CHICAGO: United States Artists (USA) has announced its 2022 USA Fellows, including five theatre and performance fellows. The full fellowship class includes 63 recipients, the largest cohort in the organization’s history, in the fields of architecture and design, craft, dance, film, media, music traditional arts, visual arts, and writing, in addition to theatre. All fellows will receive $50,000 awards to create new work or use how they decide.
“After another year facing the challenges of the pandemic, artists once again demonstrate their deep commitment to uplifting those around them and nurturing their communities,” Lynnette Miranda, program director of USA, said in a statement. “The 2022 USA Fellows were selected for their remarkable artistic vision, their commitment to community, and the potential to influence future generations.”
The 2022 theatre and performance fellows include DeLanna Studi, Machine Dazzle, Marga Gomez, Nataki Garrett, and Lars America Jan.
Studi, a proud citizen of Cherokee Nation, is an actor, playwright, and educator who was seen in the first national tour of August: Osage County. Her Off-Broadway performance credits include Gloria: A Life and Informed Consent. Her playwriting work has been commissioned by the Theatre Company, Theatre for One, and the Period Piece series. Studi is a recipient of the Butcher Scholar Award and a Cherokee Preservation Foundation grant. She is currently co-artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry.
Matthew Flower, known by the stage name Machine Dazzle, is a New York-based costume and scenic designer, art director, and singer-songwriter. He has worked with Taylor Mac, Dazzle Dancers, Big Art Group, Opera Philadelphia, Pig Iron Theatre Company, the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, and the Curran Theatre, among others. He describes himself as a radical queer concept artist and thinker.
Gomez is a San Francisco-based playwright and performer originally from New York. Her work was featured in the 1991 Festival of the New Voices at the Public Theater, which also featured her work in the 2017 Under the Radar Festival. She has written and performed 13 solo plays that have been produced nationally and internationally, and her work has been published in the anthologies Contemporary Plays by American Women of Color and Out of Character.
Garrett is the current artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the first Black woman in this role and one of few women of color to lead a major regional theatre in the country. She previously served as the associate artistic director at the Denver Center Theatre Company and was an associate dean and co-head of the undergraduate acting program at the CalArts School of Theater. Her directing credits include The Central Park Five at Portland Opera this winter and a new play by Dominique Morisseau this coming summer, and she has produced and directed the regional and world premieres of a variety of works by the nation’s most well-known playwrights.
Jan is a director and artist from Los Angeles whose works have been presented by BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Whitney Museum, the Sundance Film Festival, the UCLA Center for the Art of Peformance, Nuit Blanche Toronto, the London’s Burning Festival, and Istanbul Modern, among others. Known for genre-bending works exploring emerging technologies, he is a TED Senior Fellow, a Sundance Art of Practice fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, and a member of the Center Theatre Group Creative Collective.
United States Artists illuminates the value of artists to American society and address their economic challenges, and has awarded over 700 artists and cultural practitioners with over $33 million through its fellowships.
