The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2025 Rubys Artist Grants.
Now in its 12th year, the Rubys Artist Grant program will provide a total of $255,000 in direct funding to 15 artists in Baltimore city and county who are working on innovative projects in literary, media, performing, and visual arts. Plus, one previous Rubys awardee (or “alumni artist”) has been awarded a $25,000 grant for a new project, and two artists will be receiving material grants.
According to the Foundation’s press release, “This year’s recipients exemplify the program’s values of experimentation, risk taking, and creative innovation. Selected projects range from explorations of identity, sustainability, personal resilience, and intergenerational perspectives to public archives, pirate radio and public health.”
Many who served on the jury panel will continue on as mentors to the awardees as they carry out their projects. “It was a pleasure to work with the jurors in each discipline and see how excited they were about the work being made in Baltimore,” Rubys Artist Grants Senior Program Manager, Alex Ebstein says. “One of my favorite aspects of the grant is introducing a new panel of creative professionals to the impressive breadth of the art community here and then moderating them through the difficult task of selecting a new grantee cohort.”
To those in our creative community who will receive this much deserved support, congratulations!!
The 2025 awardees are:
| Alexander D’Agostino – To support Blueprint Specials: Battlefield Ballroom and Hidden Drag of WWII which revives the forgotten drag shows staged by U.S. soldiers during WWII—blending archival research, dance, and queer imagination into a multimedia performance and artist book. | |
| DuPont Brass – To support Rhythm & Brass, a future album by DuPont Brass that explores themes of joy, growth, reflection, and celebration through the lens of the group’s homecoming experiences at Howard University, Morgan State University, and Morehouse College. | |
| Muse Dodd – To support Black in Both Directions, an experimental film that explores Black time travel as a means of self-liberation through the use of sonic healing to activate physical points of resistance across space and time. | |
| Dina Fiasconaro – To support Uh Huh Her, an interactive, multi-channel video installation and performance that uses a fictionalized viral overdose video to explore privacy, control, and the loss and eventual reclaiming of one’s narrative. | |
| Joshua Gamma – To support Transceiver Radio, a collaboratively produced experiment in community radio as cultural commons, grounded in its legacy as a public platform and cooperative institutional structure—as it expands into a national network of semiautonomous regional nodes rooted in our neighborhoods, sharing resources, connected in solidarity. | |
| Camila Franco Ribeiro Gomide – To support “Queer Bikers: The Reclaiming of Motorcycle Culture,” a photographic project in which we let go of the toxic masculinity perception of motorcycle culture and embrace the freedom two wheels gives to an entirely different group: queer folk. | |
| Laura Grothaus – To support Scabs, a novel told via linked short stories about the future of work, which matches content (collectives of individual workers) with form (many short stories contributing to a unified whole). |
| Laura Grothaus – To support Scabs, a novel told via linked short stories about the future of work, which matches content (collectives of individual workers) with form (many short stories contributing to a unified whole). | |
| Hiromitsu Hubbard – To support Katazome, an exhibition in which the artist tells the story of his mother, Donna R. Omata’s three-year journey to Japan to study the ancient art of Katazome. The new body of work and exhibition explore the cultural history and intergenerational exchange, encouraging others to explore their own cultural and creative heritage. | |
| Saskia Kahn – To support I Can Smell The Water, a book of photographs and personal essays influenced by the artist’s family history of displacement from the Baltic Sea to the shores of Brooklyn. | |
| Hope and Faith McCorkle – To support You Can Always Come Back Home, a multidisciplinary body of work reimagining home as nonlinear, multidimensional, and spiritual. Home is presented as both a physical and metaphysical space where memory, spirit, and ancestry converge. | |
| Katie Moulton – To support Descendant: An Untelling (working title), a hybrid creative nonfiction book centered on the controversial captivity narrative of the author’s colonial ancestor, exploring public memory and the construction of American belonging. | |
| Nigel Semaj – To support An Enemy of the People, a new, research-driven adaptation, integrating physical theatre and public health research data to explore democracy, civic responsibility, and social justice. | |
| Gabriella Souza – To support Drop Year, a novel about a newspaper journalist with animal psychic abilities who must confront her past to take down a murderous, New Age developer against the backdrop of Florida’s 2008 economic recession. | |
| Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn – To support Shaping Color, a new body of work that shifts monumental, mural-scaled abstraction into a series of experimental paintings and maquettes. Shaping Color focuses on the sustainability of a collaborative creative practice, grounding it in Baltimore’s fine art and design communities. | |
| Lilith Weeks – To support Bugaboo Baby a mid-length film following Margie, a trans woman and sculptor taking refuge in Baltimore, who must journey to her home state of Florida after a metaphysical clerical error threatens to erase her from existence. |
In a separate application process exclusively for Rubys alumni, the 2025 grant cycle also recognizes one exceptional project by a previous recipient. The fourth annual Alumni Grant engages with and offers an additional area of support to the over 170 Rubys alumni artists in a single award of $25,000 to be used for the production of new work.
