting”, at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Her 2016 performance, Buffer Overrun, was supported by a MAP Fund grant (administered by Creative Capital) and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. It earned a four-star review and was chosen for the Best Dance of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune. Her work has been further supported by High Concept Labs, the Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, and others. Krebs has taught performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2004.
Fellowship in Poetry: Angie Estes
Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, most recently Parole (Oberlin College Press, 2018). Her previous book, Enchantée (Oberlin, 2013), won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and Tryst (Oberlin, 2009), was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion, was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Estes received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon and was Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
Fellowship in Prose: Heidi Bell, Aurora
Heidi Bell's fiction has appeared in the Southeast Review, the Chicago Reader, and the Good Men Project, among others. She works as a freelance editor and writer in Aurora. Her website is HeidiBellEditing.com
Fellowship in Prose: Emily Maloney, Evanston
Emily Maloney is the author of the forthcoming memoir COST OF LIVING (Flatiron Books), about her transformation from patient into EMT/practitioner, set against the backdrop of the failure of the American healthcare system. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, the North American Review, and the American Journal of Nursing. She has also worked as a dog groomer, pastry chef, general contractor, tile setter, catalog model, and has sold her ceramics at art fairs. She has nonverbal learning disability, a neurologically-based developmental disability similar to autism. Her essay, “Cost of Living,” which originally appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, was selected for Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison. Emily is also a MacDowell Fellow (17, 18) and a 2015 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh MFA program. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with Ori Fienberg, and their dog, Millie.
Fellowship in Scriptworks: Sandra Delgado, Chicago
Sandra Delgado is a writer, actor, and producer born and raised in Chicago. Her smash-hit play, La Havana Madrid, developed at the Goodman Theatre and produced by Teatro Vista, played to sold-out houses at both Steppenwolf Theatre and Goodman Theatre, received recognition as one of the best plays of 2017 from Time-Out and New City, and was a Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) Nominee for Best New Play. La Havana Madrid, featured in the New York Times, is back this spring at the Den Theatre. Acting credits include La Ruta at Steppenwolf Theatre, Oedipus El Rey at The Public Theater, 2666 at Goodman Theatre, Motherf**ker with the Hat at Steppenwolf Theatre, and Mojada at Victory Gardens Theater. She is a founding member of Collaboraction, ensemble member of Teatro Vista, and a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, as well as the recipient of a 3Arts Award, Joyce Award and a TCG Fox Fellowship. Sandra is one of twenty Chicago women honored in Kerry James Marshall's mural Rushmore at the Chicago Cultural Center. Her new play, Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars, received a developmental production at the Goodman Theatre, where she is currently under commission to write a play for the people of Chicago. Her co-adaptation of A Doll’s House with Michael Halberstam will be seen at Writer’s Theatre this Fall. www.sandradelgado.net
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Photography): Paul D’Amato, Riverside
Paul D'Amato (American, 1956- ) was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest, civil rights, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year - often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight trains - as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale School of Art, he moved to Chicago where he discovered the communities of Pilsen and Little Village. The pictures and writing D'Amato produced there over the next fourteen years were made into the book, “Barrio" published by the University of Chicago Press. His most recent book of images made in the African-American community on the west side of Chicago, entitled "Here/Still/Now" published by Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg, was awarded the Lucie Foundation Book Prize in 2018. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago among many others.
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Sculpture & Interdisciplinary): Joseph Grigely
Joseph Grigely is an artist and writer. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the MCA, Chicago; the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; and the Whitney, Venice, Berlin, Istanbul, Liverpool, and Sydney Biennials. Recent solo shows and projects took place at Marian Goodman Gallery, London; Air de Paris, Paris; Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. His work is in collections that include the Tate Modern, London; the Stedelijk, Amsterdam; Kunsthaus, Zurich; SMAK, Ghent; and both MoMA and the Whitney in New York. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. His books include Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), Conversation Pieces (1998), Blueberry Surprise (2006), Exhibition Prosthetics (2010), MacLean 705 (2015), and Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock (2016), and essays on disability theory and body criticism. He has a D.Phil. from Oxford University and is Professor of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Sculpture & Interdisciplinary): Edra Soto, Chicago
Edra Soto (b. Puerto Rico) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, focus on fostering relationships with a wide range of communities. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a bachelors degree from Escuela de Artes Plastics de Puerto Rico. Soto has been awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the DCASE for Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago amongst others. She has attended residency programs at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (FL), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), Beta-Local (PR), Arts/Industry at the Kohler Art Center (WI), Ragdale Foundation (IL), Art OMI (NY), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA) and Project Row Houses (TX). Her co-curation for the exhibition Present Standard at the Chicago Cultural Center was praised with overwhelmingly positive reviews from the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, PBS The Art Assignment and Artforum. Soto was recently featured in Newcity’s annual Art 50 issue Chicago’s Artists’ Artists. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is a lecturer for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Painting, Craft, and Installation): Bethany Collins, Chicago
Bethany Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work is fueled by a critical exploration of how race and language interact. Language is both her subject and primary material—from dictionaries and encyclopedias to literary journals and newspaper archives. Language is also a prism through which she explores American history and the nuance of racial and national identities. Collins’ work has been exhibited at: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Locust Projects, Miami and The Center for Book Arts, New York, among others. She has also received grants, awards, and residencies from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Hyde Park Art Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Artadia among others. Collins was the 2015 recipient of the Hudgens Prize and a 2018 recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship.
