/2023 GRANTEES

/2021 GRANTEES

In July 2021, OTS disbursed a total of $2,500 USD to seven awardees!

Minne Atairu

she, her, hers

b. 1992
New York, NY

IG: @minneatairu

︎︎︎Website

Minne Atairu is an artist and doctoral student in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and practice emerge at the intersection of machine learning, Art/Museum education and Black culture. Minne’s ongoing project, Igun AI, addresses a 17-year artistic absence during the interregnum following the 1897 British punitive expedition in Benin Kingdom. Minne is currently a metaLAB Affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.

Eric Von Haynes

he, him, his

b. 1985
Chicago, IL

IG: manny_suena

︎︎︎ Website

Eric Von Haynes is conceptual artist and printmaker who founded Flatlands Press in Chicago in 2007, focused on producing publications and other printed ephemera for artists worldwide. Flatlands aims to be a community-minded space for artists to create, inspire and share ideas. One of the core tenets at Flatlands Press is community building and making the invisible visible.

Taylor Johnson

he, they

b. 1991
New Orleans, LA

IG: @hoodsnax

︎︎︎ Website

Taylor Johnson is an artist from Washington, DC. His first book of poetry, Inheritance, was published in 2020 with Alice James Books.

Sylvia Jones

she, her, hers

b. 1994
Baltimore, MD

IG: @sylviaminnettajones

︎︎︎ Website

Sylvia Jones is a writer, educator, and prison abolitionist. She earned her MFA from American University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Scalawag, Ponder Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her debut poetry collection, Buzzard. She lives in Baltimore with her partner and their cat. This upcoming fall she will serve as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.

Belise Nishimwe

she, her, hers

b. 2001
Portland, OR

IG: @dragonbee1

︎︎︎ Website

Belise Nishimwe, a 2019 Poetry Out Loud Oregon Champion, and Pamplin Media Group Amazing Kids Award Recipient is a poet, scholar, activist, and visionary. She was born and lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania until the age of five when she and her family moved to America through Catholic Charities. Now a U.S. citizen, she has dedicated herself to creating a platform that gives a voice to marginalized people and the representation they need.

Since regaining her love for creative writing and poetry two years ago, she has won a Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key and Silver Medal award, been selected for publication in Duke University Press, featured in a Disney Christmas Holiday Special, and a grantee by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. She has also been featured on ABC, KATU, KOIN, KGW, The Governor’s Office, Catholic Sentinel, Portland Tribune, Pamplin Media, and Oregon Live.

A recent graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) on a full-ride, as a distinguished John B. Ervin Scholar.

elizabeth pérez

she, her, hers

b. 1989
Lenape Land-Bedstuy, BK

IG: @elizabethslash

︎︎︎ Website

I do a lot of things but the work I am most proud of is mothering my son. My professional career spans industries and has always centered families, and Black and Brown communities. I have just completed a Master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) program where I've updated my emergency preparedness kit as an artist and educator. At the moment, I work with DOTDOT studio as a producer and this coming fall I'll be thinking of all the ways to build products and services we actually need with equity at the forefront as a Resident at ITP. On days I have childcare and time on my hands, I make ceramics.

Blair Ebony Smith

she, her, hers

b. 1988 (Richmond, Virginia)
living in Champaign, IL

IG: @lovenloops

︎︎︎ Website

Blair loves to rigorously play and make Black girl sounds, spaces, lands, planets, and galaxies with Black girls and those who love them. Her artist-scholar-curator-teacher dreams and praxis emerge where Black girlhood as a creative and relation building life force with Black girls/women, Black feminist poetics, sound, and alternative modes of cultural work and production meet. Her work has explored poetics and sound as practiced with Black girls and collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a space/way envisioned by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006 to celebrateBlack girlhood/Black girls and make our world anew, locally and galaxy-wide. Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her current dreams are obsessed with Black girlhood celebration by way of SOLHOT as always,already taking many shapes;Black feminist poetics, sound (listening)and sensorial art + design (interiority) with Black girls locally and worldwide

/ 2024-2025 GRANTEES

In December 2024, OTS disbursed a total of $3,875 USD to three awardees!

