2025
Creative Capital awards $2.45 million in unrestricted project grants to 55 artists to create 49 new works in Visual Arts, Technology, Performing Arts, Film/Moving Image, and Literature, as well as multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms in all disciplines. Watch the Creative Capital Carnival 2025 Artist Project Videos.
Creative Capital awards $2.45 million in unrestricted project grants to 55 artists to create 49 new works in Visual Arts, Technology, Performing Arts, Film/Moving Image, and Literature, as well as multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms in all disciplines. Watch the Creative Capital Carnival 2025 Artist Project Videos.
Kamee Abrahamian
Portals
<em>Portals</em> is a collaborative media arts anthology that imagines and gathers the bio-mythographies of new mothers and caregivers in a multiversal, fragmented storyworld.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2025
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Thana Alexa
Resonance
<em>Resonance</em> is a song cycle that explores how the reverberation of sound frequencies can awaken emotional states, trigger physiological reactions on a molecular level and affect mental health.
Music, Jazz
2025
Jazz, Music, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Morehshin Allahyari
The Remaining Signs of Future Centuries / نشانه های باقی از سده های آتی
<em>The Remaining Signs of Future Centuries</em> is a multifaced project that explores the underrepresented history of Islamicate science, technology, and mysticism through an anti-imperialist feminist lens.
Technology, Digital Media
2025
Digital Media, Socially-Engaged Technology, Technology, 2025
Sophia Nahli Allison
Prologue
A cinematic dreamscape awakens an intimate encounter between two Black women over a century ago. But as truth and fiction begin to blur, a complex living, breathing archive is revealed.
Film/Moving Image, Experimental Film
2025
Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Holland Andrews
How does it feel to look at nothing
An embodied affirmation of trans futures amidst the disintegrative reality of trans life, <em>How does it feel to look at nothing</em> is an experimental opera and pre-origin story of a Deity of Namelessness.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Music, Opera, Performing Arts, 2025
Kathy Aoki
Koons Ruins Atlas
Koons Ruins Atlas satirically documents a fictional vendetta against Jeff Koons’ art by a collector bent on acquiring and destroying his works on her estate.
Visual Arts, Painting & Printmaking
2025
Painting & Printmaking, Visual Arts, 2025
Amber Bemak
Cosmic Moose and Grizzly Bears Ville
Peter Valentine, diagnosed schizophrenic and living unmedicated, fought MIT for 7 years while they demolished his neighborhood to develop University Park, claiming he couldnu2019t leave because it was his electromagnetic laboratory.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2025
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, 2025
Shayla Blatchford
Anti-Uranium Mapping Project
<em>AUMP</em> is an interactive counter mapping website that serves as an educational database to amplify communities on the Navajo Nation impacted by uranium mining through a multimodal learning experience.
Technology, Data Visualization
2025
Data Visualization, Digital Media, Socially-Engaged Technology, Technology, 2025
Dahlak Brathwaite
COMMERCIAL
<em>COMMERCIAL</em> is a multimedia, music-driven play inspired by playwright Dahlak Brathwaite’s personal connection and history with the cop who killed an unarmed Black man named Stephon Clark in 2018.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Music, Performing Arts, Theater, 2025
Alice Bucknell
Earth Engine
EARTH ENGINE is a video game using real-time climate data integration to explore the limits of climate prediction technologies through an inverted game mechanic where the planet is the player.
Technology, Data Visualization
2025
Data Visualization, Digital Media, Games, Technology, 2025
Thi Bui
NOWHERELAND
<em>NOWHERELAND</em>, a work of graphic nonfiction, shares the experiences of Asian Americans caught in the immigrant detention and deportation system in the United States.
Literature, Graphic Novel
2025
Graphic Novel, Literature, 2025
Susan Chen
Chinatown Girl Scouts: Past & Present
Celebrating Chinatown Girl Scout’s 100-year history through community portraiture in oil paint.
Visual Arts
2025
Visual Arts, 2025
Oscar Rene Cornejo
LAND
<em>LAND</em> is a site of research, cultivation, care, and conservation established by artists Oscar Rene Cornejo and Jen de los Reyes.
Visual Arts, Ecological Art
2025
Ecological Art, Social Practice, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Jen de los Reyes
LAND
<em>LAND</em> is a site of research, cultivation, care, and conservation established by artists Oscar Rene Cornejo and Jen de los Reyes.
Visual Arts, Ecological Art
2025
Ecological Art, Social Practice, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Lori Felker
Patient
<em>Patient</em>, a feature film, tells the story of a medical actor who must shift from helping student doctors practice bedside manner to being a real patient with a mysterious brain abnormality.
Film/Moving Image, Moving Image
2025
Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Ash Fure
ANIMAL [the underground]
<em>ANIMAL</em> reimagines opera as sonic training ground: a visceral field of full-bodied sound that activates our animal capacity to sense.
