The Ghost Bike Fellowship is a four-month paid creative residency for Brooklyn-based cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers to process the crisis of traffic violence in our borough. Fellows will participate in workshops with local leaders in transportation justice, help maintain existing Ghost Bike memorials, and collaborate on an interactive public event that envisions a joyful future of safe streets in NYC.
We will be welcoming six participants in this year's Fellowship.
CLICK ON THE DROP-DOWN MENUS TO READ ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP AND APPLY
The 2020-2022 LES Coastal Community Fellowship was a three-year paid creative residency for a group of neighbors and stakeholders in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to reflect on the decade since Hurricane Sandy, build upon existing community resilience to climate impacts, and envision a thriving future for the neighborhood through performance-making. Ten participants, selected from an open application process and follow-up interviews, met (virtually) in October 2020, presenting original work on Zoom, and in person in October 2021, presenting the next phase of work on Avenue B as part of Fourth Arts Block's Open Art Outside event. The LES Fellowship culminated in October 2022 at the ten-year anniversary of Sandy with a public performance event.
The 2020 & 2022 iterations of the LES Fellowship were co-produced and facilitated with Arts & Climate Initiative.
The 2020 Lower East Side Coastal Community Fellowship was made possible in part with public funds from Creative Learning, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of former Governor Andrew Cuomo and administered by LMCC. LMCC serves, connects, and makes space for artists and community.
October 22, 2022, 6pm
Flamboyan Theater in the Clemente Soto Vélez Center
107 Suffolk St., Manhattan
FREE
A performance event ten years after Superstorm Sandy weaving together video time capsules, historic love letters, multimedia explorations of a local supermarket’s legacy and short plays to tell stories of the neighborhood’s past and future climate resilience. Free food and drinks!
Created and performed by Keno Burckhardt, Jennifer Chiao, Antígona González, Amy Lee, Jonathan Martinez, Joshua Martinez, and Tatyanna Santana
Directed by Megan Paradis Hanley
Additional performances by Miranda Hall Jiménez and Jackie Rivera
Sound Design by Alyssa Jackson
Technical Support by Tavish Miller
Past LES Fellows included Felicia Gordon, Sandra Santana, and Minna Periniva
Watch Echoes of Liberation: A People’s Calling, the short film created by Donnay and Diana (with Raghav Ravi, Cyán Williams, and Nkoula Badila and her mom) and included as part of the June 20, 2020 Fellowship culminating Zoom event. In addition to sharing the film, Donnay and Diana led attendees in guided meditation, free writing, and collective song-making in the legacy of Freedom Songs. Congratulations to Donnay and Diana on their six-month collaboration!
2020 DUET FINALISTS
Cecilia Lim, Anita Raman, Cata Romo, Y?
2020 Fellowship Producer
Noelle Viñas is a Uruguayan-American playwright, educator, and theater-maker from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation and a 2019 Djerassi Resident Artist. Her play Derecho won the 2019 John Gassner Playwriting Award, was an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Jane Chambers Award, a 2019 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship semifinalist and a 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist. Her play La Profesora was produced by TheatreFirst and is in development for a podcast called Abuelito with We Rise Production. Other past favorite jobs include being HowlRound’s first staff assistant at Emerson College, running Annandale High School’s theater program alongside Theater Without Borders in Virginia, and producing her play Apocalypse, Please in San Francisco with Kevin Vincenti. She is currently attending Brooklyn College for her MFA in Playwriting under Erin Courtney.
Thank you to our wonderful 2020 selection committee: Josh Browne (Ph.D., Columbia University Earth & Environmental Engineering, Founder Rho AI & Superhero Clubhouse Officer – New York, NY), Houston Cypress (Director, Love the Everglades Movement -Miccosukee Otter Clan), Shy Richardson (2019 Superhero Clubhouse Fellow and Program Director, El Puente Bushwick Leadership Center – New York, NY), Meena Malik (Program Manager, Theater, New England Foundation for the Arts – Los Angeles, CA), Claire Moodey (multidisciplinary theater artist & Superhero Clubhouse Ambassador- Brooklyn, NY), and Mauricio Pita (Community Programs Manager, Arena Stage & Superhero Clubhouse Ambassador- DC).
2018-2019 Fellows
Shy Richardson is a writer, performer, teaching artist, from New York City. She has performed internationally, in NYC, and has worked with youth from the barris of Barcelona, to the borough of Brooklyn. She believes wholly in the transformative nature of the arts, and their value in social justice and reform. She hopes to see the world using her art as a tour guide, as well as continue to use poetry and hip hop to inspire and develop youth at home, and beyond its borders.
Karina Yager leads interdisciplinary research on the human dimensions of climate change. Her current NASA research integrates satellite image analysis with ethnographic studies to understand climatic and social drivers of South American land use change. She works with indigenous pastoralists & local stakeholders to identify adaptive strategies for sustainable management of mountain ecosystems impacted by climate change. She is Assistant Professor in Sustainability Studies, School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, New York.
Shy and Karina collaborated for the first time in our 2018-2019 Fellowship to explore the displacement of Puerto Ricans following Hurricane Maria. Their piece, Trés Marias, is a new performance work that explores climate justice, Puerto Rican identity, and hope after hurricanes. Weaving personal stories of loss and resilience that bridge New York, Puerto Rico, and the glacial Andes, Trés Marias is a love poem to the communities that emerge from the wreckage of displacement.
2018-2019 Associate Fellows
In 2018-2019, performer/healer Aya Lane and photographer/filmmaker Imani Dennison created a work-in-progress performance, Drexciya Study II. Drexciya is an underwater mythical resistance story honoring the black diaspora’s complicated relationship to water. It seeks to question what can be done to help heal our relationship to water so that we don’t lose it. Click on their photos for full bios.
2018-2019 Fellowship Presentation
Originally called the Science and Stage Collaborative Fellowship, our residency program was piloted in the fall of 2016 in NYC with a mixed ensemble of theater and environmental professionals.
Our original Fellows were Anthony Dvarskas, Nadia Foskolou, James Kennedy, Jame McCray, Stephanie Pearl, Skye Van Rensselaer. The Fellowship was managed by Alexandra Tsubota. The Fellowship was originally conceived and developed by Sergio Botero, Josh Browne, Jonathan Camuzeaux, Lanxing Fu, Nada Petrovic, and Jem Pickard.
It was originally called the Science and Stage Collaborative Fellowship, an initiative uniting environmental professionals and theater artists in a semester-long residency to tackle pressing questions about humanity’s relationship to climate change.
The Fellowship was an opportunity to work collaboratively with professionals in other disciplines to address critical issues. Fellows actively practiced creating devised theater based on rigorous research, and learned new ways of communicating their work to a public audience.
From September-December 2016, the ensemble studied climate change topics and approaches to theater-making through a series of workshops, excursions, and rehearsals. The Fellowship culminated in the performance of a new work made by the ensemble, which took place on December 18, 2016 as the centerpiece of Superhero Clubhouse’s annual Solstice Celebration.