2021 RUBYS GRANTEES
HANNAH BRANCATO & SANAHARA AMA CHANDRA
to support Move Slowly: Dreamseeds, an installation of textiles, sound, and interactive components that will invite current and budding activists in Baltimore to develop visions for the future.
TROY BURTON
to support U Thought I Was Him, a full stage play performed by an all male cast, that speaks to the issues Black men in America, and specifically in Baltimore, face today..
SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ
to support Escorting the Body, a collection of short stories with that focuses on the impact of immigration and colonial trauma on women in the Palestinian American community.
DAVE EASSA
to support People and Places You Don't Know How to Know Yet, a body of work that combines, painting, and installation, exploring the artist's cultural roots and heritage from the Middle East.
TAFISHA EDWARDS
to support Asunder, a poetry collection that will interrogate how Black women’s bodies, minds, and lives are contorted under societal pressures and violence.
CHUNG-WEI HUANG in collaboration with MUYU YUAN RUBA
to support Days Without End, a video project that merges film, choreography, and dance, to tell an immigrant story of endless waiting, based on the experiences the artists had while waiting for U.S. Green Cards.
JAIMES MAYHEW
to support A Different Horizon Atlas, a project that will create a series of five large scale atlas maps of utopic geographies imagined by groups of LGBTQAI+ people through interactive workshops.
HEATHER MCDONALD
to support Blue Umbrella Happy: An American Psalm, a memoir and play about a significant road trip that the artist planned to take with their father down “The Blues Highway” through the Mississippi Delta.
NGUYÊN KHÔI NGUYỄN
to support Bittersweet, a graphic memoir combining writing and illustration, that describes the artist’s experiences living through the pandemic as a husband, son, artist, teacher, and Vietnamese-American.
TARIQ DARRELL O’MEALLY
to support Straw Into Gold Pt 2: Songs of the Moon & Good Grief, a dance series that will focus on gratitude to the Black women in the artist’s life & the relationship between grief and praise, in collaboration with four Black female DMV-based dance artists.
BRY REED
to support the writing of 1927, a nonfiction narrative-based literature project that will include essays, poetry, and genealogies to create a collage of the author’s family history from the coasts of West Africa to the Chesapeake Bay.
EDGAR REYES
to support Altered Landscapes, a series of installations combining textile, audio, and video elements that uplift the artist’s generational connection with plants and examines how control over land has shaped perspectives on heritage.
SHAN WALLACE
to support All Nighter, a documentary film that explores and tells the history of the Baltimore LGBTQ night flife scene, through interviews, audio soundbites, animation, and collections from private archives.
SAVANNAH WOOD
to support Hard to Get and Dear Paid For, a video, photo and text based project that traces the founding of the AFRO American Newspaper to a former plantation in Montgomery County through research, interviews, and a focus on Enoch George Howard, whose descendants founded the newspaper.