Alabama Artists and Arts Organizations Awarded $389,500
Announcing Fellows and Arts Facilities Grantees

MONTGOMERY, Ala., (June 21, 2023) — At its quarterly meeting in Huntsville, Ala., the Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded twenty-three (23) Fellowship grants totaling $115,000 and nine (9) Arts Facilities grants totaling $274,500 for a total of $389,500 in funding.

Fellowships are awarded to individuals working in arts education, craft, dance, design, media/photography, music, literature, theatre, and visual arts. These grants recognize artistic excellence as well as professional commitment and maturity, contributing to the further development of the artist. Fellows use funding to support the growth and development of their artistic careers through time creating, practicing, and improving their skill, pursuit of professional development and training, or other opportunities that lead to success for these Alabama artists.

Arts Facilities grants are an economic investment in an organization as they plan, design, or construct spaces for arts activities. This program continues to support the adaptive re-use of spaces and revitalize neighborhoods. Funded projects involve top-level professionals in urban and community planning, architecture, landscape design, and historic preservation. Grantees are awarded based on evidence of community support, a key element for large and small organizations enhancing spaces for arts activities.

During their time in Huntsville, the Council on the Arts learned more about the host city’s arts community. The Council toured the Orion Amphitheater, attended a reception highlighting Huntsville-based artists and organizations at the Huntsville Museum of Art, learned about the Arts in Medicine and Music Therapy programs at Huntsville Hospital, and ended the visit at Lowe Mill Arts & Entertainment, with presentations by Arts Huntsville, Opera Huntsville, and a tour of Theatre Huntsville.

FELLOWSHIP GRANTS

Fellowships are grants awarded to outstanding individual artists and arts educators in Alabama and provide support for the creative growth of an individual’s career. The Council on the Arts is honored to announce these 23 artists, makers, and educators who will each receive $5,000.

Valerie Accetta of Birmingham was awarded an Arts Educator Fellowship. Accetta is the Head of Musical Theatre at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and holds a BA in Musical Theatre Pedagogy from Otterbein University and an MFA in Theatre Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a member of Actors’ Equity Association and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, as well as an Estill Voice Training master trainer. Accetta is currently the Vice Chair of the Alabama Chapter of the Voice Foundation and the South Central Regional Director for the Musical Theatre Educators’ Alliance.

Tony Bingham of Birmingham was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. Bingham teaches humanities and studio art at Miles College in Fairfield and is on the Board of the Southeast College Art Conference (SECAC). He received his BA in Communications from Antioch College, an MA in Film and Community Media from Goddard College, and an MFA from Georgia State University. Notably, Bingham’s public work “Reunion Place,” commissioned as part of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, is located in the historically African American community of Mechanicsville in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Brooke Champagne of Northport was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Prose. Champagne’s writing has appeared in literary journals and has received various accolades and awards, including the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her work “Exercises.” In 2022, she won the March Faxness National Championship Essay Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” Her essays have been selected as Notables in Best American Essays  2019, 2021, and 2022 editions. Her debut essay collection, Nola Face, is forthcoming with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press in Spring 2024.

Lauren Evans of Birmingham was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Samford University and completed her undergraduate studies at the College of Charleston and received her MFA from the University of Maryland. Evans has participated in residencies at Franconia Sculpture Park, Elsewhere Living Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Stay Home Gallery. Shaped by her own maternal experience, inherent mysticism, and neurodivergent identity, she probes at the visceral tensions of threshold moments, and scratches at liminal flickerings of the beyond.

Monique Fields of Tuscaloosa was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Prose. Fields received a BA in Communications from Auburn University at Montgomery and MA in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is the Assistant Director of Editorial at the University of Alabama Student Media, where advises student journalists at The Crimson White. Fields is the author of the children’s book Honeysmoke: A Story of Finding Your Color and her essays about race and identity have appeared on-air, in print, and online, including NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Ebony magazine, and TheRoot.com.

