Senior Grant

VPA Senior Grant – Past Projects

2023 Grantees

Portrait of Micheal Brown: a young black man standing in Times Square at night
Photo: Amina, Leo, Oliver, and Rodrigo

Micheal Brown
Musings of a Blaq Geek

Musings of a Blaq Geek (Musings OABG) is a collection of poetry & prose that centers on the experiences of Black folks & Queer folks. I intend to highlight intersectionality through written work & audiovisual media with provocative social, political & cultural commentary.

Portrait of Tyah-Amoy "Yoma" Roberts: a young black woman in a white dress with beige flowy material in front of green foliage
Photo: Vanessa Joy Onuoha

Tyah-Amoy "Yoma" Roberts
The Chrysalis Collection

Ruminating on ideas of queer subjecthood and legibility, The Chrysalis Collection marries fashion design and fiber art installation to create a collection of crochet wearable art for all modes of gender expression.

Portrait of Lora Suprandi: a young asian woman with long black hair in a forest with a stream
Photo: Arpi Park

Lora Supandi
Eastside Elegy

Eastside Elegy is a poetic documentary that examines how devotion and grief are transformed by state violence, genocide, urban adolescence, and Indonesian kinships. To bridge immigration and remembrance through a non-linear narrative structure, experimental poetic forms are fused with video art’s DIY reimagining of cultural history.

Portrait of Camilla Wickman: a young white woman with a stone necklace, in front of green foliage
Photo: Paulo Makalinao

Camilla Wickman
Cailleach

Cailleach is part-concept album, part-family history project grounded in the archetype of the Gaelic divine hag of winter by the same name.

2022 Grantees

Photo: Yesenia Ulloa
Photo: Yesenia Ulloa

Cameron Mirhossaini
The Way to the Bread

The Way to the Bread is a novella that explores the present-day, psychological consequences of forced nomadic sedentarization one hundred years ago in Iran, examining how relationships with grief, land, desire, and care are transmuted by cultural imperialism.

Photo: Danika Lyle
Photo: Danika Lyle

Danika Lyle
Work-Life Malice

Work-Life Malice is a comedic screenplay and radio drama satirizing the corporate experience in the world of a super villain’s HQ. Following an “expendable” henchman thrust into the role of HR, we explore our need to empower in the workplace.

Photo: Zay Smith
Photo: Zay Smith

Isaiah "Zay" Smith
Church Walls

Church Walls recontextualizes Black American pew figurines into a diorama centering Black identity and its relationship to the “Black Church.” The diorama incorporates AR (augmented reality) to bridge the cultural tradition of figurine making and emerging media practices.

Photo: Omar El-Sabrout
Photo: Omar El-Sabrout

Omar Howaida El-Sabrout
Dovecotes Domiciles

Through the creation of four to five large-scale site-specific sculptures, Dovecotes Domiciles investigates themes of transplantation, ugliness and queerness. Recycled waste will constitute the material, engaging sustainability and revitalization.

2021 Grantees

Angie Lee, Senior Grant 2021 recipient, smiling towards the camera.
Photo: Kim Lee

Angie Lee
(Dis)abled

(Dis)abled is a story cycle, a collection of short stories that each stand as independent works but are also in conversation with each other and enhanced when read together. At each story’s center is a protagonist affected by disability, directly or indirectly. The culmination of stories highlights the disabled experience as a whole and explores the concept of normalcy as perceived or construed by society.

Inspired by ideas Angie began to nurture in Stanford classes such as Advanced Fiction Writing, Novel Writing Intensive, Secret Lives of the Short Story, and Reading for Writers, Angie will spend the summer drafting five short stories, each with disability centralized. The works will focus on the varying perspectives of a physically disabled child, her parents, her sibling, and her best friend, as well as the initial child later as an adult. Angie will attend various summer writing workshops to gain feedback on the pieces. In the fall and beyond, she will revise the stories and work to put the collection together as a complete book.

Jamie Seney, Senior Grant 2021 recipient, smiling towards the camera.
Photo: Michael Spencer

Jamie Seney
Valley View Rd

Valley View Rd is a documentary video piece following the process of beginning and developing a gardening practice with the artist’s mother while offering memorial to the trailer their family abandoned when it became uninhabitable. This work serves as a reimagining of the trailer as a space of life and abundance, while showcasing the growth required within the family to make a thriving garden possible today.

Valley View Rd works through the contradictory nature of landlordship, the impacts of whiteness on community and land relations, and the role of bearing witness in grieving.