Music, Opera
2025
Music, Opera, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Ash Goh Hua
Confinement (坐月)
Jing returns to Singapore following the birth of her niece and in trying to be an aunt, is forced to confront the causes of her departure a decade prior—her family.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2025
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Juan Pablo González
The Measure of Time
In a Mexican farming village, two brothers reunite after twenty years. Will their fraternal love heal the scars of such prolonged distancing?
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2025
Documentary Film, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, 2025
Katie Grinnan
The Vault
<em>The Vault </em>is a video/3D simulation, occurring in an economic ruin, that reconsiders systems of valuation, preservation, and cohabitation within the backdrop of extreme climate and weather conditions.
Visual Arts, Ecological Art
2025
Ecological Art, Sculpture, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Harmony Holiday
After the End of the World
<em>After the End of the World</em> is an improvised record of events that surround black music and performance that is most attentive to those events that occur backstage and on the margins that we are asked to forget or overlook.
Literature, Literary Nonfiction
2025
Literary Nonfiction, Literature, Poetry, Socially-Engaged Literature, 2025
Susie Ibarra
CHAN
CHAN is a landscape opera/sound installation of ancestral stories sung and played in resonant jurassic canyons, rivers, & cisterns in Southern Colorado created by Susie Ibarra and produced by the TANK.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Music, Opera, Performing Arts, 2025
Vishal Jugdeo
Hurl a Rock, Feel a Flame
A collectively authored, experimental video made with members of the queer and trans community in Georgetown, Guyana; and an online archive with resources for the community.
Visual Arts, Installation
2025
Installation, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Darol Olu Kae
Without a Song
An aging musician reluctantly returns home after a decades-long absence and struggles to repair old friendships while suffering from a mysterious illness that makes it impossible to play his instrument.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2025
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
yuniya edi kwon
How does it feel to look at nothing
An embodied affirmation of trans futures amidst the disintegrative reality of trans life, <em>How does it feel to look at nothing</em> is an experimental opera and pre-origin story of a Deity of Namelessness.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Music, Opera, Performing Arts, 2025
Kate Ladenheim
Gestural Publics
<em>Gestural Publics </em>is a dance performance and a digital motion archive that interrogates issues of identity, agency, and conformity in motion capture technology.
Performing Arts, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, 2025
Leilehua Lanzilotti
Dance Suite from Liliʻu
<em>Dance Suite from Liliʻu </em>draws its music and inspiration from the experimental opera project, <em>Liliʻu</em>, by Leilehua Lanzilotti connecting performance, community activations, and indigenous language revitalization.
Performing Arts, Opera
2025
Opera, Performing Arts, 2025
Damon Locks
Live From CPS
Damon Locks will create a new production for his Chicago music group Black Monument Ensemble, encapsulating performances, workshops, and curriculum rooted in Chicago public schools.
Music, Dance
2025
Dance, Music, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Angelo Madsen
OUT OF ME INTO YOU
This project documents the ecosystems the emerge as a result of symbiotic human-to-animal encounters. Shaped by fantasy, these alchemical exchanges are latent with erotic potential.
Film/Moving Image, Documentary Film
2025
Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Christopher Marianetti (Found Sound Nation)
COMMERCIAL
<em>COMMERCIAL</em> is a multimedia, music-driven play inspired by playwright Dahlak Brathwaite’s personal connection and history with the cop who killed an unarmed Black man named Stephon Clark in 2018.
Music, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Music, Performing Arts, Theater, 2025
Dolissa Medina
A Light for Ambiguous Loss
An experimental documentary about "Ambiguous Loss," grief in suspension, explored through the nascent field of Forensic Macrophotography, which resurrects lost fingerprints of the anonymous dead.
Film/Moving Image, Animation
2025
Animation, Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, 2025
Jonah Mixon-Webster
The Hauntology of Slavery
<em>The Hauntology of Slavery</em> is a work of literary non-fiction that combines personal narrative, photography, and archival research to deconstruct the aftereffects of slavery on African American lives.
Literature, Literary Nonfiction
2025
Literary Nonfiction, Literature, Socially-Engaged Literature, 2025
Emily Mkrtichian
Portals
<em>Portals</em> is a collaborative media arts anthology that imagines and gathers the bio-mythographies of new mothers and caregivers in a multiversal, fragmented storyworld.
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film
2025
Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Rashaad Newsome
I Come As One, But I Stand As One Thousand
In a cybernetic bejeweled landscape, artificial intelligence takes physical form through the choreography of 1000 quadcopter drones with LEDs, accompanied by live performers and an orchestra.
Music, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Music, Performing Arts, 2025
Samantha Nye
Possible Pleasures
<em>Possible Pleasures</em> is a series of video installations that reimagine musical Scopitone films from the 1960s as celebrations of intergenerational queer pleasure.
Visual Arts, Installation
2025
Installation, Performance Art, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Jared Owens
Remembering Attica: the optics of uprising
Celebrating the ingenuity, craft, and visuality of resistance in the face of systemic oppression.
Visual Arts, Painting & Printmaking
2025
Painting & Printmaking, Sculpture, Social Practice, Visual Arts, 2025
Steve Parker
HOUSTON IS SINKING
A series of interactive sculptures, made from defunct nautical tools, that sonify land loss in Houston, Texas—one of the fastest sinking cities on earth.
