Current Creation Grantees

Julian Barnett

Julian Barnett is a choreographer, performer, arts advocate, and educator. He works collaboratively across disciplines to create performances that examine the social-political possibilities for transformation and empathy. His work often revolves around notions of intimacy within performance and examines his own mixed-raced identity as a fulcrum for inquiry, activism, and possibility. Julian’s work has been presented throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, and extensively across Europe.

Naomi Bindman

Naomi Bindman is an award-winning educator who lives in Vermont. She earned her BA from Dartmouth College, and her Masters from Harvard University. Her articles, essays, and poetry have appeared in VTDigger,  Mothering, So to Speak, Friends Journal, Consilience, and Import Sky Journal, among others. Naomi is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. She has just written her first book,  You’re the Words I Sing: A Memoir of Song, Sorrow, and Solace.

Naomi’s grant will support the creation of a memoir that weaves together childhood stories and maternal relationships.

Boomslang (Johnny Morris & Dustin Byerly)

Boomslang is a Montpelier, Vermont, based hip-hop group comprised of DJ, Beatmaker, and Producer Johnny Morris (JL) and Dustin Byerly (MC Sed One). A founding member of the Golden Dome Musician’s Collective and State and Main Records Label (Montpelier, VT), they appeared on State and Main Records: Volume I (2011) and State and Main Records: Volume II (2013) before releasing their self-titled debut Boomslang album in 2014.

Thomas Dunn

Thomas Dunn, a lighting and visual designer, lives in and maintains his studio practice in Vermont. He primarily works on creating and developing original works of art and performance worldwide. His approach to design stems from years of investigative work with light, treating it as a sculptural medium and a facet of stage design. Selected credits include works with; JoAnne Akalaitis, Jonathan Bepler, Wally Cardona, Steve Cosson, Annie Dorsen, DD Dorvillier, Daniel Fish, Beth Gill, Trajal Harrell, Ted Hearne, Jennifer Lacey, Noémie Lafrance, David Levine, Molly Lieber, Ong Keng Sen, Zeena Parkins, Tina Satter, Jay Scheib, Eleanor Smith, Muna Tseng, and Seth Parker Woods.

Leslie Fry

Leslie Fry‘s sculptures, drawings, and prints have been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries such as Kunsthaus in Hamburg, Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, Windspiel Galerie in Vienna, Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris, Artists Space and Wave Hill in New York, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum near Boston, and Centre des Arts Visuels in Montreal.

Public sculptures have been commissioned in New York, South Korea, Montreal, Florida, Wisconsin, and Vermont. Public collections include Tufts University, Songchu International Sculpture Park, Freehand New York, Kohler Arts Center, Tampa Museum of Art, Fleming Museum of Art, Musée d’art de Joliette, and St. Petersburg, Florida’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Jonathan Gitelson

Jonathan Gitelson [1975] is originally from Mount Kisco, NY and currently resides in Brattleboro, Vermont. He is a Professor of Art at Keene State College in NH and works in a variety of mediums that include photography, artist books, video, installation, and public art. Jonathan’s work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe including MASS MoCA, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Galerie f5,6 in Munich. His artwork is in the permanent collection of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Fidelity Investment Collection. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Art in America and Art New England.

Read a feature story about the “Sonic Blanket” project in the Brattleboro Reformer.

Ariel Goodman

Ariel Goodman is multimedia artist and investigative journalist whose work centers on community media and collaborative journalism. Most recently she worked as a Tow Fellow at The Marshall Project to create collaborative accountability journalism with communities impacted by the criminal justice system. Previously she managed award-winning community media programs across Philadelphia, including Atrévete, a bilingual community TV project, and Hear Us Out, the first youth radio show on LPFM 106.5FM.  Ariel’s journalism has appeared in outlets such as ProPublica, The Associated Press, El Pais, Univision, and more.

Renee Greenlee

Renee Greenlee is a photographer based in Vermont. In addition to her professional and community projects, she utilizes film and historic processes to explore place, liminality and the work of being present. To that end, she creates cyanotypes of her local watershed, bringing a blue world to light. For her, photography is a dialogue between light, memory and the meaning of making an image.

Dylan Hausthor

Dylan Hausthor is a photographer, filmmaker, and bookmaker who received their BFA from Maine College of Art and MFA from Yale University, where they were awarded the John Ferguson Weir Award. They are a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves fellowship for visual artists, runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist, a 2022 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard grant and residency, 2021 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, 2021 Penumbra Foundation resident, 2023 Light Work resident, Lunder Institute Fellow, and the winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer’s Fund. They found a huge patch of chanterelle mushrooms a few days ago, and are working on their second monograph.