Lorena Diosdado, Senior Grant 2021 recipient, smiling towards the camera.
Photo: Lorena Diosdado

Lorena Diosdado
Vero 2021

Vero 2021 is a collection of 20 mixed media (charcoal, graphite & paint on 9x12 in paper and canvas) one-hour studies of Vero, a friend of Lorena's. The studies will be created over the course of four months. Lorena plans on using Vero as a paid model to create these studies from life in Vero’s home focused on the way that Vero’s visage and person reflects the rupture and healing from ongoing hardship.

Lorena's interest in this project comes from her friendship with Vero whom she first met in 2019 through Stanford’s Habla, a student organization that pairs Stanford students with Stanford workers to practice English. When the COVID-19 layoffs started, Stanford University by proxy of UG2, let Vero go. Vero has been unemployed since and much at the whim of whatever response the politician in power hands out--this has left Vero in a continuous lurch.

Robert Mungai, Senior Grant 2021 recipient, smiling towards the camera.
Photo: Winston Oxford Liao

Robert Mungai
Aliens, A Web Series

Aliens, A Web Series is a mini eight episode series reflecting Robert's personal journey of love as an international student seeking belonging and agency in political issues and conversations such as immigration laws.

As foundation for his characters and script, Robert is collecting narratives from peers who identify as international students. He is working with mentors Professor Adam Tobin and Professor Jamie Meltzer on storyboarding and a production schedule considerate of COVID-safety guidelines to keep actors safe, and pitch the finished work to festivals.

2020 Grantees

Photo: Caroline Moon
Photo: Caroline Moon

eli feier
Utopic Love in Melodic Memoriam

feier will spend the next months, quarantined in California, turning closets into makeshift studios, working on a debut album steeped in the traditions of hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and indie-pop and informed by their academic studies of sociology, poetry, fiction, climatology, and history. Through lyric and harmonic expression feier will tell their story of searching for love and belonging while multiracially black in a white world. In discussing their traumas, feier hopes to find healing, lessons, & love and allow listeners to do the same.

Photo: John Okhiulu
Photo: John Okhiulu

Natalie Johnson
Speculative Fiction During COVID-19

Natalie Johnson will spend the summer writing a speculative fiction novella, extending her creative writing journey at Stanford and engaging with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The world of her novella is also steeped in a pandemic, but unlike the coronavirus, this virus does not spread through contact with infected persons. Rather, it preys on people not living close enough together in large enough communities. Instead of necessitating widespread social distancing, this virus forces people into small, densely populated communes for immunity and survival, reshaping society for some and, for others, reinforcing the way the community has always lived.

Natalie seeks to develop a disciplined writing practice that will prepare her for a Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. She spent significant time during undergrad studying and writing in the genre of speculative fiction. Writing such a novella during this great social upheaval feels urgent and important to her.

Photo: Karis Will
Photo: Karis Will

Sara Carrillo
Creating the Archive of Patssi Valdez: Uncovering and Cataloging Works for a Retrospective

This project seeks to create a digital archive that will house multi-media artist Patssi Valdez’s oeuvre, some 300+ works, which are currently stored in her garage. Carrillo has worked closely with the artist over the course of a year, making studio visits and interviewing her. The majority of her work has been photographed and digitally uploaded to the artist’s personal computer, but none are easily accessible nor do the photographs have any useful archival information (size, date, provenance, medium) attached to them. Carrillo will create an archive that allows the artist to access her pieces and share them with educators, collectors, curators, etc. in an easy and accessible manner. Especially in the time of COVID-19, the artist’s digital library is their most valuable tool.

Photo: AnQi Yu
Photo: AnQi Yu

Starr Jiang
How to Bury My Father

Drawing from mythology and personal memory, How to Bury My Father is an imagination of Jiang's dad’s funeral where his dead body goes missing. Through ghost stories, mysterious prophecies, and a fairy tale gone wrong , this solo performance/radio drama attempts to fill in the gaps of a broken family legacy, revealing how the trauma left by the dead continues to violently ravage the living. The project builds on the productions Jiang did with Asian American Theater Project, where Jiang learned to use the theatrical medium to create the world we desire to live in. Academically, its foundations lie in the presence of queerness in non-Western contexts and the implications of female performance in song and dance.

erinaheadshot2023

Contact:

Erina Alejo (they/she/siya)
Program Associate
Office of the Vice President for the Arts
ealejo@stanford.edu

Schedule a Zoom meeting (for current students only)