2025 GRANTEES
RULE-BREAKERS, VISIONARIES, ARTISTS
Image Credit: Ricardo Nagaoka
Artist
Braxton Cook
Project
“Black Renaissance”
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Braxton Cook is an Emmy-winning artist and Grammy-winning producer, named a “Jazz Marvel” and “Jazz Prodigy” by The Fader, and cited by Ebony alongside Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington as a top jazz artist to watch. A Juilliard-trained saxophonist, he has toured with Christian Scott, Herbie Hancock, Jon Batiste, Rihanna, and others, and released seven projects of his own. With Black Renaissance, Braxton is pivoting from R&B back to straight-ahead jazz, building a subscription-based ecosystem that captures live jazz in single-take, highly stylized performances. Shot through a Black creative lens—director, stylist, and band—the project revives the visual energy of the Black jazz renaissance for younger audiences while reducing his dependence on constant touring through Patreon-driven support.
Black Renaissance is a model for sustainable performing arts practice — a system where live music, visual style, and direct audience connection create a long-term, artist-owned ecosystem. Starfish was designed to uplift this bold approach.
Artist
Emel Mathlouthi
Project
Divina Tempesta: Echoes of Resistance
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Emel is the Tunisian-American singer-songwriter whose anthem “Kelmti Horra” became the voice of the Arab Spring and was later performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Across five albums, she has fused electronic composition, North African roots, and avant-garde performance into a singular, politically charged practice. With Starfish, she is launching Divina Tempesta, a five-part music film and digital performance series in which she embodies women of resistance—real and imagined—through song, cinematic poetry, and character work. The series doubles as a participatory platform, inviting audiences to share their own stories of exile, protest, and transformation, modeling how politically urgent work can thrive through direct relationships with a global community rather than industry gatekeepers.
This project is exactly what Starfish was built to support: politically urgent, globally resonant performance that can thrive through direct community relationships rather than legacy gatekeepers.
Artist
Eunice Levis
Project
Colmado del Futuro
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Eunice Levis is a Bronx-born, Afro-Dominican writer-director whose award-winning genre films, including Fell Ends, Invade, and Ro & the Stardust (Netflix), blend sci-fi, horror, and fantasy with culturally grounded storytelling. A Fellow of the inaugural Tribeca Vital Stories, the AFI Directing Workshop for Women+, an Agog XR fellow, and co-host of Café Negro con Genre, a podcast spotlighting genre work by creators of color, Eunice works at the intersection of film, XR, and speculative futures. Colmado del Futuro is an immersive, headset-free XR installation that reimagines the Dominican corner store as a site of memory and resistance. Audiences step into a familiar neighborhood Caribbean bodega that slowly transforms under the pressures of AI, surveillance, and displacement. Built to tour, the project carries Caribbean futurism directly into communities that are typically shut out of immersive media, creating a model for XR that is both accessible and community-rooted.
We’re excited about this project because it uses emerging technology in a grounded, culturally specific way — examining how technological change pressures, distorts, and reshapes the everyday spaces that hold our communities together.
Artist
Faith ‘Aya’ Umoh
Project
DanceAR
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Faith “Aya” Umoh is an award-winning Nigerian-American new media artist, creative tech director, and data scientist with a background in biostatistics and 15 years in technology. Her new media artworks have been showcased from Art Basel to W1 Curates and the Max Ernst Museum, and she is the 2025 MIT Reality Hack XR Grand Prize winner and a Black Public Media Immersive Pitch awardee. Rhythmic Wave II expands her practice into a multiplatform cultural blueprint that combines immersive performance, interactive installation, AI-generated choreography, documentary storytelling, and a global creative toolkit for movement archiving. The toolkit includes DanceAR, an Unreal Engine plugin that compresses the normally complex motion-capture pipeline into a few clicks: upload a dance video, choose an avatar, preview, and publish as an AR experience on a phone The project extends these tools to Black, Indigenous, and diasporic communities globally, supporting them in creating, remixing, and owning their movement traditions and the data that carries them forward.
Rhythmic Wave II aligns deeply with Starfish’s mission by showing how emerging technology can preserve cultural memory while staying in the hands of the communities it serves.
