2026
The 2026 Creative Capital Award, renowned for its recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, will support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines. Read the press release.
The 2026 Creative Capital Award, renowned for its recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, will support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines. Read the press release.
Delbert Anderson
The Long Walk: 1,674 Days
"The Long Walk: 1,674 Days" is a tribute to the Navajo people's resilience during their forced relocation from 1863 to 1868. This durational composition, performed over 1,674 days, symbolizes the exact duration of the Navajo Long Walk, honoring the memory and spirit of those who endured the tragic event.
Music, Performing Arts
2026
Music, Performing Arts, 2026
Sadie Barnette
Untitled
Sadie Barnette will continue investigations of form and sociality through architectural sculpture. Minimalist in design, but maximal in activation possibilities, the familiar structures of benches, staircases, tables, are rendered as 3D text formations. Things become words become an invitation, a compass, a stage, a place.
Visual Arts, Installation
2026
Installation, Public Art, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Gina Beavers
Comfortcore Sculptural Paintings
An exhibition in a public, not for profit space of Sculptural Paintings based on Photoshop compositions made up of fragments of photographs of home goods and consumer products. The finished works will offer a balm for the chaotic passions of the viewer’s lives online.
Visual Arts, Painting & Printmaking
2026
Painting & Printmaking, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Samuel Beebe
[Project Creatine] (working title)
Project Creatine is a semi-biographical opera written for operatic tenor and drag artist Jordan Weatherston Pitts (Creatine Price). On an odyssey through city life, night clubs, and dreamscapes, our eponymous heroine encounters the highest highs and lowest lows of love, art, and living. Cantata, cabaret, and court drama – Project Creatine redefines opera in a boundary-breaking story about radical self-definition.
![[Project Creatine] (working title)](https://creative-capital.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Brown_5-e1777051124252.jpg)
Performing Arts, Musical Theater
2026
Musical Theater, Opera, Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Jocelyn Bioh
Nana From Ghana
Nana From Ghana is an original stage musical that tells the story of Nana - a doll who was all the rage in the 90’s, but in present day, Nana has struggled to find her place in a society that has seemingly moved on. Now, facing being discontinued, Nana is on a journey to prove her worth.
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Lex Brown
[Project Creatine] (working title)
Project Creatine is a semi-biographical opera written for operatic tenor and drag artist Jordan Weatherston Pitts (Creatine Price). On an odyssey through city life, night clubs, and dreamscapes, our eponymous heroine encounters the highest highs and lowest lows of love, art, and living. Cantata, cabaret, and court drama – Project Creatine redefines opera in a boundary-breaking story about radical self-definition.
Performing Arts, Musical Theater
2026
Musical Theater, Opera, Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Daniel Chein
TIME HUNTER
A revolutionary spy is dispatched to steal technology from his colonial oppressors to use against them. Can he liberate his people without losing himself in the maze of the diaspora?
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Kenturah Davis
Rest Stops: Thriving in the Thresholds of Altadena
The project emerged to create a material archive about the nature of fire as a tool of community recovery and resilience in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA. By sourcing trees felled by the disaster, a series of vessels will be made to evoke the complexities of memory, loss and recovery. The project has expanded its scope by designing gardens that will be developed on vacant lots to contribute to the recovery of the community's ecological, physical and mental well being.
Visual Arts, Drawing & Illustration
2026
Drawing & Illustration, Public Art, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Sue Ding
Ghosts of Blue
A rumination on the color blue, told through the lens of science, art, and philosophy.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Harmon dot aut
The Pneumafractalist
A live multimedia performance blending short plays, digital art, documentary footage, this project contrasts a filmmaker’s “objective” gaze with the rural reality of an Autistic artist navigating poverty and abuse far from big city resources. By excerpting from the documentary film director’s cut, the artist’s staged re-edit challenges narratives of authority, survival, and self-representation.
