Summer Stories: Fiscally Sponsored Artists in Action
NYFA fiscally sponsored projects are busy sharing work with eager audiences, fundraising for new opportunities, and sustaining active practices this summer.
Check out just a few of their awesome accomplishments below!
Congratulations to NYFA Opportunity Grant Recipients
For the seventh year running, annual Opportunity Grants were awarded to NYFA fiscally sponsored artists working in all disciplines and living in New York City and surrounding counties. This award allows artists to take advantage of specific career development opportunities. Natalie Bookchin, Laura Naylor, David Pulz, and Alison Cornyn were the artists selected for the 2016 cycle.
Alison Cornyn’s fiscally sponsored project Incorrigibles is a transmedia and documentary art project focused on the history of incarcerated girls in New York. It will be screened this fall at Irondale Center in Brooklyn. A portion of the work is currently on view at Hunter East Harlem Gallery in the exhibit Visions of Confinement.
Laura Naylor is the project director of “Bartleby,” a sponsored stop-motion animation film that is a modern adaptation of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby.” The film is produced by By and By Productions.
Natalie Bookchin was awarded the Opportunity Grant for her video installation Testament, now on view at the Public, Private, Secret exhibit at the International Center for Photography Museum through January 2017. Bookchin’s project Long Story Short is fiscally sponsored by NYFA, and you can learn more about her practice in this interview.
David Pultz’s documentary film, The Bones Speak, is about the recent discovery of long forgotten burial vaults at the former site of a New York City church. The project received an NEH Development Grant and is in the editing phase.
Highlights and Honors
Carolyn Jones, project director of Hope, was named a Filmmaker Citizen Diplomat by the American Film Showcase. This film diplomacy program is a branch of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA), and it organizes screenings and workshops with American filmmakers and partnering nations. Hope is a feature-length documentary about four patients as they move between ICUs, operating rooms, hospice care, and home. It follows these patients as they face death, embrace hope, decide what technologies to use and ultimately redefine what makes life worth living.
Anna Deavere Smith participated in a roundtable discussion on “The School-to-Prison Pipeline” at the Embassy of the United States of America to Italy. The Pipeline Project, fiscally sponsored by NYFA, is the newest research and artistic work by Smith. It examines the lack of opportunity and resources for many young people living in poverty and how these circumstances often lead them into the criminal justice system. Using her signature form of theater, and through interviews with hundreds of individuals, Smith seeks to understand why we have let so many of our nation’s children drop out of school, suffer in regards to their physical and mental health, and wind up incarcerated in juvenile facilities.
From the Big Screen to Your Home
Be sure to check out Transfatty Lives, now streaming on Netflix! The autobiographical documentary follows its star and director, Patrick O’Brien, after he is diagnosed with ALS at age 30. The film won audience choice awards at the Tribeca, Milano, and American Film Festivals in 2015.
Learn more about NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship and check out our Directory of Projects to see what our community is up to. Questions? View our FAQ page.
Images, from top, and clockwise: Courtesy of Incorrigibles; courtesy By and By Productions; David Pultz; I am not 2009/2016 from the Testament series, Natalie Bookchin; Adam Schwartz/WFIU; Anna Deavere Smith; courtesy of Transfatty Lives
