Our Artists and Creatives Grants provide financial support - generally up to $2,500 - to independent creatives (including collectives and collaborators) making or presenting creative work relating to or encouraging community engagement. We are committed to helping projects that depart from the routine and present new, distinct and imaginative possibilities. We primarily support projects taking place in Southern California, but sometimes those further afield that well match our guidelines. We especially encourage applications from those who have been historically excluded from the mainstream art world. This includes, but is not limited to, those who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Trans, Deaf, Disabled, Immigrant or Refugee, or Self-Taught.
Mikaelo Lacson Aguilar
2025
Hear Together
Hear Together is a unique industry gathering designed for social impact leaders, community organizers, and changemakers to connect, recharge, and celebrate their work. Set in an immersive, mindful disco atmosphere, this event blends music, movement, and meaningful dialogue to foster deep connections and collective inspiration. Changemakers often give so much to their causes that they forget to take care of themselves. By nurturing the people behind the purpose, we create a stronger, more connected community—one that’s ready to keep making an impact with renewed passion and resilience. Hear Together is about celebrating the work, the people, and the energy that fuels change.
Bahia Collective
2025
Tales of Lizards and Camels: A Film and Food Program
Deserts have historically been occupied, weaponized, and reimagined as sites for extraction by colonial forces and capitalistic projects. Bahia Collective’s Tales of Lizards and Camels: A Film and Food Program invites participants to engage with deserts as meeting points that connect our struggles and strengthen our solidarities. The program contains three main elements: a shorts program, food servings and text readings. Merging the acts of filmmaking, programming, and communal eating, the community is invited to rethink their engagement with films, creating a space where the boundaries between the screen and the audience, the film and the meal, are blurred and redefined. The event will conclude with a discussion that builds on the ideas and topics included in the films.
Joseph Godwin
2025
Move Together Initiative (Project MTI)
The Move Together Initiative is a community project where dance, health and digital literacy meet. Based in Nigeria, Joseph Godwin’s initiative focuses on physical and mental wellness and creates a community where people can attend workshops on health issues and get medical checkups on a regular basis. It will attempt to form new social dynamics through workshops, mentoring programs, and Community Dance Circles, where participants use movement to connect a social issue and cause empathy. In addition, digital education classes will provide participants with the necessary skills to navigate the digital world, thus enabling them to tell their own stories, increase their social interactions, and access opportunities outside their neighborhoods.
Mamie Green
2025
Dis-order
Directed by Mamie Green, Dis-order is an immersive performance that reimagines the Passover seder as both a communal ritual and a family drama exploring the tension between honoring tradition and rebelling against it. Through a synthesis of theater, dance, puppetry, and audience participation, Dis-order demonstrates how we as a community are moved by enacting ancient rituals and what is left spoken and unspoken when we gather around the table. During the performance, audience members become integral players in the ritual, reading from scripts and sharing physical space with the performers. This direct involvement transforms passive viewers into active participants, fostering meaningful dialogue across cultural boundaries.
Thayu Lou Hamer
2025
Building Kujichagulia: The Komunity-Led Design Against Cop City
This project was created in response to the construction of a militaristic police training facility that destroyed a forested public park in a working-class black community in Atlanta. Seeing the “Cop City” unfold, Thayu Lou Hamer and collaborators decided to ask those directly impacted, what would they design and build instead? After receiving feedback from the community, they underwent a decolonial architectural process and are moving toward building the “Komunity Kitchen” they see in their future. A guidebook is being produced that will teach community members how to design their own spaces collectively, heal the lands of greater Atlanta, build using the natural materials in abundance around them, and show the final blueprints for the “Komunity Kitchen.”
J.E. Hernández
2025
Ilnamikilispan (útero-herida/womb-wound): Aquatic Memories of Longing
Ilnamikilispan is a transdisciplinary cuicatl-opera that reimagines operatic form through the lens of Mesoamerican artistic epistemologies. It is the first work of its kind in the U.S., fusing Indigenous Mesoamerican frameworks with emergent technologies, including wearable movement sensors and interactive sound and visuals. J.E. Hernández’s narrative follows a native mother who dies giving birth to her mestizo daughter, and the two reunite in a metaphysical aquatic space beyond time. The womb-wound (utero-herida) metaphor serves as both structure and theme, exploring the interwoven histories of colonial rupture and ancestral connection. Ilnamikilispan engages native communities by creating a space where these linguistic and cultural lineages are fundamental and inseparable from the artistic process.
Umi Hsu
2025
Fruiting Bodies
A multimedia oral history project with a futurist orientation, Fruiting Bodies by Umi Hsu is a memorial laboratory inspired by fungi’s resilience and regenerative power. With a goal toward transformative healing, Umi Hsu’s project explores concepts around temporality and ecology with members of the transgender and gender diverse communities. These communities are invited to participate in the making of speculative oral history recordings of their lives and afterlives. Through a series of one-on-one oral history interviews and group workshops, Fruiting Bodies provides the space for a collective, multigenerational contemplation on how we want to be remembered. The final recordings, along with fungi-inspired music compositions, will be featured in a 2026 exhibition.
Dena Igusti
2025
A Bit Tuary
A Bit Tuary is a multimedia found poetry series in which Southeast Asian NYC locals are asked to explore their relationship with grief, both current and anticipated. For Southeast Asians grieving the loss of loved ones and homes, personal artifacts become a means of collecting and/or supplementing historical archives. The artifact could be, for example, a letter from their parents, a screenshot of a conversation with a friend, or an item of clothing. The participants will be recorded interacting with the artifact and then interviewed about the item’s significance and why it is a symbol of grief. Eight to ten visual poems will be edited and written based on excerpts of the interviews and will be displayed on video and published online as text poems.