Jenny Fine of New Brockton was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. Rooted in the photographic form, Fine’s practice employs time as material in an exploration of both personal and cultural memory, identity, and our shifting relationship to the photograph in our digital, image-saturated age. She received a BFA from the University of Alabama and an MFA from Ohio State University. Fine was awarded a National Windgate Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (2006); was named Southern Prize, Alabama Fellow by SouthArts (2022), and selected by Greater Columbus Arts Council, Columbus, Ohio for an artist residency in Dresden, Germany (2012).

Robert Finkel of Auburn was awarded a Design Fellowship. He is the Program Chair and Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Auburn University. Finkel’s creative research is based on a design consulting practice for regional and national clients. His work has been awarded by Communication Arts, Print Design Annual, Creative Quarterly, LogoLounge, and Graphic Design USA, Graphis. He co-authored and designed the book The IBM Poster Program: Visual Memoranda, published by LundHumphries in 2021.

Ardith Goodwin of Mobile was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. As a full-time working artist, Goodwin employs specific technical framework to create figurative works and non-objective abstracts in mixed media and acrylics connected to creative narratives and builds paintings with fractured line, dynamic movement, transparent layers, complexity, and details from rich life experiences on canvas and paper. As an artist who teaches, she travels the U.S. and abroad conducting art workshops, hosting creative travel journeys, as well as small group academic study for professional artists.

Alyshia Harper of Harvest was awarded a Dance Fellowship. She is a professional dancer, teaching artist, influencer, and proud member of Actors’ Equity Association. Harper holds a BA in Dance from The University of Alabama and an MA in Dance and Studio Related Studies from Florida State University. Her philosophy as an artist and educator stresses the beauty of discipline, self-discovery, and communication through the art of dance and creative movement. Her current projects and research interests highlight the beauty of dance as a means of communication and connection focused on the intersection of womanhood, motherhood, and blackness.

Kristen Iskandrian of Birmingham was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Prose. Iskandrian is the author of the novel Motherest (Hachette, 2017), named a Best Book of 2017 by Publishers Weekly and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her other work has been published widely, in places such as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Short Stories, Ploughshares, ZYZZYVA, Crazyhorse, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. Iskandrian received her BA at the College of the Holy Cross and her MA and PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Tyler Jones of Birmingham was awarded a Media/Photography Fellowship. A filmmaker and experience designer, he has an MA in Journalism from the University of Alabama. In 2012, Jones established 1504, a narrative studio that integrates strategic communications with the visual arts. Jones leads the studio’s narrative strategy and experiential projects, seeking to use the power of storytelling to foster greater empathy across communities.

Michelle Jones of Mobile was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Alabama Contemporary Art Center and Kentuck Art Center, as well as several group exhibitions, most recently at James May Gallery, WI. The worlds Jones creates within her paintings highlight the peril of the wilds and the claustrophobia of unattended growth.

Zdenko Krtić of Auburn was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. He is a visual artist whose creative agenda reveals interest in a dynamic idea of history; one that is always mutable, and reflective of subjective and (infinite) narrative potentials.  Krtić has completed three visiting artists residencies at the prestigious American Academy in Rome, Italy, and his work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Most recently, his paintings were featured in Aquachrome, a juried international exhibition and survey of contemporary watercolor painting, held at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Mark Lackey of Birmingham was awarded a Music Fellowship. Lackey earned the degrees Doctor of Musical Arts in composition, Master of Music in theory pedagogy, and Master of Music in composition from The Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. As a composer of vocal, electronic, chamber, orchestral, and wind ensemble music, he has garnered premieres from many gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasília), Rhymes with Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. Lackey also serves as Associate Professor at Samford University's School of the Arts, where he teaches music composition and theory.

Matt Layne of Birmingham was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Layne has been writing, performing, teaching, and promoting poetry around Alabama and the Southeast since the early 1990s. He was a founding member of the improv poetry group, The Kevorkian Skull Poets, and in 2008, he helped found the Word Up! Poetry competition at the Birmingham Public Library. A multiple Hackney Literary Award-winning writer, he has also been recognized by the National Society of Arts and Letters and been featured in Peek magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Steel Toe Review, and B-Metro.