Performing Arts, Multimedia Performance
2026
Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, Theater, 2026
Cheryl Dunye
BLACK IS BLUE
In near-future Oakland, Black--a broke Black trans man--is drawn into the orbit of a reclusive Blue, an ex-tech mogul, and Lison, the humanoid she built in her own image. But when desire and betrayal start to take hold, Lison rises from their fragments to become something new, uncanny, and alive.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2026
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2026
Kayla E.
I Will Give You Rest
Narrated by Dead Head Kayla, a cartoon version of my severed head, I Will Give You Rest is a fragmented graphic memoir of collected short comics. Li’l Kayla and Miss Kayla confront childhood trauma while Dead Head Kayla investigates faith, maternal divinity, memory, survival, and the mystical potential of comics.
Literature, Literary Nonfiction
2026
Literary Nonfiction, Literature, 2026
Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan
Hum
A young veterinary student discovers her unique ability of communicating with animals. After hearing the thoughts of a dying horse, she interprets it as a warning that a great earthquake is about to come.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2026
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2026
Tania El Khoury
Choreography of State
A Choreography of State Violence is an installation performance that analyses events of state violence in the public space from a choreographic perspective, against how it is perceived as incidental and individualized cases of violence perpetrated by the state, to illustrate how it is, in fact, conceptualized and rehearsed with calculated dramaturgy.
Performing Arts, Dance
2026
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2026
Carl Elsaesser
Untitled: Coastlines Project
Blending video diary, ethnography, and fiction, Resonant Coastlines follows Ellis, a queer boy documenting his family’s frustrations and emerging sense of self. Set against Maine’s colonial legacy, the film probes privilege and America’s cultural adolescence through the small revelations that shape personal liberation.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Amir ElSaffar
Ruins of the Encampment, a Maqam Opera in Arabic
Ruins of the Encampment will be a three-act opera in Arabic, based on the stories of the 7th century Arabian odes, known as Al-Mu‘allaqat, but set in present-day Middle East. The music will combine Middle Eastern maqam modal system with jazz improvisation and Western classical music, featuring native Arabic singers.
Music, Jazz
2026
Jazz, Music, Opera, Performing Arts, 2026
devynn emory
boiling rain
this performance trilogy is at the intersection of honoring the physical labor of nurses and healthcare workers on the front lines through multiple pandemics in collaboration with the public, our families and their oral histories. through breath, video, dance, and story, i weave interactive ritual for audience to practice grief work together in contemporary times.
Performing Arts, Dance
2026
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, 2026
Carmina Escobar
The Future Was Always Sacred, Because the Land Remembers
A site-responsive installation and performance series exploring the sacred through sound, sculpture, and voice. Using clay records made from earth gathered in the Southwest, the project creates immersive environments where ancestral memory, land, and diasporic identity converge through ritual, vibration, and embodied listening.
Performing Arts, Multimedia Performance
2026
Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, Technology, 2026
Sarah Garrahan
Ghosts of Blue
A rumination on the color blue, told through the lens of science, art, and philosophy.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Eva Louise Hall
Pluck
‘Pluck’ is a stop-motion surrealist horror film investigating the tension between nature vs. human control, bodily autonomy, and end-of-life agency, following an athlete at the height of her career as she struggles to hide the symptoms of a horrifying terminal diagnosis that is grotesquely beginning to mutate her body into that of a chicken.
Film/Moving Image, Animation
2026
Animation, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2026
Dayna Hanson
Hugely Amplified Present (working title)
Hugely Amplified Present is a live performance using dance, text, music, film and documentary elements to address themes of ephemerality, class, disagreement and labor.
Performing Arts, Dance
2026
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, 2026
Christopher Robert Jones
deaf*—Towards Cripistemological Captions
Towards Cripistemological Captions is an experimental documentary project exploring the historical lineage of creative captioning praxes and the generative potential of deaf* positionalities—developing ‘cripistemological captions’ as a methodology that emerges from a multiplicity of non-normative experiences, vantages, and epistemologies in/around aurality, orality, communication, and listening.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Sharon Chohi Kim
Haenyeo
A site-specific, multidisciplinary hydro-opera consisting of “vocal sculptures,” combining movement, voice, underwater sounds, and electronics. Inspired by Korea’s freediving women — or haenyeo — and their symbiotic relationship with the ocean. Haenyeo explores themes of ecological conservation, interdependence, and hydrofeminism.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2026
Multimedia Performance, Music, Opera, Performing Arts, 2026
Suji Kwock Kim
UTOPIA, INC.
