2025 RUBYS GRANTEES
Photo credit: Aisha Butler Photography
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.
photo credit: Rebecca Meek
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.
photo credit: David Andrews
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.
photo credit: Tamika Galanis
HOPE & 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.
Photo Credit: Schaun Champion
JESSIE UNTERHALTER & 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.
2025 Micro Grantees
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.
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.
2025 Alumni Grantee
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.