Book Arts Solidarity Network

Between New York City + Detroit

IG: @book_arts_solidarity

We are a group of makers and publishers, committed to building a network that leverages the book arts as a tool for mobilizing solidarity-based movements, generating creative collaborations, and fostering greater accessibility and resource-sharing within the field. This network seeks to connect, support, and organize new and existing book arts initiatives and spaces, outside of institutionalization, exclusivity, and dominant “fine art” frameworks. We pay tribute to the radical traditions and histories of printmakin and publishing, and the practitioners and movements that paved the way for us. We reject the co-optation of these practices in the service of art-washing and upholding an oppressive and genocidal status quo.

Yoshie Sakai

she, her

b. 1970
Gardena, CA

IG: @yoshie_sakai_studio
︎︎︎ Website

Yoshie Sakai is an interdisciplinary artist (video, sculpture, installation, performance), and the recipient of the 2024 Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, 2021/22 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Fellowship, and the 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship. She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Marble House Project, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency (Foundry), and International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, California State University Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery, Verge Center for the Arts, Antenna, and the Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, as well as internationally (Cambodia, Canada, Germany, and Japan). She holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and a BFA from California State University, Long Beach.

Wyatt Coday

she, her

b. 1992
Los Angeles, CA

IG: @wyekleekamp
︎︎︎ Website

Wyatt Coday is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a practicing financial dominatrix. As NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, the design research studio she founded in 2017 with Evan Kleekamp (1992-2022), Coday develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses. Coday describes her practice as "research performance" and offers her labor as a “unique instance of Black melancholy." Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography.

/ 2022 GRANTEES

In October 2022, OTS disbursed a total of $4,500 USD to seven awardees!

Yaa Addae

she, they

b. 1997
London, UK

IG: @yaatheplant
︎︎︎ Website

Yaa Addae is a curator, writer, and artist-researcher whose practice is informed by the liberatory power of the imagination,play, and restorative love economics: bringing love to the systemically underloved. They have led participatory workshops with Autograph ABP, The Church of Black Feminist Thought, The Library of Africa + The African Diaspora, Skate Gals and Pals, and Rumpus Room and spoken at Southbank Centre, Nubuke Foundation, Goethe Instiut Lisbon, King’s College London, and The Barbican. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Gal-Dem, Trippin, The Republic Nigeria, and Everything Passes Except The Past (Sternberg Press March 2021) and she was part of the inaugural Frieze New Writers Cohort (2021). In 2020, Yaa was recognized as one of 100 innovators under 30 across the world on the ‘Regenerative List’, an initiative in partnership with Irregular Labs, World Frontier Forum and Gucci.

Ayana Zaire Cotton

she, they

b. 1993
Youghtanund Land (Dawn, VA)

IG: @ayzaco
︎︎︎ Website

Ayana Zaire Cotton is a queer, Black feminist, anti-disciplinary artist and cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. They are currently based in Dawn, Virginia — tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund — answering the call to steward land that has been in their family for four generations. Braiding language, performance, and craft Ayana speculates and worldbuilds alongside science and technology. Sankofa is a word and symbol of the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana which translates to, "go back and get". Centering a sankofa sensibility, they build databases as vessels holding seed data and experiment with shuffling algorithms to spin non-linear narratives. Ayana calls this methodology “Cykofa Narration”, generating new worlds using the digital and social detritus of our existing world — resulting in a storytelling form that embodies circular time and troubles human authorship. Through engaging with language, technology, and ecology, Ayana is cultivating a practice of remembering and imagining alternative modes of being and interspecies belonging.

Gugulethu Anathi Duma

she, they

b. 1993
Port Alfred, South Africa

IG: @duma_ma
︎︎︎ Website

Gugulethu Duma (aka D U M A M A) explores intersectionality in her transdiscplinary artistic practice allowing the structures in formlessness to simply be. Her practice involves consciously deconstructing and critiquing archaic modes of representation of Southern African/African sonic and performance culture, while also composing music for herself and others. Ritualising modes of togetherness, Dumama is concerned with the ways in which new forms can organically emerge when collaborations can center in intimacy and openness.

