upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
Vashti DuBois
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2006 Leeway Transformation Award – $15,000
- Neighborhood: Germantown
- Discipline: Literary Arts, Performance
- Social Change / Intent: Feminism
For Vashti, the purpose of artmaking is to create experiences that nurture, challenge, and move the artist and community. The art and social change aspects of her work are inextricably bound up in each other, a consequence of her growing up female, Black, poor, and a single mom who just wanted to be an artist. When working with young women, ages 13-17, at The Girls' Center, a project of Congreso de Latinos Unidos, Vashti and the staff came together to transform the center, but more importantly to transform the messages that people were getting about the girls through three multimedia, multidisciplinary projects. Alice, Alicia and Ayana in Wonderland was one of the resulting projects, a one-act play about a trip down the rabbit hole of the juvenile justice system developed from interviews, student writings, and daily interactions with the young women. Her directing work includes Converse Sneakers, a one-act play, a coming of age story of two Latina girls growing up in the Bronx. More recently in 2005, after her 16-year-old nephew was murdered in Lynchburg, Virginia, Vashti created a new writing series called Hansel and Gretel, a how-to memoir that dealt with the loss of her nephew and became an instructional guide for survival for her teenage children and family. Vashti sees her art as a continuum, with each project related to and building upon the project before.
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