Pioneer Works Announces 2025 Working Artist Fellowship Cohort, Supported by The Rockefeller Foundation’s Artist Impact Initiative
NEW YORK, NY, DECEMBER 16, 2024— Pioneer Works is pleased to announce the 2025 participants in The Working Artist Fellowship: Ari Melenciano, Ariana Faye Allensworth, Azikiwe Mohammed, Amirtha Kidambi, and Finnegan Shannon.
Launched in 2023, the one-year fellowship serves as an extension and enhancement of the existing Pioneer Works Residency Program—nominating New York City-based Alumni Residents to partake in a fellowship program that supports the development and completion of new, socially-engaged work. The artist fellows will be provided a range of resources including a $50,000 stipend, teaching and public engagement opportunities, production resources, mentorship, and advisors to support artists who want to deepen and expand their connection to socially-engaged modes of creating.
The five fellows each demonstrate creative practices that create new pathways and modalities to address critical challenges and foster social change, serving as creative leaders who employ innovative approaches, unique skill sets, modes of working, organizing and creating to address critical issues that positively impact the lives of New Yorkers.
“It's been an extraordinary privilege for Pioneer Works to be a recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Artist Impact Initiative, enabling us to start The Working Artist Fellowship as a resource to our Alumni Residents. The Fellowship directly channels funds into the hands of artists and allows them to wholly dedicate themselves to their practice—an aspiration we've long held,” said Gabriel Florenz, Pioneer Works’ Founding Artistic Director. “By providing resources to those who shape and transform our environments, we affirm our commitment to fostering equally impactful and meaningful artistic contributions—strengthening our bonds with our artistic community and creating a new standard for genuine creative support.”
Pioneer Works’ Working Artist Fellowship is directly supported by The Rockefeller Foundation’s Artist Impact Initiative, a two-year initiative created to foster a diverse community of New York City-based artists with ambitious projects that respond to and address the needs of the city’s people and communities—offering creative solutions, driving collective action and positive social change during a one-year fellowship. The Artist Impact Initiative supports two fellowship programs, with Pioneer Works and Creative Time respectively, enabling 20 artists to participate in one-year fellowships over a two-year period.
With this initiative, it is the shared ambition of The Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Time, and Pioneer Works to position artists as leaders in processes of social change, recognizing art-based initiatives as an innovative and highly effective means of elevating dialogue and fostering collective action to address the most pressing issues of the 21st century.
About the 2025 Working Artist Fellows
Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using improvisational dance to study ethnomusicology, to sound design using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She occasionally designs and teaches courses at different universities including New York University, Hunter College, and Rutgers University. She is also the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, and culture. Most recently, Afrotectopia has published the experimental kitchen table art book titled, Black Metal.
Ariana Faye Allensworth is a cultural worker who helps people organize to create change in their communities. Working across a range of disciplines including research, design, photography, and oral history, her work often focuses on stories of urban life. She leverages participatory and collaborative methods to mobilize and build belonging in place. Ariana’s creative practice is deeply informed by her decade-long experience as an arts administrator, social worker, educator, and strategist, supporting organizations working to transform culture. She is a long-time member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective advancing just housing futures through data and tenant-powered storytelling. Currently, she is developing a new body of work that aims to build solidarity tourism in Allensworth, CA—a historic free Black town founded by her ancestors in the San Joaquin Valley.
Azikiwe Mohammed is a crafter who builds physical spaces that include Blackness and the stories of the people of this land. Sometimes that land is physical, and other times it lives in our bodies. These attempts at land shapings have taken place at Canada Gallery, NY; Transformer, Washington, D.C.; The Highline, NY; California African American Museum, LA; Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia, PA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; NY and MoMa PS1, Queens, NY, among others.
Mohammed is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2023, a Rauschenberg Artists Fund grant (2021), a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016), an Art Matters Foundation Award (2015) and via his Black Painters Academy has received support from The Ruth Foundation. In 2022, he was featured on Art21’s New York Close Up digital-film series on artists living and working in New York City. Azikiwe Mohammed lives in New York, NY and has his studio in Newark as part of Project for Empty Space.
Amirtha Kidambi is heavily invested in decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical” (NPR, 2024). Spanning free jazz, punk, noise, and Indian devotional music, Kidambi crafts subversive sounds challenging hegemony. Based in New York City-Lenapehoking, Kidambi is an improviser and composer focused on critical intervention, responding to our fraught times, in collaboration with potent musicians including Luke Stewart, Angel & Demons with Darius Jones, Neti-Neti with Matt Evans, Moor Mother, Mary Halvorson, William Parker, Matana Roberts. She is also the composer for the anti-colonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri, exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Blackstar Film Festival. Leading the protest ensemble Elder Ones which recently released its incendiary third album New Monuments on We Jazz, her work garners critical acclaim from the New York Times, NPR, Wire Magazine, Fader, The Quietus, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily and Downbeat.
Kidambi has toured extensively in North America, Europe and Latin America at venues and festivals including Big Ears, Lincoln Center, Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Kennedy Center, Newport Jazz Festival, Rewire, Unsound, Moers, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Suoni per il Popolo (Montreal), Skaņu Mežs (Latvia), Jazz em Agosto, OutFest (Portugal), SESC (Brazil), CNA (Colombia) and Berlin Jazzfest. Kidambi has received grants and residencies from Pioneer Works (Working Artist Fellowship, Residency), EMPAC, Bucareli 69 (CDMX), Mid-Atlantic Arts, NYFA and Jerome Foundation. An educator, activist, and co-founder of South Asian Artists in Diaspora, Musicians Against Police Brutality and Amplify Palestine, Kidambi organizes with several artist-activist collectives. As a scholar and educator with degrees from Columbia and CUNY, she has taught and engaged in decolonizing curriculum at Brooklyn College, Bennington College and The New School and has given workshops and lectures at NYU, Harvard, Oberlin, Wesleyan University, UC Irvine, Bennington College, UC Santa Cruz, the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, and KM Conservatory (India).
Finnegan Shannon is an artist experimenting with forms of access. They intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, and rage. Some of their recent work includes Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces; and Don’t mind if I do, a conveyor-belt-centered exhibition that prioritizes rest and play. They have done projects with MUDAM Luxembourg, the Queens Museum, moCa Cleveland, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, MCA Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, a Disability Futures Fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation and Canada Council for the Arts. Their work has been written about in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, and Out Magazine. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
About Pioneer Works
Pioneer Works (PW) is an artist and scientist-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that fosters innovative thinking through the visual and performing arts, technology, music, and science. We support onsite production through our science, design, recording, and ceramics studios; media, virtual environment, and technology labs; darkroom; and garden. Multi-disciplinary programs, exhibitions, residencies, and performances are presented to the public, of which the majority are free.
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