Office of the Vice President for the Arts

Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant

The Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant offers support for faculty creative projects with significant impact on campus and beyond.

This program is in a pilot phase for fiscal years 2023, 2024, and 2025. Program criteria, eligibility, and availability may differ between cycles.

Grant Recipients

2025-27

A person with long hair smiling towards the camera.

IOANIDA COSTACHE | Trajo

Project Summary

Trajo is an experimental film documentary portrait of Romani violinist Nicu Ciotoi that uses musical performance as a gateway to Romani lifeways, memory, and culture. Poetic visuals and a soundtrack of song-stories interweave to make audible Romani counterhistories long silenced by—and produced in the wake of—persecution. The film presents music as a living archive where memory and identity converge. The film’s aesthetic language—one of visual, aural and narrative opacity, following Glissant’s “right to opacity”— resists any attempt to render Romani subjectivities fully legible within dominant frameworks. Through this experimental approach, Trajo implicitly interrogates dominant cultural narratives and historiographical practices that have long silenced Roma, thus challenging entrenched hierarchies inherent in conventional documentary practice.

AMARA TABOR-SMITH | (May There Be) Good Atmosphere Between Us: The Parables of Now

Project Summary

(May There Be) Good Atmosphere Between Us: The Parables of Now is a dance, theater, and multi-disciplinary ritual performance project responding to the climate crisis. The project utilizes Indigenous sacred myths and Yorubá/Lukumí divination practices through community-building, prayer, and durational movement to activate appropriate responses of ecological and communal care. Development of this project includes interviews and conversations with climate scientists, spiritual/religious practitioners, land stewards, urban farmers and community members to create a performance work grounded in a collection of stories and community narratives intermingled with African and Indigenous mythologies and spiritual texts. Performed as a series of “parables” inspired in part by the Parable series written by Octavia Butler, this ritual performance experience is guided by the question, “How do we activate our collective wisdom to survive, adapt, and heal from environmental catastrophe and climate disaster in the Anthropocene?” This project will develop through community gatherings held throughout the SF bay area, and through visits with communities in Pittsburgh, New Orleans, New York and New Mexico to share and gather stories, myths, and sacred texts that have helped communities negotiate difficult times. Additionally, tabor-smith will engage in research exploring the science of our ecosystems to develop a deeper understanding of the interlocking, interdependent earth systems. During this process, filmmaker, Alisha B. Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA), will create a poetic documentary film about this project to increase visibility and engagement for the work.

(may there be) Good Atmosphere Between Us: The Parables of Now Project will culminate with performances in Oakland in 2027.

2024-26

NATALIA ALMADA | Captions Will Be Needed

Project Summary

A magical-realist, science-fiction documentary about beauty and grief. Captions Will be Needed is filmmaker Natalia Almada’s cinematic response to living with a rare cancer during an era that believes in technology's omnipotent power to answer all questions.

Susan Sontag had cancer when she wrote “Illness as Metaphor.” Virginia Woolf wrote “On Being Ill” from her sickbed in 1925. And Anne Boyer could only write “The Un-Dying” after fighting cancer. It seems only the sick can really talk about what it is to live with illness and the anticipation of death—how fatigue kills all desire, how cancer is a metaphor for all incurable mysteries, the entrapment of a failing body, the reconfiguration of our relationship to time. Illness shifts our fundamental understanding of who we thought we were, of what we believed or understood to be true, even how we dreamed.

Captions Will be Needed is a cinematic essay about time—in relation to my diagnosis, to my children, to nature, and to the technological era in which we all live. The film does not end with death or a cure. It ends with surrender.

A person with shoulder length hair staring at the camera

MOLLY ANTOPOL | Saturn: a novel

Project Summary

Merging imagination and history, Saturn is a multi-generational novel that explores the seismic impact geopolitics have on individual lives. Asking questions about surveillance, election interference, privacy and gender roles in Hollywood, the book hopscotches through Rome, Cannes, Washington D.C., London, Los Angeles and a tiny Greek fishing village—and through half a century of history leading up to the end of America’s standoff with the Soviet Union. It is only then that the personal dramas long seething beneath the conflict’s surface reemerge in frightening force, fashioning a narrative prism that sheds light not only on how Great Powers interact, but how those interactions lay the fault lines to human relationships.

The interplay between geopolitical instability and the psychological lives of my characters raises a series of questions that I explore in the novel: What happens after the battles a person has spent her life fighting are won, or lost? Should ethical standards be imposed on the art we create? Who owns a story? What is the difference between a government collecting information on people and actually seeking to understand them? What happens when paranoia becomes part of a national lexicon? What are the costs of ideology? And finally, how does power work—for those who seek it, those who wield it, and those who have none and are forced to live under its thumb?