Her interests intersect as practice based performance research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative bodies of work centered around political-poetic imaginations. As a compelling storyteller and lyricist, she works to seamlessly to mend together the divide between traditional South African oral culture and futuristic globally-oriented poetics, with a delicate care and awareness of the value of both. As one part of the duo dumama + kechou, Dumama released her debut album buffering juju in 2020. Weaving together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, she resists typical archival practices around oral traditions and advocates for a recalibration of our transcendental, futuristic Black and African sense of being and belonging.

As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in immersive sensory experiences. Her debut curatorial venture ancestral body noise, produced in collaboration with Oyoun Berlin, is a testament to this. This premiered at the cutting edge curatorial focus, Emobodied Temporalities , as as a performance workshop intervention. This performance workshop and exhibition brought together artists from the diaspora based in Berlin, challenging them to dig into their individual opaque ancestral relations to the African continent, and bring them into the present in order to generate contemporary approaches to forms of ritual and engagements with archiving, performance and narrative making for the future.

Keli Maksud

she, her

b. 1985
Brooklyn, NY

IG: @kelisafiamaksud
︎︎︎ Website

Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory and identities, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.

Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at Salon 94 in New York, NY, Huxley Parlour in UK, the Bamako Biennial in Mali, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul in South Korea, Galería Nueva in Spain and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in Brazil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2018 and 2017), the Toronto Arts Council (2015), the Ontario Council for the Arts (2012 and 2014) the New York Foundation for the Arts (2021) and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). Her writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine and A Space Gallery.

Alkebuluan Merriweather

they, she

b. 1997
Chicago, IL

IG: @ alkebuluanm
@ homagetoblkmadonnas

Alkebuluan Merriweather is a Chicago-born and raised artist who received their BA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2019. Their work explores blackness and collective memory through various mediums such as collage, ephemera, and photography. She is most known for her previous archival project titled theblackmatriarcharchive alongside its reiteration homageblkmadonnas.

Almah LaVon Rice

she, her

b. 1976
Ancestral Territory of the Osage Nation (Pittsburgh, PA)

IG: @agentsubrosa
︎︎︎ Website

Almah LaVon Rice is a writer, mixed media mail artist, and fairy marsh monster. She is at work on an novella in the key of the AfroSurreal.

Islam & Print

Daniel Talib Latif
he, him
b.1998

Safiyah Cheatam
she, her
b. 1995
Baltimore, MD

IG: @_flounders /
@ saphicles

︎︎︎ Website

Islam & Print (I&P) is a community print space based in Baltimore, MD created by Dan Talib Latif Flounders and Safiyah Cheatam. We aim to champion diverse Muslim experiences and strengthen career readiness by building a network of regional, emerging visual artists of all mediums through our annual year-long screen printing fellowship. I&P strives to prioritize relationship building in cohorts of two to four to co-work, critique, and produce a collection of print editions that will partially exist within I&P’s growing archive of contemporary Muslim artist work and partially remain with the artist.

With plans to expand our services in the future, Islam & Print currently offers monthly group brainstorming / work-in-progress meetings, one-on-one mentorship, technical print education, growth-centered critique environments, artist-to-gallery facilitations, and a culminating group exhibition per cohort.

Safiyah and Dan value their fellow’s quality of time (personal, spiritual, and artistic growth) above their quantity of output (productivity culture), understanding that we are all people first. We emphasize that you do not have to be a printmaker to join Islam & Print and maintain that our varied expertises is a strength of our collective thought.

Andrea Yarbrough

she, her, hers

b. 1991
Chicago, IL

IG: @dre_lasoul
︎︎︎ Website

Andrea Yarbrough is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and educator based on the South Side of Chicago nurturing sites of care through a blend of civic engagement and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative in c/o: (in care of). The programs and projects produced support writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, as artists in residence seeking to explore the intersections of urban ecology, art praxis, and land-use policy.

Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.

Orange Tangent Study