10 DC-area artists & collectives receive $60,000 in grants to support collaborative research and experimental projects
Top left clockwise: Rasha Abdulhadi & Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (collaborators), Sobia Ahmad, Claire Alrich, Rhea Beckett, Nakeya Brown, Adele Kenworthy, Stephanie Kimou, Tsedaye Makonnen, Dominick Rabrun, and Jessica Valoris
Washington Project for the Arts is pleased to announce the 10 grant recipients for the 2025 funding cycle of Wherewithal Grants, providing financial support and peer mentorship for DC-area artists in areas of research and project presentations. Six artists have been awarded with research grants of $5,000 each, and four artists and collectives have been awarded with project & presentation grants of $7,500 each, for a total disbursement of $60,000 this cycle.
2025 Research grantees: Sobia Ahmad, Rhea Beckett, Nakeya Brown, Adele Yiseol Kenworthy, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Dominick Rabrun
2025 Project & Presentation grantees: Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Claire Alrich, Stephanie A. Kimou, and Jessica Valoris
Over the next year, artists from this cohort will organize projects including a durational site-specific performances, a performative lecture examining colonial trash, and a community-based installation about reparations for descendants of those enslaved in DC, and a score-based performance; while others conduct research around fascinating topics such as: a Sufi parable about moths to a flame, soundscapes, material archives for Black femmes, counter-memories of DC’s AAPI community, and Haitian Vodou storytelling.
Throughout the yearlong grant cycle grantees will produce their work independently and in dialogue with one another, convening regularly as a group facilitated by Nathalie von Veh, WPA Storyteller and Wherewithal Grants Manager.
An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 98 applications and are awarding 10 grants. The adjudication panel consisted of: Ayana Zaire Cotton, artist and Wherewithal Alum (Bowie, MD); Candice Davis, Communications and Visual Arts Fund Coordinator, Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN); Joshua Gamma, Gallery Director and Curator, BlackRock Center for the Arts (Germantown, MD); and Alisha B. Wormsley, artist and Cultural Producer (Pittsburgh, PA). They evaluated each proposal based on the criteria of Artistic Impact, Context/Audience, Collaboration, Feasibility, and Budget.
Generously funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its Regional Regranting Program and managed by Washington Project for the Arts, Wherewithal Grants are intended to support a wide range of experimental and multidisciplinary practices, particularly those that emphasize collaboration and discourse. Since launching in 2019, Wherewithal Grants has supported 156 visual artists with a total of $400,000 in grants.
Learn more about each grantee and their work below.
AWARDED RESEARCH
These $5,000 grants are for artists to further their practices through ideation, research, and experimentation.
َSobia Ahmad, The Allure of Light |رغب ِت ُنور
Sobia Ahmad’s research explores an ancient Sufi parable about a group of moths and a flame. Often told orally and sung in South Asian poetry, the parable is an everyday metaphor for ‘seeking.’ Over the grant period, Sobia is conducting a multidisciplinary investigation and expanding on the moth-flame metaphor by engaging with scientists, ethnomusicologists, and devotional poetry and music practitioners from Pakistan and India.
Rhea Beckett, Sonic Cartographies: Mapping Place and Identity Through Sound
Rhea Beckett’s research will expand her sonic practice into immersive installations that evoke deeper connections to place, memory, and identity. Through various experiments and collaborations, she will transform auditory experiences into visual space through shared stories and histories.
Nakeya Brown, Even beloved things move
Conceptual photographer Nakeya Brown’s practice-driven research will explore the history of objects, with a particular focus on uncovering their often overlooked connections to Black femme lives. Drawing on concepts of race, gender, memory, and bio-mythography, Brown’s research will be guided by the following questions: Whose lives can past objects reveal in meaningful ways? What material histories out of Black womanhood remain hidden in plain sight? How can we create Black femme spaces through material culture today?
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy, The Durational Performance of Cut Flowers
Artist-organizer Adele Yiseol Kenworthy’s research explores their mother’s rituals of visible hope—ancestral practices absent from museums and archives—as the last remaining connection to her heritage. They focus on the question, “How do we preserve the unspoken oral histories written by our bodies?” and through this inquiry, Kenworthy tends to counter-memories and how they exist in public for the AAPI diaspora in the DC metro area, beginning with the Chinese hand laundries in Old Town Alexandria. In illuminating memories of migration, embodied care, and commemoration, they reimagine a flourishing community archive that practices collective resilience.