Ekene Ijeoma
2025
Black Forest: New York
Black Forest is a nationwide living monument and archive for Black lives past, present, and future. Through partnerships with local urban forestry, oral history, and community organizations, the project records about Black life and plants trees for Black lives. It includes plant-ins, tree giveaways, a phone hotline, web map, tree and story management system, sound and video artwork, and informational booklets. Black neighborhoods have historically been denied green spaces due to redlining and other policies. Currently, neighborhoods with majority people of color have 33% less tree coverage than those that are majority white. In eight years, Black Forest has recorded over 40,000 stories and planted over 40,000 trees across all 50 states.
Alejandra Martinez & Natasha Dominguez
2025
Debí Tirar Más Fotos: Documenting Community Stories, Preserving Shared Memory
The SELA Community Archive was launched in response to significant, forthcoming public infrastructure projects set to reshape Southeast Los Angeles. Born from a collective effort to document the region’s living history in light of these developments and the risks of gentrification and displacement, the archive is a mechanism for engaging diverse perspectives, cultivating collective knowledge, and supporting the community’s ongoing efforts to assert its identity and agency in the face of transformation. The exhibit will feature community-submitted photos and mementos, collections from grassroots and institutional archives, spaces for dialogue, and sections highlighting activist histories in the region. All contributions will be archived and preserved for future generations.
Ariel McCleese
2025
Trans Voices in Horror Poetry Zine
This project seeks to advocate for the power of poetry and art amidst crisis and uplift the work of emerging trans makers. Throughout historic periods of social unrest, resistance poetry has had an outsized impact on morale, achieving a galvanizing effect in the wake of adversity. Ariel McCleese will publish a poetry zine centering on the theme of lived horrors, featuring the work of 20 early-career trans poets and four early-career trans illustrators speaking to the unique challenges of our present moment. Each artist will be assigned five poems to illustrate with full creative license. The zine will be distributed freely among trans folks and allies by donating 200 copies to Bluestockings Cooperative, a queer, trans, and sex worker-owned feminist bookstore in New York City.
Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes
2025
MUJER: Mujeres United for Justice, Eco-wellness & Remembrance
MUJER: Mujeres United for Justice, Eco-wellness & Remembrance is a dynamic new social practice art project that empowers Southern California women and street vendor communities through culturally rooted creative wellness. Using mobile holistic Cultura Cura (Culture Cures) art carts, MUJER fosters healing, dialogue, and action in public spaces creating temporary convergences and creative communities for Chicanx, Latinx, immigrant, and Indigenous communities. Key components include: La Botanica del Barrio, a living, interactive sculpture blending social practice, performance, and education; and The Politricked Public (C)art, a mobile political art intervention featuring posters, poetry, projections, performances, and pláticas (talks). These carts bring art and wellness practices directly to the people, offering free, hands-on experiences in traditional remedies, creative activism, and cultural healing.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
2025
Tidal
Queer, transgender, and BIPOC communities in the U.S. have historically been dispossessed of access to public beaches through redlining policies and policing, as well as bullied within or excluded from the scene of surfing through its heteronormativity, transphobia, racism, and its domination by white cisgender men in competition for waves. Tidal is a participatory social documentation and portraiture project featuring queer and transgender surfers across the California coast, culminating in a traveling community art show that would be on display across major cities in California. By documenting the aesthetic refusals of gender binary culture, the athletic brilliance and oceanic intimacy of queer and trans surfers, Tidal creates visibility that intervenes on the pain of isolation and establishes a meaningful historical record.
Nina Sarnelle
2025
World Water Day for Paayme Paxaayt
In dominant LA culture, Paayme Paxaayt (aka The LA River) is thought of as a dirty and “unnatural” body of water to be avoided rather than revered. That has been slowly changing due to the advocacy of a network of engaged organizations, educators and artists with Indigenous Tongva leaders at the forefront. World Water Day for Paayme Paxaayt is a proposed 12-hour event that aims to encourage folks to consider the role that the river plays (or could play) in their lives and futures. Taking place along the river bike path, a diverse group of musicians, artists, ecologists, and naturalists will collaborate with the environment to present ecologically focused programming designed for an all-ages audience.
Alees Yvon
2025
ALIAS RADIO powered by ALIAS ENERGY
ALIAS RADIO is an eco-spiritual radio media platform reimagining sound and live transmissions as portals to interconnectedness, creativity, and earth-conscious living. Anchored in Alees Yvon’s vision of fostering healing, clean energy, and sustainable allyship, the station weaves together art, sound, and technology amplifying voices attuned to the planet's pulse. Through the power of sound, it invites audiences to experience the interconnectedness of life and to envision a world where humanity and nature coalesce in harmony. ALIAS RADIO programming will feature live transmissions, virtual sanctuaries, collaborative exchanges, and community engagement features such as call-ins and participatory sound projects that invite listeners to contribute recordings, chants, and sounds from their local environments.
Maya Simone Z. & zavé martohardjono
2025
UNDOXX: Borderless Artist Long Table on Censorship
UNDOXX is an artist-run series created, curated, and produced by zavé martohardjono, Maya Simone Z. and Jamie Chan that brings together global majority/BIPOC artists, queer and trans artists, and marginalized artists who have experienced censorship and contended with its inner workings. The project facilitates conversation and learning, generates community resources, builds power, and generates creative exchange to equip artists to navigate censorship. UNDOXX will offer a fall 2025 public event, “Borderless Artist Long Table on Censorship,” to deepen community power building and broaden resource-sharing for artists. This event will include a long table discussion followed by a post-talk reception that will bring together artists for conversation and guided activities to foster artistic collaboration.