2026 RUBYS GRANTEES
photo by Jacob Marrero
JOSH ATEROVIS
To support The Pansy Hour, a new, original immersive theatrical experience from Submersive Productions inspired by Baltimore's hidden queer history and the dazzling Pansy Craze of the 1920s and '30s. Step inside a secret 1932 speakeasy where music, drag, ritual, ghosts, and queer joy intertwine in a magical realist celebration of resilience, chosen family, and the spaces we create to survive and thrive.
CAROLYN CASE
To support the creation of Magic Mess, an artist book documenting a surprise convergence of two different pursuits: the artist’s lifelong artistic practice and an acre-sized native meadow that she created in her yard.
ANDREA CONTE
To support The Records & The Ruse, a documentary theatre performance that draws on years of investigative journalism and Freedom of Information research to uncover previously undisclosed state actions targeting the Baltimore Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Blending investigative documentary processes with theatrical storytelling, the performance examines how political power, the historical record, and public narratives shape our understanding of truth.
KATIE HILEMAN
To support Let’s Get Fucked Up and Die, a fat-positive dance theatre piece and memory play in the form of an early 2010s house party that explores an elder millennial’s longing for the exhilaration of their 20s, and asks, is there really a difference between being nostalgic and being haunted by your past?
MICHELLE MARRION
To support 10 O’Clock Flowers, a film that follows Tibebe, a Haitian artist and activist in her 70s, on a spiritually charged journey reckoning with a system of child slavery called “restavek” that marked her life. While reclaiming dreams of becoming a poet and actor, she fights for change she hopes will once again have a ripple effect.
ADRIANA MONSALVE
To support Magdalena / Mississippi, a photo-based art book that uses revisionist history to explore colonized land and waterways elusive to black and brown bodies through the displacement of mixed diasporas. Investigative collaboration with the dead results in an irreverent fable that calls legends to life and ghosts to play.
KATIE O’KEEFE
To support Mending Takes Time, a new body of work integrating dance and movement into the poses of life-sized stitched portraits, with guidance from dance professionals and dance movement therapists. Materializing into life-sized, multi-figurative embroidery pieces, they illustrate the artist’s chronology of her healing journey while living with chronic illness.
S. RASHEEM
To support Soul of the City: Baltimore’s Creative Legacy, a documentary exploring how Baltimore’s artists and culture bearers have used creativity as a force for resistance, healing, and community transformation, forming a living archive of the city’s cultural history within the Baltimore Legacy Project.
ALEX VERNON & SARAH OLMSTED THOMAS
To support Really Quite A Lot of Mechanisms, a darkly comedic puppet show set in the not-too-distant Now when nations are at war, bad things happen to good people, and dropped toast always lands butter side down; but, good people, take solace that just beneath the seen world there are…Really Quite A Lot of Mechanisms.
PAUL VILLMOARE
To support Flamenco Reimagined, integrating Persian and Arabic musical traditions into contemporary flamenco guitar performance. Through specialized mentorship, he will develop original compositions across five traditional flamenco styles and preserve his research in a digital archive to provide a new cross-cultural resource for fellow musicians.
JAMES WILLIAMS II
To support Heaven Knows / Victories and Losses, a project that develops a series of materially complex, journal-like paintings that weave an abstract, non-linear narrative. Using fragile surfaces, layering, appliqué, and metaphorical material processes, the work explores personal vulnerability, emotional authenticity, and the tension between hopelessness and hope, creating an intimate and contemplative dialogue between material, process, and viewer.
KAREN YASINSKY
To support Felted Objects, a new body of needle-felted wool busts and simplified, abstracted figures using stick-figure warning signs as a starting point. The sculptures are cartoony but attempt to embody a specific character.
2026 Material Grantees
AGUSTIN MURIAGO
To support Nuestra Historia, discovering and recording classical piano works by lesser-known Latin American composers that highlight the folk traditions and cultural connections across the region.
JOEY ZELEDON
To support Design is Trans, a collection of functional sculptures that playfully transform everyday objects beyond their prescribed identities, asserting that trans people are part of everyday life while inviting viewers to see themselves and each other with greater fluidity and multiplicity.
2026 JANE BROWN ALUMNI RUBY
Each Rubys grant cycle includes one Alumni Award to recognize an exceptional project by a previous recipient, as part of a separate application process. This year, the newly renamed Jane Brown Alumni Ruby Award celebrates the Rubys’ growing alumni community with two awards of $25,000 each to be used for the production of new work. The 2026 Jane Brown Alumni Ruby Award recipients are:
TAHIR HEMPHILL
To support Semantic Geometries, a public art installation that transforms large archives of popular language into light and sculpture within a historic industrial building. Using LED systems, AI-generated text, the Rap Almanac, and Baltimore civic data, the work reveals the hidden structures through which language shapes our understanding of place, culture, and community.
MARNIE ELLEN HERTZLER
To support Frog Hollow, a multichannel installation following Francis, a humanoid robot left to tend an old farm after humanity's departure, who recovers the memory that human life was never separate from the natural world they attempted to abandon. Built on a layered LLM character architecture across twelve narrative profiles, the work unfolds across screens that simultaneously hold her states of consciousness: live-action footage, Unreal Engine animated sequences, identity primers, and raw feed from the robot's own vision camera.