Announcing the 2021 Leeway Transformation Awardees
Amid COVID and its lasting impacts on arts, culture, and its practitioners, Leeway Foundation announces $180,000 in unrestricted support to 12 artists and cultural producers working at the intersection of art and social change.
This year’s cohort spans an array of artistic disciplines and social change intents – photographers focused on immigrant justice, dancers preserving and reinventing cultural legacies, poets championing racial justice, musicians creating work about gender self-determination, and more. This cohort also reflects an increase of awardees who identify as cultural producers. Whether they are artists or cultural organizers driving social change or curators uplifting the work of others, cultural producers offer a unique perspective and utilize their practices to connect and engage community members through art-driven social change events, practices, and opportunities.
These 12 awardees have continued to work through the pandemic, adapting and expanding their artistic practices in ways that safely engaged and supported their communities.
The 2021 Leeway Transformation Award (LTA) recipients are (in alphabetical order):
- Ada Trillo of Logan Square, Visual Arts
- Ama Schley of Logan, Performance/Folk Art
- Andrea Walls of Overbrook, Visual Arts/Media Arts
- Annielille “Ani” Gavino of West Philadelphia, Multidisciplinary
- Arielle Julia Brown of East Mount Airy, Multidisciplinary
- Erlina Ortiz of South Jersey, Multidisciplinary
- Jasmine L. Combs of West Philadelphia, Literary Arts/Performance
- Julie Lipson of West Philadelphia, Music/Performance
- Las Artivistas (Diana Lugo Martinez, Maria Guadalupe Castillo, and Maria Lourdes Flores) of Norristown, Multidisciplinary
- Marángeli Mejía-Rabell of Center City, Multidisciplinary
- Shivon Pearl Love of Brewerytown, Folk Art/Literary Arts
- Sinta Penyami Storms of South Philadelphia, Folk Art/Performance
A national panel of artists and cultural producers convened to review applications and work samples in this two-stage process. The 2021 panel included Philadelphia-based filmmaker and new media artist Anula Shetty, Texas-bred and D.C.-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and art historian Claudia Zapata, and Los Angeles-based dramaturg, scholar, and facilitator Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. The second stage panel welcomed Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and community organizer Maria Bauman, and South Carolina-based filmmaker, photographer, and educator Roni Nicole Henderson-Day, and was facilitated by Sage Crump, New Orleans-based culture strategist, artist, and facilitator.