UTOPIA, INC is a hybrid work incorporating poetry, memoir, lyric essay and visual materials, exploring the lives of Suji's family and other diasporic North Koreans in South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, the U.S. and U.K. It investigates questions of postwar migration and displacement, nation and narration, surveillance and autocracy, memory and postmemory.
Literature, Poetry
2026
Literature, Poetry, 2026
Benjamin Akio Kimitch
New Work by Benjamin Akio Kimitch
Director and choreographer Benjamin Akio Kimitch creates a personal work about postwar Japanese art, U.S. soft power, and Japanese American incarceration. The work takes the form of a fantasy Japanese American court dance, exploring the collision of global cultural movements which shaped Japanese American identity after World War II.
Performing Arts, Dance
2026
Dance, Performing Arts, 2026
Liss LaFleur
The Queer Birth Project
The Queer Birth Project, created by transmedia artist Liss LaFleur and sociologist Katherine Sobering, explores LGBTQIA+ family building through mixed-media installations. Blending art, research, and activism, it reflects on queer family formation in the United States, drawing on original and archival research to challenge dominant narratives and celebrate diverse experiences.
Visual Arts, Installation
2026
Installation, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Sound Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Haruna Lee
DADBOT (working title)
Inspired by the fad to recreate deceased loved ones through AI, this performance will resurrect Lee's dead dad in performance using the same technology and source materials from their Zainichi Taiwanese family so that they can act in a simulation of the iconic father-child relationship.
Performing Arts, Multimedia Performance
2026
Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Technology, Theater, 2026
Rob Macaisa Colgate
The Vice of Our Jaws
A multimedia verse novel exploring colonialism, disability, famine, and cultural gender, composed in the form of a junk journal filled with ephemera, written by a patient at a psychiatric ward for queer Filipino boys.
Literature, Poetry
2026
Literature, Poetry, 2026
Pepe Mar
El Gato Negro
“El Gato Negro” will be a major multi-room installation by Pepe Mar; taking over a significant space to recreate an architectural structure from memory, a now defunct gay nightclub in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico.
Visual Arts, Architecture & Design
2026
Architecture & Design, Installation, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Both and Neither
Both and Neither is a work of memoir and haunted nonfiction about life beyond the binary.
Literature, Literary Nonfiction
2026
Literary Nonfiction, Literature, 2026
Roger Q. Mason
BILL
In this two-act performance work, Taffeta, a queer creation of color, prepares for her first in-person date with Bill, a log cabin Republican obsessed with the Constitution. When Bill arrives, he's revealed as a person of color whose political values lead to a debate about race, desire, privilege, and liberation.
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Jehane Noujaim
Shooting the Messenger
Shooting the Messenger follows young Gazans coming of age amid the collapse of their world, asserting who they are within it.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Rodrigo Olivar
El Pueblo Salva al Pueblo (We Save Us)
We Save Us (El Pueblo Salva al Pueblo) is a feature documentary that follows Mexican delivery workers in New York who, amid rising assaults and little support, establish a community guard to pursue justice and reframe their story, revealing the strength of collective action.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2026
Masud Olufani
The Sound of Labor
The Sound of Labor, is a large scale multimedia installation that combines sculpted form and the layered ringing of bells to mimic the use of the pulley bell in urban slave plantations to regulate the lives and labor of enslaved people.
Visual Arts, Sculpture
2026
Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Jeff Ostergren
PHARMÆSTHETIC: Plato’s Pharmacy, Duchamp’s Dispensary, Preciado’s Prescriptions
PHARMÆSTHETIC is an immersive installation inhabiting an abandoned pharmacy that combines pharmaceutical-infused pointillist paintings, cast-plastic and found-object sculptures, and videos of altered drug commercials to explore the complex relationship between medications, marketing, color, and human bodies, while revealing both the euphoric possibilities and mortal compulsions of pharmaceutical culture.
