Artist News | 2017 Opportunity Grant Honorees and Fiscally Sponsored Projects at Work

Congratulations to NYFA Opportunity Grant recipients!

The 2017 NYFA Opportunity Grant honors Fiscally Sponsored projects with unique opportunities occurring in New York City and its surrounding counties. For the eighth consecutive year, this award supports artists as they take advantage of a significant career development opportunity. Learn more about 2017 grant cycle awardees Alexandra Henry, Andre Degas, and Duston Spear and get updates on Fiscally Sponsored projects that you can see (or may have recently seen) in New York City!

Alexandra Henry, Street Heroines

Street Heroines investigates the power and imagination of female graffiti and street artists from New York City, São Paulo, and Mexico City. This documentary film showcases women around the world who are fighting social injustice with creativity in the male-dominated world of street art. The Opportunity Grant award will be used to edit an extended trailer for the film.

Director Alexandra Henry is a multilingual creative producer. She has been twice-recognized as a CurateNYC Emerging Artist and her photographs have been internationally exhibited and published in various magazines and online.

Andre Degas, Crossing The Line

Crossing The Line is a contemporary story of star-crossed lovers set in Queens, New York. Tensions mount when Khadija, a Muslim-American high school track runner, falls for Terrance, an All-American football player, setting the stage for a dramatic ending during the high school championship. The Opportunity Grant will fund color correction for the short film version of Crossing The Line.

Andre Degas has written and directed a diverse array of films over the past 20 years. His first film First Coda, based on a short story by Samuel Beckett entitled First Love, was selected for several European film festivals and traveled with a slate of American art house filmmakers. His first feature-length film American Autobahn was distributed by Sony Software in Europe and the United States. Degas also wrote and co-produced the prison drama Condition Red, directed by Mika Kaurismaki. In addition to his film work, Degas wrote the television drama The Kitchen and the theatrical drama The House of Charity. He is based in New York City where he works as producer and editor for television networks including Lifetime, MTV2, and CBS.

Duston Spear, The Moby Dick Project

Funds from the NYFA Opportunity Grant will be used to support The Moby Dick Project, an exhibition of incarcerated student’s artworks. 

Duston Spear teaches at the College Program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, located in Bedford Hills, New York. Paintings on the theme of Moby Dick will be exhibited at the Hewitt Gallery of Art at Marymount Manhattan College this fall, with works by incarcerated artists alongside other contemporary artists. Spear is a painter and filmmaker and her projects Red Thread and PAST are Fiscally Sponsored by NYFA.

Screenings, Exhibitions, and Performances by Fiscally Sponsored Projects

This summer is chock full of screenings, exhibitions, and performances by Fiscally Sponsored projects. Read on for more, and go team!

Bartleby
Laura Naylor and Kristen Yee are the directors of Bartleby, a stop-motion animation that’s currently sweeping the festival circuit. Bartleby will be back home in Brooklyn, New York for BAM’s Animation Block Party. Get your tickets for the July 28, 2017, 4:30 PM screening here. Bartleby is an adaption of the Herman Melville story by the same name and is set in present day Wall Street. Learn more about the film in our NYFA Current conversation with Naylor and check out their press accolades here. 

14 Sculptors on the Rock
14 Sculptors is a group of professional artists whose mission is to create a forum for experimental sculpture, free from the constructions of a commercial viewpoint. The group has been actively exhibiting since 1973, when they began in SoHo district of New York. This summer join 14 Sculptors for their exhibition at Rockaway Beach, which is supported by the Partnership for the Parks at the Puffin Foundation and a 2017 Arts Access Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. See photos of the exhibition here.

INSITU Site-Specific Dance Festival
An enormous congratulations to INSITU Site-specific Dance Festival for successfully completing its inaugural year! Led by project director Svea Schneider, this festival brought free performances to the waterfront in Long Island City, Queens. Dancers overtook the neighborhood and captured our imaginations. This project received a 2017 Arts Access Grant from the Queens Art Fund. Learn more about INSITU in this NYFA Current interview.

Are you an artist or new organization, and interested in expanding your fundraising capacity through NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship? We accept applications on a quarterly basis and our next no-fee deadline is September 30, 2017. You can also gear up for the fall grant season sooner, with an out of cycle review for your project. Learn more here!

Collage Images (clockwise from left to right): Image Courtesy: Alexandra Henry; Image Courtesy: Andre Degas; Image Courtesy: By and By Productions; Image Courtesy: 14 Sculptors; Image Courtesy: Duston Spear; Shandoah Performance/Carte Blanche performing at INSITU Site Specific Dance Festival, Photo Credit: Madeleine Cutrona.

Images Cont’d: Image Courtesy: Alexandra Henry; Image Courtesy Andre Degas; (detail) Image Courtesy: Duston Spear; Group Photo, Image Courtesy: Anthony Johnson; Rock Relic, 2017 by Esther Grillo, Image Courtesy of 14 Sculptors; Zullo/Raw Movement performing at INSITU Site Specific Dance Festival, Photo Credit: Madeleine Cutrona