Visual Arts, Public Art
2025
Public Art, Sculpture, Sound Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Clyde Petersen
Our Forbidden Country
<em>Our Forbidden Country</em> is a 70-minute, stop-motion animated, narrative feature film centering transmasculine identity, community, desire and fantasy.
Film/Moving Image, Animation
2025
Animation, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, 2025
Julia Phillips
Pentasomnia
A 5-channel installation consisting of black and white videos derived from dreams and other associations that take place in a factory, a beach, Hopper’s <em>Nighthawks</em> diner, an institution, and a tunnel.
Visual Arts, Installation
2025
Installation, Sculpture, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Lee Pivnik
The Living Room: A Symbiotic Home
<em>The Living Room</em> is a speculative retrofit of a South-Beach studio apartment into an inhabitable aquaponics sculpture.
Visual Arts, Architecture & Design
2025
Architecture & Design, Ecological Art, Sculpture, Visual Arts, 2025
Paola Prestini
Sensorium Ex
Sensorium Ex is a new opera synthesizing artificial intelligence, disability, and the arts, pushing boundaries of what it means to have a voice, and paving the way for future artists with disabilities.
Music, Opera
2025
Music, Opera, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Aparna Ramaswamy
The Liminal Museum
<em>The Liminal Museum</em> is an installation/performance that layers gender, family, lineage, and aging through the life story and collected mementos of the artists’ late mother/grandmother.
Performing Arts, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Ranee Ramaswamy
The Liminal Museum
<em>The Liminal Museum</em> is an installation/performance that layers gender, family, lineage, and aging through the life story and collected mementos of the artists’ late mother/grandmother.
Performing Arts, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Ashwini Ramaswamy
The Liminal Museum
<em>The Liminal Museum</em> is an installation/performance that layers gender, family, lineage, and aging through the life story and collected mementos of the artists’ late mother/grandmother.
Performing Arts, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Aaron Robertson
A Separate Rite
In 1980s Detroit, a Black priest fights to revive his dwindling congregation and stop inner-city church closures following the miraculous discovery of two missing children.
Literature, Literary Fiction
2025
Literary Fiction, Literature, Socially-Engaged Literature, 2025
Zane Rodulfo
SHOUTER!
<em>Shouter!</em> is a multimedia project exploring Black Spirituality and survival through the lens of Trinidad & Tobago’s Shouter Baptist religion & the Gullah Geechee Ring Shout tradition.
Performing Arts, Jazz
2025
Jazz, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance, 2025
Ilana Savdie
Festejeros
Examine the role of theatricality in the rise of power regimes and resistance movements, and develop new paintings and video work which integrate this research.
Visual Arts, Installation
2025
Installation, Painting & Printmaking, Video Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Marike Splint
SHOW FULL HISTORY
Using Marike Splint's own internet search history as a performance script, SHOW FULL HISTORY takes audiences on a virtual odyssey, tracing her family's history of migration.
Performing Arts, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, Theater, 2025
Sister Sylvester
Ghost Genes
<em>Ghost Genes</em> is an exploration of the hidden histories and the ghosts that haunt genetics and synthetic biology.
Performing Arts, Multimedia Performance
2025
Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, 2025
Tshay
Tell Me When You Get Home.
During a family party, 15 year-old Honest Cardamom encounters the spirit of a lost loved one, reconnecting the teen to her own origin story.
Film/Moving Image, Animation
2025
Animation, Film/Moving Image, Narrative Film, 2025
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
There, Eyes Were Watching
A “monument by subtraction” that transforms a historic Louisiana home into a site for reckoning with the history (and shaping the future) of the land.
Visual Arts, Architecture & Design
2025
Architecture & Design, Ecological Art, Public Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Janelle VanderKelen
The Golden Thread
Inspired by the philosophies and visions of Hildegard of Bingen, this experimental feature film employs stop-motion and time-lapse animation to examine ways fungi mitigate the effects of climate change.
Film/Moving Image, Animation
2025
Animation, Experimental Film, Film/Moving Image, Moving Image, 2025
Divya Victor
Kin
Essays that explore under-recognized experiences of ecstasy, agony, and frisson as kinship catalysts in the South Asian diaspora through visual arts, film, architecture, and poetry.
Literature, Literary Nonfiction
2025
Literary Nonfiction, Literature, 2025
Christine Wong Yap
Bay Windows / Ventanas en saliente / 窗花
A trilingual social practice project engaging working-class, immigrant women to collaboratively develop Mexican and Chinese paper cuts and public art to foster cross-cultural bridging.
Visual Arts, Craft
2025
Craft, Social Practice, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Visual Arts, 2025
Takahiro Yamamoto
Hollow Center
<em>Hollow Center</em> consists of a film, dance, and a book that interiorly explore the membrane between erasure and existence as a place of refuge from the accomplishment society and continuous hostility against immigrants.
Performing Arts, Dance
2025
Dance, Multimedia Performance, Performing Arts, 2025