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Painting, Craft, and Installation): Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Chicago
Diana Guerrero-Maciá makes hybrid works of art and considers craft a form of consciousness. She makes works that are collaged, pieced, dyed, and stitched as a reconsideration of the field and form to ask poetic questions about our perceptions of color, symbols, and material value. Through her large-scale projects such as My First Painting, Twenty-One Years Later at the MCA Chicago, Unravelling the Rainbow, at ArtPace San Antonio, Devoured by Symbols at Tony Wight Gallery, A-Z.2 at Threewalls & Elmhurst Art Museum, and most recently Slow Blossoming at the South Bend Museum of Art & Carrie Secrist Gallery - she engages materials to question what is being seen and what inclusive histories are represented. Her studio practice is informed by her deep understanding and intuitive fascination with textiles, paintings, and designed objects. Guerrero-Maciá has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. She has created public art commissions for the Public Art Fund, in New York City & Chicago. She is a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award winner and multiple MacDowell Colony Fellow. Guerrero-Maciá received fellowships at both Skowhegan School of Art and Penland School of Craft. She is a Professor & currently Chair of the Fiber & Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley and Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago. http://www.guerrero-macia.com
Fellowship in Visual-Based Arts (Painting, Craft, and Installation): Michael Dinges, Oak Park
Michael Dinges received his Bachelors degree from the Art Center College of Design in 1982 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Chicago in 2005. He has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Miami as well as Vancouver B.C. and in Japan. In 2009 he created a mural for the CTA Arts in Transit Program. He has previously received an Artists Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2007 as well as residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Program and their Connecting Communities Program.
The following jurors reviewed this year’s submissions:
ETHNIC AND FOLK ARTS: Nicholas Hartmann, Cedar Rapids, IA; Lisa Rathje, Oak Park, IL; Robert Baron, Brooklyn, NY; Julia Olin, Berwyn Heights, MD
MEDIA ARTS: Anula Shetty, Philadelphia, PA; Abina Manning, Chicago, IL; Joe Bowman, San Francisco, CA; Brenda Webb, Skokie, IL
MUSIC COMPOSITION: Sabrina Peña Young, Buffalo, NY; Kirsten Broberg, Aubrey, TX; Marjorie Rusche, South Bend, IN
PERFORMANCE-BASED ARTS: Carron Little, Chicago, IL; Peter Taub, Chicago, IL; Marianne Weems, Santa Cruz, CA; Hector Canonge, Elmhurst, NY
LITERATURE (POETRY): Leila Wilson, Evanston, IL; Chanda Feldman, Oberlin, OH; Lisa Olstein, Austin, TX
LITERATURE (PROSE): Jacinda Townsend, Bloomington, IN; James O’Laughlin, Evanston, IL; Sheila Everett, Paw Paw, MI
LITERATURE (SCRIPTWORKS): Ruth Margraff, Chicago, IL; Erin Washburn, Philadelphia, PA; Kirsten Bowen, Washington, DC
VISUAL-BASED ARTS (PHOTOGRAPHY): Deanna Witman, Warren, ME; Marzena Abrahamik, Park Ridge, IL; Jesse Mattimoe Avina, Chicago, IL
VISUAL-BASED ARTS (SCULPTURE): Lisa Costello, Champaign, IL; Stephanie Cristello, Chicago, IL; Zachary Zetterberg, Peoria, IL
VISUAL-BASED ARTS (PAINTING, CRAFT, AND INSTALLATION): Kathyrn Koca Polite, Galesburg, IL; Kendra Paitz, Bloomington, IL; Allison Peters Quinn, LaGrange, IL; Douglas Stapleton, Chicago, IL
Follow this link for more information