Dylan’s grant will support the creation of new photographs for a monograph exploring the complexities of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of the natural world.

Read our interview with Dylan.

Sarah King

NEMA’s 2021 Songwriter of the Year Sarah King inhabits the dark side of Americana, creating “high-powered blues-Americana-rock” (Burlington Free Press) anchored by her atmospheric voice and rhythmic blues guitar. Her 2021 debut EP The Hour, produced by Simone Felice and David Baron (The Lumineers, Jade Bird), marks her stunning arrival with “Nightstand” named 2020’s #1 Best Song in Vermont by County Tracks.

Rebecca Mack

Rebecca Mack is a musician and visual artist; teaching, living and working in the Old North End neighborhood of Burlington, Vermont. Mack directs and performs with Amerykanka, a vocal ensemble which resonates with old vocal traditions while embracing newer tools to share a unique perspective on choral music. Amerykanka’s debut album, Snow, 2018, is deeply inspired by our northern landscape, as well as by our ancestral cultural traditions. Mack is one half of Knit and Purl, an experimental music duo with John Thompson-Figueroa, featuring voice, piano, bass, harp and turntables. Knit and Purl released Loop Gloss Volume 1 in 2021. Mack’s first vinyl release, RECORDS, 2012, is an artist’s book with sound exploring impermanence and memory, housed at UVM Library Special Collections.

Rebecca’s career as a vocalist began at age 12; her first composition was performed at age 17. Her musical influences include hip-hop turntablism, Eastern European folksong, Jewish liturgical music and birdsong. When not writing, playing or teaching music, Rebecca can be found raising twins, tuning her harps and others’ pianos, cooking ancestral foods with her family, drawing, creating stop-motion animations, swimming in the lake, or cultivating plants and communing with urban wildlife in her garden.

Kekla Magoon

Kekla Magoon writes novels and nonfiction books for children and teens, often exploring themes of identity, community, empowerment, and social justice. Her acclaimed young adult and middle grade titles include The Season of Styx Malone (winner of the Boston Globe Horn Book Award), How It Went Down (a Coretta Scott King Honor book), and Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People, which was a Michael L. Printz Honor winner, L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist and National Book Award Finalist. Kekla’s nonfiction books for younger readers include The Highest Tribute: Thurgood Marshall’s Life Leadership and Legacy and She Persisted: Ruby Bridges, written with Chelsea Clinton.

Jennifer McCandless

Jennifer received her BFA in Sculpture from Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design and her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a full time sculptor in Burlington,VT.  Jennifer has exhibited nationally and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Michigan Council for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, The Palmer Fellowship 2011-2015, MASS MoCA Assets for Artists grant, the Millay Colony and Skowhegan Fellowships. Her extensive exhibition history includes shows at the National Sculpture Society, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, The Lemberg Gallery, the Housatanic Museum, the John Sly Ely Museum, the Elmhurst Art Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, The Frederick Meijer Museum of Sculpture and the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

Matt Neckers

Matt Neckers works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting and installation. Matt’s mobile museum project, the Vermont International Museum of Contemporary Art + Design, a miniature museum set inside a 1950’s camper, toured multiple locations in Vermont, including the Kent Museum, Burlington City Arts, and the Fairbanks Museum. He followed this up with an interactive museum in a 1941 Philco refrigerator, which was shown at the Fleming Museum.

Mina Nishimura

Mina Nishimura, originally from Tokyo, was introduced to butoh and improvisational dance through Kota Yamazaki. Buddhism-influenced philosophical concepts are reflected across her somatic, performance and choreographic practices. In the United States, she has been performing and collaborating with a number of groundbreaking artists, in the most recent years, such as John Jasperse, Dean Moss, Yasuko Yokoshi, Nami Yamamoto, Neil Greenburg, Vicky Shick, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Ursula Eagly, Moriah Evans and SIA for her Saturday Night Live performance. Nishimura was named as Best Performance of 2018 in Dance Magazine, and was a cover and featured artist of May 2021 Issue. She is a recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award 2019, and is the current Renewal Residency Artist, working on her new project, Mapping a Forest while Searching for an Opposite Term of Excorcist, at Danspace Project in New York. She currently teaches at Bennington College where she completed her MFA fellowship in 2021. Nishimura is also one of the current curators of Tokyo-based whenever wherever festival.