Visual Arts, Installation
2026
Installation, Painting & Printmaking, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Nadia Owusu
Saviors: A Novel
“Saviors” is a polyphonic tale of collision between American missionaries and Ugandan activists. The novel employs various narrative forms to dissect the intricacies of race, religion, charity, and neocolonialism, challenging the distinction between seductions and solutions and asking thorny questions about the possibilities and perversions of love.
Literature, Literary Fiction
2026
Literary Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, Literature, 2026
Margaret Pearce
Mississippi Dialogues: Ḣaḣa Wakpa, Nįį Xete, Nyitanga
Mississippi Dialogues is a cartographic intervention to narrate an Indigenized Mississippi River on two panels installed in public parks along the River, in Minnesota and Illinois in 2026. This is a collaboration with Prairie Island Indian Community THPO, Ho-Chunk Nation CRD, and Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.
Visual Arts, Public Art
2026
Public Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Creatine Price
[Project Creatine] (working title)
Project Creatine is a semi-biographical opera written for operatic tenor and drag artist Jordan Weatherston Pitts (Creatine Price). On an odyssey through city life, night clubs, and dreamscapes, our eponymous heroine encounters the highest highs and lowest lows of love, art, and living. Cantata, cabaret, and court drama – Project Creatine redefines opera in a boundary-breaking story about radical self-definition.
Performing Arts, Musical Theater
2026
Musical Theater, Opera, Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Ronald Rael
Archipelago Adobe
Merging technology, storytelling, and tradition through architectural-scaled robotic adobe installation, redefining land-based practices across diverse sites.
Technology, Architecture & Design
2026
Architecture & Design, Craft, Technology, Visual Arts, 2026
Sofía Rei
Reinitas
There is a bar in the Nebraska plains that serves as a refuge for meatpacking workers. It’s called Reinita, in honor of owner Berta Quintero’s mother. This bilingual multimedia performance follows three generations of Quintero women in Fremont, Nebraska—a city shaped by the meatpacking industry and mass deportations. It is composed by Sofía Rei, based on reporting by NPR senior correspondent Jasmine Garsd.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2026
Multimedia Performance, Music, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2026
Liz Roberts
Love is the Drug: Women in Harm Reduction
A nonfiction feature film tracing the history of women organizing in first wave harm reduction to their work in the movement today decades later. The project points to how many strategies now used in public health originated in the harm reduction community, which has often been organized by women.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Cara Romero
Mirror & Pattern: When Animals Were People
Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero will collaborate with Tribal youth and families to revitalize stories of the land through handcrafted costumes and performances in the Mojave Desert. The project will culminate in 20 silver gelatin photographs and a 5-minute art film documenting this intergenerational cultural transmission process.
Visual Arts, Ecological Art
2026
Ecological Art, Photography, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Mason Rosenthal
America Again
Lightning Rod Special will create a performance in response to the United States Semiquincentennial. Set in a post-apocalyptic theme park, the piece unfolds through looping dioramas of the American Revolution and asks: Are we spiraling upward toward our democratic ideals, or sinking deeper into our founding sins?
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Yoshie Sakai
GRANDMA = FUTURE: The Musical
" GRANDMA = FUTURE: The Musical" is an original tragi-comedic musical extravaganza challenging ageism and patriarchy via live performance, storytelling, song, dance, and staging. Set in an imaginative, future world where there are no parents—leaving only grandmas and their grandchildren—this musical poses the question: what if stupid parents didn’t run the world?
Visual Arts, Performance Art
2026
Performance Art, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Jeana Scotti
Furball
Furball is a play about boundaries of consent and our failing gynecological healthcare system, told through farce when Sam finds a cat furball in their vagina after their partner doesn’t wash their hands before sex . The staging explores how to present sex in an alternative and non-realistic way through knitting.