Tsedaye Makonnen, Light :: ብርሀን :: Berhan
Interdisciplinary artist-curator Tsedaye Makonnen has been drawn to light as a material for many years because of its layered meanings and its scientific and magical properties. This research grant will enable her to expand her abilities, language, and knowledge of lighting design to explore the recurring themes in her practice and activism on: migration, intersectional feminism, and reproductive rights, specifically focused on Black femmes and gender expansive individuals.
Dominick Rabrun, Vèvè-Punk: Digitizing Haitian Vodou
Dominick Rabrun’s research will examine how digital and interactive media can faithfully portray Haitian Vodou, embracing its complexity and fluidity. He will consult practitioners, cultural historians, and artists to ensure respectful representation, while weaving his personal perspective into visuals that challenge the limits of digital technology. By honoring Vodou’s inherent ambiguity, Rabrun will create a framework for immersive, culturally rich experiences that invite audiences to engage with Afro-Caribbean heritage in new and meaningful ways.
AWARDED PROJECTS & PRESENTATIONS
These $7,500 grants support ongoing or new projects that embrace unconventional or D.I.Y. values and will be presented publicly in the DC-area in 2025.
Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning and Militancy
This project is an iterative, site-specific, partly improvised ritual performance that invites artists to engage in public mourning of Palestinians, reckoning with the immense scale of annihilatory colonial violence while centering the need for ongoing and escalating resistance to the forces of empire across the globe. Artists spanning a range of communities, practices, and lineages have created short performance scores which will then be interpreted by Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi through performance, offering a multiplicity of ways to find space for mourning which supports, rather than distracts from, militant resistance efforts.
Claire Alrich, this house is a body/this body is a house
This project, organized by Claire Alrich, is a performance celebration of the house that houses D.I.Y. venue RhizomeDC. Practically speaking, it is an installation that knits together a multidisciplinary cohort of artists for a durational, site-specific performance in collaboration with the architecture of the art-space/house. Poetically speaking, this project is an ode to impermanence—the impermanence of spaces, the impermanence of bodies, the impermanence of our bodies within spaces—nothing lasts…and yet traces are left behind: memories, marks, and ghosts.
Stephanie A. Kimou, The Colonizer’s Trash
The Colonizer’s Trash is a performance lecture and interactive social practice by multidisciplinary artist Stephanie A. Kimou. This work redefines the concept of “trash” to include mindsets, ideologies, and material excess tied to colonial histories of anti-Blackness and exploitation. In line with Stephanie’s ongoing exploration of colonialism’s toxic legacies, the project invites participants to reflect on what they hold onto, and what they can let go of. Through this participatory event, attendees are encouraged to bring items that symbolize colonial structures, which will be collectively examined, repurposed, or discarded as an act of decolonization, reclamation, and communal introspection.
Jessica Valoris, Beyond Value: Journeying with Reckoning and Repair
DC’s prominent landowners, the Burnes and Van Ness families, enslaved dozens of Black people for tobacco cultivation and domestic labor in the Nation’s Capital—a history often neglected and unnamed. Beyond Value is a public art project by Jessica Valoris that honors the memory of those enslaved here by creating a series of commemorative stained glass panels that tell this untold story. This project invites viewers into an ongoing process of learning, reckoning, and repair. This project is a collaboration between Jessica and First Congregational United Church of Christ (FCUCC). The collaborative design process will be documented and shared through an art book, while programming will engage both the congregation and the wider public in conversations around historic research, reparations in action, and community healing.
ABOUT WHEREWITHAL GRANTS
Wherewithal Grants are a funding source for artists in the DC-area. Generously funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its Regional Regranting Program and managed by WPA, these grants are intended to support a wide range of experimental and multidisciplinary practices, particularly those that emphasize collaboration and discourse. Since launching in 2019, Wherewithal Grants has supported 156 visual artists with a total of $400,000 in grants. wherewithalgrants.org | @wherewithalgrants
ABOUT WASHINGTON PROJECT FOR THE ARTS (WPA)
Washington Project for the Arts is a non-profit incubator and publisher for artist-organized projects. Artists curate all of our programming—as an extension of their own research and experimentation. wpadc.org | @wpadc