Devin Lunsford of Birmingham was awarded the Gay Burke Memorial Photography Fellowship. His work utilizes photography to interrogate the American South, drawing connections between its complexities, contradictions, and beauties while focusing on the nature of time, place, and memory. Lunsford’s photography has been exhibited internationally and has been published in such outlets as The New Yorker, PDN, The Oxford American, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, AINT-BAD, and Fisheye Magazine. In 2020, he released his first monograph “All the Place You’ve Got” which explores notions of beauty, anxiety, and the passage of time while documenting the changing landscape along Alabama’s Corridor X.

Erin Mitchell of Birmingham was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship in Craft. A mixed media artist and muralist, she received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Art Education from Columbia College Chicago. Mitchell’s work is a mixture of textiles, painting, and collage and is inspired by southern Blackness and Afrofuturism. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art and has been showcased at Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts, Ground Floor Contemporary, Kravets Wehby Gallery, FLXST Contemporary, The Other Art Fair, Future Fair, AMFM Gallery, EXPO Chicago, and on the nationally syndicated Fox television series, Empire.

Eun-Hee Park of Alabaster was awarded a Music Fellowship. Praised by The New York Concert Review for “a solid foundation of fluent pianism” after her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Korean pianist Park enjoys a diverse career as soloist, chamber musician, and educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Music and Head of the Keyboard Area at the University of Montevallo and holds degrees from Florida State University, Oklahoma City University, and Colorado Mesa University. Park has given numerous concerts throughout the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Italy, Brazil, and Costa Rica. Recently, she was awarded Global Music Award’s silver medal in chamber music.

Amy Patel of Madison was awarded an Arts Educator Fellowship. Patel earned her MA in Directing from Roosevelt University in Chicago and currently teaches theatre at James Clemens High School. She was recently named Alabama Theatre’s Teacher of the Year, and recently won the Innovative Playwriting Instruction Award from the Southeastern Theatre Conference.

Adam Prince of Mobile was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Prose. Prince’s award-winning fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and Narrative magazine, among others. His first book, a short story collection called The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, was published with Black Lawrence Press. A former Tickner Fellow, Prince was named one of the twenty best new writers by Narrative magazine. In 2021, he was selected by novelist Michael Byers to receive the Peden Prize for a story published in the Missouri Review.

Andrew Raffo Dewar of Tuscaloosa was awarded a Music Fellowship. He is a composer, soprano saxophonist, electronic musician, and ethnomusicologist whose music spans through-composed music, aleatoric and algorithmic composition, electroacoustic music, and improvisation. Recent work includes original music for his ensembles in San Francisco, New York City, and Hamburg, Germany; music for film, compositions incorporating oral history materials, biofeedback, and electroacoustic sound installations, and live electronic music performances utilizing 3D spatial audio. Dewar is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts in New College and the School of Music at the University of Alabama.

Jacqueline Trimble of Montgomery was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry) and a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow. American Happiness, her debut poetry collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her new poetry collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, released in August 2022, was named one of the ten best poetry books for adults by the New York Public Library. Trimble is Professor of English and chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. 

Lauren Woods of Opelika was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship. Woods received an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art after completing a BA in Studio Art at Spring Hill College. She is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Auburn University, where she teaches figure drawing and painting. An artist whose practice and creative research explore concepts of mythic time, Woods has exhibited her work in galleries across the US and abroad.

ARTS FACILITIES GRANTS

The Arts Facilities program provides funding for the planning, designing, and construction or renovation of arts-focused facilities. Funding assists arts organizations in the improvement of buildings and spaces used for arts activities that benefit the public.

Capri Community Film Society in Montgomery was awarded a $55,000 construction grant for renovating and restoring the front of the Capri Theatre. The grant will fund the construction of a new marquee structurally more complementary with the original 1941 design of the building. This marquee project will create a more attractive public facing facade for the theatre, as well as enhance Montgomery’s historic Old Cloverdale neighborhood.