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Avery Sharpe
I Knew You When
Avery Sharpe will compose and perform a 7 movement composition, that will incorporate melodies and musical ideas elicited from musicians/composers and people who were involved in music, that are now in stages of dementia. The composition will be performed by a chamber orchestra and jazz sextet.
Music, Jazz
2026
Jazz, Multimedia Performance, Music, Performing Arts, 2026
Scott R. Sheppard
America Again
Lightning Rod Special will create a performance in response to the United States Semiquincentennial. Set in a post-apocalyptic theme park, the piece unfolds through looping dioramas of the American Revolution and asks: Are we spiraling upward toward our democratic ideals, or sinking deeper into our founding sins?
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Jean Shin
Unfinished Business: Transforming a Korean Grocery into a Community Hub
Jean Shin will transform her family's closing Korean grocery store in Washington DC into a living monument and cultural hub honoring immigrant resilience. Through immersive installations repurposing storefront signage, shelves, and everyday objects, alongside community meals and oral histories, this work catalyzes collective healing and intergenerational dialogue.
Visual Arts, Socially-Engaged Visual Art
2026
Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2026
Liza Sylvestre
deaf*—Towards Cripistemological Captions
Towards Cripistemological Captions is an experimental documentary project exploring the historical lineage of creative captioning praxes and the generative potential of deaf* positionalities—developing ‘cripistemological captions’ as a methodology that emerges from a multiplicity of non-normative experiences, vantages, and epistemologies in/around aurality, orality, communication, and listening.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Catherine Telford Keogh
Metabolic Rift
A large glass networked installation housing Gowanus Canal sludge where extremophiles metabolize industrial waste, their movements translated into sound activating pneumatic systems—revealing the dynamic tension between sterile containment and the vibrant resilience of decomposing yet animate matter.
Visual Arts, Ecological Art
2026
Ecological Art, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2026
Henry Threadgill
Six Of Inside Straight Goin Thru Simply Existing Surface
“Inside Straight Let’s See Goin’ Thru Simply Existing Surface” is a five-room multimedia gallery installation that immerses viewers in a progressive series of spaces designed to recalibrate and expand their sensory perception.
Music, Installation
2026
Installation, Music, Painting & Printmaking, Performing Arts, Video Art, 2026
Josiah Thomas Turner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim (Working Title)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim' is an epic musical play set in the world of Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' presented as a church revival hosted by the titular Character Jim's daughter, Elizabeth. The play tackles racism, legacy, Americana, nationalism and nostalgia through music, song, dance and biting satire.
Performing Arts, Musical Theater
2026
Musical Theater, Performing Arts, Puppetry, Theater, 2026
Gillian Waldo
Nickel
Nickel is a 16mm film investigating the life of Richard Nickel, a Chicago photographer obsessed with saving the buildings of architect Louis Sullivan, who perished when one of Sullivan’s buildings collapsed upon him.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2026
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, 2026
Charlotte Wells
Novelty Acts
Novelty Acts' is a narrative feature-length film about a drummer in New York City in two significant periods of her life — her arrival in the late 1960s and her eventual forced departure in the present day. It’s a portrait of a queer artist and city — what endures and is endured through time.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2026
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2026
Alice Yorke
America Again
Lightning Rod Special will create a performance in response to the United States Semiquincentennial. Set in a post-apocalyptic theme park, the piece unfolds through looping dioramas of the American Revolution and asks: Are we spiraling upward toward our democratic ideals, or sinking deeper into our founding sins?
Performing Arts, Theater
2026
Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
Danny Zelibor
[Project Creatine] (working title)
Project Creatine is a semi-biographical opera written for operatic tenor and drag artist Jordan Weatherston Pitts (Creatine Price). On an odyssey through city life, night clubs, and dreamscapes, our eponymous heroine encounters the highest highs and lowest lows of love, art, and living. Cantata, cabaret, and court drama – Project Creatine redefines opera in a boundary-breaking story about radical self-definition.
Performing Arts, Musical Theater
2026
Musical Theater, Opera, Performing Arts, Theater, 2026
