Leeway Foundation announces its 2025 Transformation Award Recipients

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PHILADELPHIA, PA — Leeway Foundation is proud to announce the recipients of its 2025 Transformation Award (LTA), awarding a total of $180,000 in unrestricted support to 12 women, trans, and/or gender nonconforming artists and cultural producers working at the intersection of art and social change in the Greater Philadelphia region.

The Transformation Award honors artists and cultural producers who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to social change work, sustained artistic practice, and leadership within their communities for five years or more. Selected from a competitive pool of applicants, the 2025 LTA recipients represent a wide range of disciplines, including dance, theater, performance, film, literature, folk and traditional arts, culinary arts, social practice, and multidisciplinary work. Ranging in age from their mid-20s to early 70s, this year’s cohort reflects the many life experiences, creative paths, and justice-driven work shaping today’s movements.

The 2025 LTA cohort includes artists whose practices engage urgent and interconnected issues such as immigrant and refugee justice; cultural preservation; racial justice; environmental justice; prison abolition; Palestinian liberation; gender justice; mental health and community healing; and Black, queer, and trans liberation. Across practices, recipients center art as a tool for collective memory, resistance, care, and transformation.

This year’s awardees include but are not limited to: a Mexican folk dance artist creating intergenerational spaces for migrant families to reconnect with cultural tradition; a formerly incarcerated activist-filmmaker documenting resistance to mass incarceration; a Black, queer, and agender artist creating experimental performances centering liberation and interiority; an expressive arts practitioner creating accessible wellness spaces for underrepresented communities; a poet and audio storyteller archiving intimacy and care among Black women; a chef and cultural worker preserving African diaspora foodways; and a Palestinian director and organizer creating politically informed theater that transforms grief into collective vision.

Together, the 2025 Transformation Award recipients exemplify Leeway’s belief that art is essential to building just, liberated futures – grounded in community accountability, imagination, and sustained cultural work.

The 2025 Transformation Award recipients are (in alphabetical order):

Andrea Espinal of Northeast Philadelphia, Multidisciplinary, $15,000

Connie Yu of Cedar Park, Multidisciplinary, $15,000

Debbie A. Davis of Lamokin Village, Media Arts/Visual Arts, $15,000

Donna Oblongata of Kingsessing, Performance/Visual Arts, $15,000

Imran Siddiquee of Olde Kensington, Media Arts/Literary Arts, $15,000

Nia Benjamin of Fairmount, Performance/Media Arts, $15,000

Raina J. León of Chestnut Hill, Literary Arts/Media Arts, $15,000

shanina dionna of West Philadelphia, Visual Arts/Performance, $15,000

Silvana Cardell of Francisville, Performance, $15,000

Sojourner Ahebee of West Powelton, Literary Arts, $15,000

Valerie Erwin of Germantown, Folk Arts, $15,000

Zaina Yasmin Dana of Northern Liberties, Performance, $15,000 

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ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATION AWARD

Transformation Award applications are evaluated by an independent peer review panel. A national panel of artists and cultural producers convened to review applications and work samples in this two-stage process. Grantees were selected through a process that values commitment to social change, lived experience, and creative rigor.

The 2025 review panel consisted of Brooklyn-based visual artist Chitra Ganesh; Philadelphia-based poet, writer, and performer Denice Frohman (LTA '12; WOO '19, '20, '23); Knoxville-based playwright, director, and actor Linda Parris-Bailey, Philadelphia-based illustrator and arts administrator Elliot Waters-Fleming; and Houston-based writer, poet, and translator Jadine Pluecker. The panel was facilitated by Jess Garz, founder and director of RAE Consulting, who holds over a decade of experience in arts-focused grantmaking.