This year’s Alumni Grant recipient is:
Marian April Glebes – To support The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument, a public art process that supports social and spatial change in order to build a new kind of community-driven monumental public space using personalized, handmade bricks. |
The jury also selected two additional, outstanding projects to receive the Rubys Material Grants and access to the Rubys artist services, helping further develop the projects and provide a year of mentorship to further hone their proposals.
The Material Grant recipients are:
Quentin Gibeau – To support The Beautiful Game Archive, a collected oral history of the Waverly Sunday Pickup Soccer crew, documented in audio format, to commemorate its decade-plus of existence. This account will serve as a primary source for a multi–phase project that will utilize multiple forms of art-making, both within the studio practice of the facilitating artist and as a teaching tool for art-making workshops with a storytelling component. |
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| Felicia Henry – To support Pam’s Kitchen: Preserving African-Caribbean Food Pathways in the U.S., which highlights the unique nature of African-Caribbean culture through food and the significance of the kitchen in creating sites of belonging in communities. |
The 2025 Rubys jury panels for visual, media, performance, and literary arts were comprised of the following esteemed professionals, many of whom will serve as mentors to the awardees this year:
| Peter Chang is a muralist and designer by trade, at the heart of Peter’s work is a passion for supporting small businesses and building community. An entrepreneur from a young age, Peter worked in events production, entertainment booking, marketing and sales before creating No Kings Collective, a public art collaborative that worked with small businesses, governments, and corporations to create art forward experiences around the world, in 2009. In recent years, Peter has devoted more of his time to coalition building around causes passionate to him– supporting the artist economy and the AAPI community through his new ventures, Usan Usan and Studio Usan. Peter is the son of Korean immigrants and was born and raised in Montgomery County, MD. | |
| Melissa Lyde, a Brooklyn native, is a highly regarded culture worker and the visionary founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, an influential and immersive Black video-art series and lifestyle platform that has been a cornerstone of New York’s underground film scene since 2015. Currently, she is spearheading the development of a dedicated film space in Brooklyn. Melissa’s work with Alfreda’s Cinema has led to prestigious residencies at The Metrograph and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, alongside curating groundbreaking programs at notable cultural institutions across New York City, including Film Forum, Light Industry, Maysles, The Museum of the City of NY, WSA, and Anthology Film Archives. She has also contributed to film festivals and collectives both locally and internationally, collaborating with businesses and organizations to further the reach of experimental cinema. Her work has been featured in The BK Reader, Hyperallergic, and Crater Magazine, showcasing the impact of Alfreda’s Cinema on the underground film exhibition community. | |
| Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the author of Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (2019). Her journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Bookforum, and elsewhere. | |
| Monica Mirabile (b. Clearwater, Florida 1988) is an Artist, Choreographer, Movement Director, Performance Educator and Curator living in NYC. Her work is multi-practice; converging performance, painting, installation, composition and social process. Her choreographic productions are deeply collaborative and often blur the lines between performance and practice. Mirabile’s performances have been on view at the Guggenheim, Performance Space New York, The Broad Museum, PS1, Miami Art Basel, HAU Berlin, NADA, Performa, The Queens Museum and others. Often working with musicians, she has choreographed and movement directed live tours and music videos for various artists such as The Weeknd, SOPHIE, Mitski, Yaeji, Kenya Grace, Zsela & Maggie Rogers among others. Mirabile is the Director of Open Movement at Performance Space New York in the East Village, coFounded THIS IS A PERFORMANCE school in 2023, Founded Otion Front Studio in 2014 and is one half of the performance duo FlucT with Sigrid Lauren since 2010. | |
| Chet Hunter Pancake is an award-winning filmmaker, video, new media, and sound artist. He has exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA,) Royal Ontario Museum, Murray Art Museum Albury, Australia, Wexner Center for the Arts, Mexican Film Institute, and Shanghai Conservatory. Pancake’s narrative and experimental documentary work has been screened at over 150 venues nationally and internationally, as well as broadcast & streamed on the Sundance Channel, PBS.org, AppleTV, Roku, Mubi and OVID.tv. His films are distributed by Frameline, Bullfrog Films, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Mostra Films Dones Barcelona Spain, and are held in permanent collections in over 75 university and museum archives nationally and internationally with a recent acquisition by Archive BORA in South Korea. Recent festival awards include “Best Picture” from QFest Houston and “Boundary Breaker Award” at the Buffalo International Film Festival. Pancake is Chairperson and Associate Professor in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University. He received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, winning the MFA Studio Art’s highest honor, the Edes Fellowship. Pancake is a recent Leeway Transformation Award Winner and was recently named a Finalist for the Stowe Story Lab Fellowship for his narrative fiction screenwriting. His scholarly writing can be found in the collection “Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for Sustainable Futures,” University Press of Kentucky, 2024, Zane McNeill PhD, Rebecca Scott PhD (eds.) | |