Artist
Grace Ann Lee
Project
The Franklin Experiment
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Grace Lee is a Peabody-winning filmmaker and co-founder of A-Doc (Asian American Documentary Network), with a track record of work that mobilizes audiences. Her documentaries include American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, Asian Americans (PBS), And She Could Be Next, and BTS ARMY: Forever We Are Young. With The Franklin Experiment, she is building a modular documentary and civic toolkit inspired by her family’s direct lineage to Benjamin Franklin. In addition to a single feature film, she is creating short videos, screening toolkits, and discussion guides that turn community events into opportunities for participants to draft their own visions for local democracy. Timed to the 2026 semiquincentennial, the initial phase of the project treats documentary as civic infrastructure—using story to rehearse the future of democratic practice.
The Franklin Experiment represents a new blueprint for civic storytelling — an accomplished artist building a replicable model for turning documentary into civic practice, which sits at the heart of Starfish’s mission.
Artist
Karim Ahmed
Project
LONGFANG
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Karim Ahmad is a writer, producer, and founder of Utopia Studio, whose inaugural project The Voice of Hind Rajab (dir. Kaouther Ben Hania) won the Silver Lion at the 2025 Biennale. He is the creator of Muslim Futures, former Sundance Director of Outreach & Inclusion, Soros Equality Fellow, and the creator of the graphic novel DIVIDE. Longfang is his YA, punk-rock, anti-imperialist supernatural fantasy franchise, designed from the ground up to live as a webcomic, in print graphic novels, and in animation. Set in an alt-reality America under supernatural apartheid, the story follows a family fighting an empire from the margins. With Starfish, Karim is prototyping the webcomic and fandom-building strategy first, using digital platforms to grow a rights-rich universe that can expand across media on creator-controlled terms.
Longfang embodies the Starfish thesis: bold narrative IP built from the ground up alongside its audience, designed to expand across platforms while preserving full artistic, social, and political sovereignty.
Artist
Shirel Jones
Project
The Imagination Island Festival
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Detroit-based dancer and teaching artist Shirel "Ms. Shirel" Jones is a Kresge Gilda Award recipient, Jubilation Foundation Fellow, and CultureSource ARC Fund Fellow whose YouTube channel Ms. Shirel's Imagination Island has drawn more than one million views. Her work blends ballet, play, and social-emotional learning, centering neurodivergent inclusion and working-class families often excluded from traditional arts programming. With Starfish, she is launching the Imagination Island Festival, a sensory-friendly arts festival and year-round ecosystem that transforms galleries into movement-based playgrounds where preschoolers become co-creators. The project couples in-person experiences with educator toolkits, virtual school assemblies, and licensed content, building a sustainable revenue model for early-childhood arts while deepening access for families and local artists.
Imagination Island is a powerful example of how artist-led early childhood work can become sustainable because it’s community-rooted — precisely the kind of creative infrastructure Starfish aims to grow.
Image Credit: Jonathan Peterson
Artist
Tunde Wey
Project
TACO Trade
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Tunde Wey is a Nigerian-born, Detroit-based social practice artist and 2025 Harvard Loeb Fellow whose work uses food, writing, film, and performance to reveal and disrupt economic injustice—from pricing meals by race to raising $150K through hot chicken sales for a community land trust. With TACO Trade, he is transforming a Detroit food truck into a piece of “economic theater”: a roving dining experiment where tacos and specially minted crypto become tools to model alternative value systems. Diners pay in project-specific currency, participate in structured games and conversations about tariffs and global trade, and experience firsthand how financial systems shape everyday life. The project prototypes a live, participatory economic model that can be adapted and replicated far beyond a single city—part of Tunde's broader practice exploring capital and the political economy through art. A 2024 CANNESERIES Official Selection, recipient of the Monroe Fellowship from Tulane University (2023) and Ford Foundation Just Films Grant (2022), Tunde's work has been covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, and GQ. He is currently working on a book of essays to be published with MCD (a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
We love TACO Trade because it tests a bold, artist-led economic system — a living prototype for how performance, food, and finance can fuse into a new form of cultural infrastructure.
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
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.
LAYING FLOWERS.:.SETTING FIRES
Visual Poem
You will be someone’s ancestor. Act accordingly.
GRAMMY-Nominated Album
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.