GRANTEES
RULE-BREAKERS, VISIONARIES, ARTISTS
Announcing Soon
Apply to be the next Starfish grantee.
PAST GRANTEES
In 2020, we launched our pilot program with four talented mid-career artists. Our goal was to provide these proven creators with the funding, mentorship, and connections to produce a direct-to-consumer MVP—be it a short story, article, podcast, or another form of digital content—connecting directly with core audiences and securing early buy-in from community members, activists, and fans.
Three of our grantees successfully launched their MVPs, each making significant strides in their respective fields. One creator took their project even further by adapting it to multiple media, earning a GRAMMY nomination in the process.
These initiatives represent diverse approaches to storytelling and content creation, each tackling important social themes through innovative means. We’re proud to have supported these artists in the early stages of their projects and look forward to seeing how their work continues to evolve and reach new audiences.
Here's an overview of their innovative projects:
AMIR SULAIMAN
LAYING FLOWERS.:.SETTING FIRES
Visual Poem
You will be someone’s ancestor. Act accordingly.
GRAMMY-Nominated Album
Creative Village: the live-write IG community
Collaborators: Dave Chappelle, Michael Fernandez, Mikaal Sulaiman
Launching with Laying Flower.:.Setting Fires, conveying the grief and terror of what it is to be Black in America, Sulaiman blends image, sound, and spoken word into a new visual art form: the cinematic poem. SUBVERSE also includes a travel docu-series (being produced by Jon Stewart and Dave Chappelle) that explores world cultures through the lens of poetry, the poem We Must Win on the b-side of Chappelle’s upcoming 8:46 LP, the book and poetry album 11:11, and an immersive literary art installation/VR experience.
DEREK NGUYEN
BURNING BAYOU
Narrative Crime Series
Creative Village: Michelle Sugihara, Jeff Yang, Alicia van Couvering, Keith Joseph Adkins
When two Vietnamese-American children go missing in a low-income Louisiana community in 1985, police detectives unravel a series of brutal murders in a coastal town ravaged by a race war between Vietnamese immigrants and local fishing laborers backed by the Ku Klux Klan. Created by Vietnamese-American playwright and filmmaker Derek Nguyen, Burning Bayou is a true-crime narrative radio play and a film-noir-inspired episodic television crime drama that takes on issues around immigrant/refugee identity, belonging, and white supremacy.
VANESSA BENTON
GOD BLESS THE PROMISE LAND
Immersive Storytelling Experience
Creative Village: Mikhael Tara Garver, John Jennings, Shawn Taylor, Cheryl Slean
In 2035, a new global law called The Promise Land Bill 1200 has forced every country to drastically reduce its population to combat climate change. God Bless The Promise Land is a pre-apocalyptic horror television series and an Alternate Reality Game (podcast, web platform, and a series of collected photos, videos, and journal entries), set in a pre-apocalyptic America and examines the future impact of climate change on front line communities.