2023-25

PATRICIA ALESSANDRINI | Sonic Cyberfeminisms

Project Summary

This funding will support the première of a theatrical, intermedial “duodrama” for the coloratura virtuosi Marisol Montalvo and Donatienne Michel-Dansac and an ensemble of ten musicians, based on a libretto by author Alexandra Kleeman. This work will use “soft” robotics systems with both musical and visual interest, based on my previous work on the Piano Machine, Harp Fingers, Orpheus Machines and other physical computing systems. These interactive soft robotics systems will be developed in close collaboration with Marisol, Donatienne and Alexandra, in keeping with the feminist-futurist theme of an interplanetary dialogue between two women, necessarily mediated by technology. These ideas are a continuation of Parlour Sounds (2017), also for soprano and ten musicians, in which the household labor of a woman in the 1960’s was transformed into a musical performance by creating interactive instruments from vintage housekeeping appliances. It will thus create a pair of works to be performed separately or together, each with a duration of ca. 40 minutes. These works showing women transgressively repurposing the technology in these lived spaces take place in the past and future respectively, in a living room on the one hand and a space station on the other. While seemingly a somewhat playful subject, the issue at the core of this second theatrical work is how future technology – including robotics – might be imagined from a marginalized, specifically female perspective. Both are informed by feminist and cyberfeminist theory from Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judy Wacjman and others.

TERRY BERLIER | Tonic Immobility

Project Summary

This project reimagines Louis Agassiz as an inverted shark being tagged through tonic immobility. By taming Agassiz, as he once fell from the quad in the 1906 earthquake with his “head in the sand”, I want to recenter queer, trans, and decolonial ways of healing to bring to the surface new ways to connect through interdependence. I will create a new series of sculptures, installations, and performances that traverse the intersections of queerness, ecology, memory, monuments, and archives based on this history. The project uses this object/statue as a starting point to perform an exorcism to remove its racist history. Drawing from scholars Sara Ahmed, Joan Roughgarden, Rachel Carson, Karen Barad, José Esteban Muñoz's and the University Archeologist, to decolonize and conjure new forms of place making.

HIDEO MABUCHI | SilkPunk Memory Dōgu

Project Summary

In a recent Stanford lecture, author Ken Liu expressed sharp concerns about Western modernity as an alien cultural overlay, promulgated via techno-capitalism, that decoheres life experiences of peoples around the globe. As a form of creative resistance Liu advocates the exercise of a “technology and literary aesthetic” he calls Silkpunk, which “meld[s] past-reinterpretation with future-hopecrafting” to envision alternative modernities that might have evolved elsewhere, given more time in peace. In the work of Liu and like-minded writers, Silkpunk is science fiction that reregisters what we presume technology can do across the diversity of magical fantasies global humanity once had. Silkpunk imagines powerful and effective tools peculiar to indigenous cultures, and in so doing helps us feel the contingency and obtrusion of our actual technological regime. My project now asks: Must Silkpunk be fictional, and can nonfiction Silkpunk still be art? My aim will be to silkpunk computer technology by creating resistive digital memory (RRAM) devices (dōgu) based on the memristor effect in natural indigo, which take the form of traditional East Asian textiles and are fashioned primarily via corresponding craft processes. In Japanese, dōgu signifies tools meant for delimited use within traditional practices such as tea ceremony, suggesting that RRAM textile dōgu could be understood as implements for rituals of memory. My project will encompass historical research on Japanese-Korean cultural interactions and harms enacted by Japan upon Korean people, to inform the development of testaments or speculative historical fictions suitable for implanting in East-Asian-Silkpunk memory ritual textiles.

JAMIE MELTZER | Shifted Landscapes

Project Summary

MICHAEL RAU | Orchestra Orpheus Opus Onus

Project Summary

Orchestra Orpheus Opus Onus is a new music-theater piece written by Kate Soper, and directed by Michael Rau. The piece is a hybrid of orchestral music, solo voice and theatrical spoken storytelling, mixed media and tape. Set in an post-apocalyptic future, Orpheus sifts through the past, confounded by the descent of music into orchestral memes, trying not to think about Eurydice.This new project will generate an original script, a new musical score, and preliminary stagings, and rough scenic, lighting and costume designs. The piece will be workshopped both in New York City and Stanford, will an eventual premiere in 2025.

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Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant

The Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant offers support for faculty creative projects with significant impact on campus and beyond.

Grant Recipients

2025-27

2024-26

2023-25

Didn't find what you were looking for?

Sabrina Wilensky

Can you read me?

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