Children’s Dance Foundation in Birmingham was awarded a $27,500 design grant for protecting and leveraging their current property in the Homewood community. The Dance Foundation’s comprehensive design project has the goals of 1) defining a vision for the property to serve the Foundation and its constituents, 2) documenting physical requirements for current use and future programmatic growth, and 3) creating conceptual and schematic drawings as well as potential development and financing scenarios.

The City of Eufaula was awarded a $32,000 design grant for the restoration of the historic Martin Theater. The reimaged theater would be an attraction for residents and visitors by bringing cultural programming to the community and serving as a hub for arts, music, performances, and other events.

The Coleman Center for the Arts in York was awarded a $25,000 design grant for the rehabilitation of artist-in-residence facilities. The grant would help fund the renovation of two facilities: the Wimbley-McDaniel Building and the Inda Hightower Facility. During this design phase, the goal is to acquire updated blueprints, schematics and renderings, and other documents needed to renovate and repair the artist-in-residence facilities.

Envision Opelika Foundation in Opelika was awarded a $10,000 construction grant for the renovation for the Southside Center for the Arts. This grant will fund the completion of the building’s interior renovation, along with HVAC installation. The facility can, is, and will facilitate multiple artistic needs in the community such as a small performance space, meeting spaces for civic and community groups, job creation, a haven and workplace for artists, and a learning center for adults and children. This facility will also enhance economic development for Opelika and improve a gateway into the downtown.

Fantasy Playhouse Children’s Theater (FPCTA) in Huntsville was awarded a $32,500 design grant for capital expansion in West Huntsville. The grant will help support the development of an arts campus that will be fully accessible to the residents of Huntsville’s Terry Heights/Hillendale neighborhood. This project is a catalyst for the revitalization of one of Madison County’s most diverse yet under-resourced areas of the city.

Firehouse Community Arts Center in Birmingham was awarded a $22,500 construction grant for a recording studio. Supported by this funding, the Firehouse plans to build an interactive, educational recording studio in the adjacent building. The addition of a studio will help current students and reach those interested in music production. Additionally, the recording studio will be remodeled in accordance with ADA Standards for Accessible Design and will be used as an accessible learning space in Birmingham’s Avondale community.

The Flourish Alabama in Birmingham was awarded a $20,000 design grant for the creation of a Black Arts District. The conceptual design phase of the Black Arts District will involve the development of a preliminary plan and vision for the district. The conceptual design phase will include the development of a preliminary site plan, which will outline the location and layout of buildings, public spaces, and other amenities within the district.

Tennessee Valley Art Association (TVAA) in Tuscumbia was awarded a $50,000 construction grant for phase one renovation of the Ritz Theatre. TVAA’s plan is to renovate the Ritz Theatre campus into a multifunctional cultural arts center that is ADA compliant and home to the Tennessee Valley Art Association central office. Renovations of this event space will include new partitions, ceilings, finishes, lighting, new ADA restrooms, a permanent concession stand, and reconfigured kitchen to provide a prep and warming area.

For more information about the Alabama State Council on the Arts, please visit arts.alabama.gov.

The grants above are in response to applications submitted between January 1 and March 1 and are awarded for the 2024 fiscal year (October 1, 2023 – September 30, 2024). 

The next grant application deadline is September 1, 2023, for arts in education grants, project and administrative grants for organizations, and Folk Arts Apprenticeship requests. The application portal will open on July 1, 2023.

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About Alabama State Council on the Arts
The Council on the Arts is the official state agency for the support and development of the arts in Alabama. The Council works to expand and preserve the state’s cultural resources by supporting nonprofit arts organizations, schools, colleges, units of local government, and individual artists. Arts programs, assisted by Council grants, have a track record of enhancing community development, education, cultural tourism, and overall quality of life in all regions of the state. Alabama State Council on the Arts grants are made possible by an annual appropriation from the Alabama Legislature and additional funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Learn more at arts.alabama.gov.