| Chinai Routté was born in Baltimore and spent her formative years in Georgia. She has been acting professionally for almost two decades, having graced the stage in such productions as the World Premiere of In the Red and Brown Water written by Oscar-winning writer Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Tina Landau, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf directed by Jasmine Guy and the World Premiere of The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years written by critically-aclaimed playwright and novelist Pearl Cleage and directed by Susan Booth; Room Enough (For Us All) at Rattlestick Theater and The Fire This Time Festival in NYC; and the first noir production of The Trip to Bountiful at Cleveland Playhouse and Round House Theatre directed by Timothy Douglas. After a short hiatus from acting to explore arts integration and arts administration as Program Manager in the Education Department at the World Famous Apollo Theater, she has made a triumphant return to acting. This time she is diving into film and television as well as the stage. She began with a short film directed by Christian Padron and the RSCK Collective to serve as the visual to the song Process written and performed by award-winning multidisciplinary artist and musician Samora Pinderhughes for his work entitled The Healing Project. Process, the extended version, was featured in the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from October 2024 to January 2025. In 2024, Chinai completed five films, recently wrapping the fifth film entitled St. Peter Street in November 2024. | |
| Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry, and humor to create artworks in various formats, for example, video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, Rauschenberg Project Space, and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian, and Onassis. | |
| Alex Smith (they/them) In 2017 Alex debuted their first feature documentary, Susanne Bartsch: On Top, which premiered at Hot Docs and went on to win the John Schlesinger award at the Provincetown International Film Festival. Alex has received multiple Webby Awards, selected for Vimeo Staff Pick and featured on Netflix, Hulu, MTV, VH1, Vogue, Dazed, HuffPo, Rolling Stone, Paper Magazine, Out, and Vice. Alex co-produced the Topic Studios/Magnet Releasing film Wrinkles the Clown (2019), directed an episode of the documentary series Pride for FX (2021), field segments for Queer Sports on Vice (2023), and most recently finished filming a feature documentary about Tina Burner and Blake Allen staging their original musical, Farmyard Follies. Alex is also the Co-Director of MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival – New York’s longest-running Queer film festival. | |
| Kenneth Tam is an interdisciplinary artist who works across video, sculpture, installation and photography. His work examines the performance of masculinity, private rituals and expressions of intimacy within groups. He has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; MIT List Center for Visual Arts; the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, Queens Museum, NY and at the ICA LA. Tam has participated in group shows at the Hammer Museum, LA; SculptureCenter, Queens and The Shed, NY. He has participated in residencies including Artist Lab at 18th Street Arts Center; LMCC Workspace; The Core Residency Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pioneer Works; and at The Kitchen. Tam is a Lecturer at Princeton University and was a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University this past fall. Tam received his BFA from the Cooper Union and is based in Houston, TX and Queens, NY. | |
| Alexandra Villasante has always loved telling stories, though not always with words. She has a BFA in Painting and an MA in Combined Media (that’s art school speak for making work out of anything). Born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, Alex has the privilegio of dreaming in both English and Spanish. Her debut Young Adult novel, The Grief Keeper, was a Fall 2019 Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Children’s Literature/Young Adult Fiction. She’s a contributor several Young Adult short story anthologies including, All Signs Point To Yes (Harper Collins/Inkyard) Our Shadows Have Claws (Algonquin), Everything Under the Moon (Affirm Press), Relit: 16 Latinx Remixes of Classic Stories (Harper Collins) and We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters Angels and Other Creatures (Running Press Kids). Alex’s next young adult novel, Fireblooms, comes out from Nancy Paulsen Books on September 30th, 2025. Alex is a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival (with Mayra Cuevas and Ismeé Williams) and of the LKBF Latinx Storytellers Conference (with Mayra Cuevas). When she’s not writing, planning or painting, Alex works for the Highlights Foundation. | |
| Gregg Wilhelm is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Mason Creative Writing, a community that includes BFA and MFA in Creative Writing programs at George Mason University. At Mason, he co-founded Watershed Lit: Center for Literary Engagement and Publishing Practice. Wilhelm also co-developed the Graduate Certificate in Publishing Practice and the Minor in Dynamic Publishing, a cross-disciplinary undergraduate minor in collaboration with the School of Art. Wilhelm started his literary arts career at Johns Hopkins University Press; launched three imprints, including one with a major independent bookseller; founded the nonprofit literary arts organization CityLit Project, which continues to serve writers and readers in the Baltimore metropolitan region; and mentored scores of students at two university-based teaching presses. Wilhelm’s short fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in Tampa Review, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Light Ekphrastic, and Baltimore Magazine. Wilhelm holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. | |
| Imani Williford (she/her), is the Curatorial Assistant for Photography, Fashion and Material Culture at the Brooklyn Museum. Since Joining the BKM in 2022, she has worked on a number of projects, including Thierry Mugler: Couturissime (2022 – 2023), Jamel Shabazz: Faces and Places, 1980–2023 (2023), Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines (2023 – 2024) and Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit (2025). Prior to joining the BKM she worked as a gallery assistant at the Gladstone Gallery, and held internship positions in the curatorial and education departments at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received her BA in the History of Art from the University of Pittsburgh and her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, choosing the Documenting Fashion special option. She has contributed writing for Hyperallergic and the Brooklyn Museum, and exhibition publications for the Brooklyn Museum, the University of Pittsburgh and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. |