Barbara Paulson

Barbara Paulson lives the transient and transformative life of a touring puppeteer. Marionettes are her primary medium for connecting a story to the world at large, and she relies on the world to inform the stories that need to be told. The infinite possibilities for building and performing with string puppets fuel her creative drive.

She has performed nationwide as one half of the No Strings Marionette Company who creates performances from the ground up in their central Vermont workshop. Barbara knows bravery, flexibility, tenacity and fun are essential to her creative process. An active teaching artist, Barbara partners with organizations to help participants gain experience in telling their personal story through the voice of a puppet production.

Aly Perry

Aly Perry is a multi-disciplinary artist who builds worlds through a variety of mediums but often in the forms of live performance and design. Her work explores how unexpected encounters in constructed environments hold the seed for sparking radical public intimacy and healing.

Aly is an award-winning stage director, featured writer-contributor to arts journal HowlRound (“Devising Our Future” and “New Crit” series), producer-host of Soundsmith Radio, muralist with Miss Rockaway Armada and Philadelphia’s Mural Arts, and celebrated performer. She earned a dual BFA in Theater and Photography/Imaging from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Aly’s grant will support the creation of an immersive theatrical production exploring environmental degradation, inheritance, and grief through a feminist clown lens.

Hannah Regier

Hannah Regier is a fiber artist whose work explores the aesthetic and spiritual possibilities of natural dyes and fibers. With reverence, sensitivity and curiosity to learn each living material’s language, she invites the stories and character of the land to speak through her work. Hannah grows, forages and processes her materials hyperlocally, delving into terroir and experiencing seasonal rhythms. A second generation professional craftsperson, Hannah has shown her functional work at fine craft shows including the Smithsonian Craft Show and Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. Her studio practice was featured in Yankee Magazine’s Sept/Oct 2022 issue. Hannah would like to acknowledge that the land on which she works is the homeland of the Abenaki people.

Hannah’s grant will support the creation of a body of sculptural fiber art works entitled “Landcesters.”

José Rivera

José Alejandro Rivera (aka proxemia, he/they) is a listener, artist, designer, land tender, researcher, and composer that often works with sound and space across installation, performance, transmission arts, and experimental audio pieces. José’s densely layered, placed-based practice is influenced by maps, architecture, and expanded states of consciousness such as dreams, body-mind connections, and working with plants.

His current investigations utilize the radio space as a means to playfully explore associations between neurodivergence, queerness, diasporic identity, ufology, science fiction, language, and decolonization.

Along with numerous collaborations that consist of sound design for audiovisual projects, dance pieces, and podcasts, his fluid body of work also includes an open-air performance space for a youth dance and drumming group in rural Ghana.

Maria Robinson

Maria Robinson’s writing has appeared in Catapult, The Forge Literary Magazine, PANK Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, and the Cream City Review, among others. She is a graduate of The Writing Seminars Program at The Johns Hopkins University and has done graduate work at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Lissa Schneckenburger

Fiddler and folk singer Lissa Schneckenburger grew up in Maine as an active member of the folk community, where she learned to play at the feet of some of the most venerable musicians in New England. She has continued to explore music throughout her life, leading to her graduation from The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts (2001). Lissa has played all over the world, including appearances in Russia, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, and the United States. Hew newest solo album is a collection of original fiddle tunes written at the beginning of the pandemic. While embracing a diverse pallet of musical influences, she still stays true to her New England roots.

Lissa’s grant will support the creation of a full-length musical album that inspires and invigorates the collective desire to make positive change.

Leath Tonino

Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his work appears regularly in Orion, The Sun, Tricycle, New England Review, and Outside. He was born and raised in the Champlain Valley.

Leath’s grant will support the creation of a creative nonfiction book manuscript about solitude, community, and nature.

Read an interview with Leath in The Addison Independent.

Kota Yamazaki

Kota Yamazaki trained under Akira Kasai. A recipient of the Bessie Award of 2007, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist Award of 2013, National Dance Project of 2012 and 2015, NYFA Fellowship 2016, Guggenheim Fellowship 2018, and Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Recovery Fund of 2021. Director of Body Arts Laboratory. Dance Faculty at Bennington College. DaBY Guest Artist.

Kota’s grant will support the creation of a new dance work entitled “I, Ghost, The, Other, or You.”

Yanyi

Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. He was most recently poetry editor at Foundry and gave creative writing advice at his newsletter, The Reading. Currently, he teaches creative writing at large.

Yanyi’s grant will support the creation of a poetry manuscript entitled “BOUQUET.”