The Velocity Fund, a Philadelphia-based regranting organization, announces its next cohort of grantees, which will receive $70,000 in project funding this year. Now in its eighth cycle of regranting, and its second year hosted by Asian Arts Initiative, the Velocity Fund will provide fourteen artists and collectives $5,000 each, to develop their new project proposals.

Selected from over 160 applications, these fourteen proposed projects exemplify a dedication to archiving contemporary movement and cultural organizing, recontextualizing and fabulating lost local histories, and expanding learning outside existing educational systems. With consideration of youth perspectives as well as intergenerational exchange, and of communities impacted by displacement and detention, these grantees will extend the visual arts to capacities new for them, relying on their strong collaborative networks and their varied lived experiences.

Cycle 8 Velocity Fund Grantees

 

Archiving a Movement: No Arena in Chinatown
Peri Law (she/her)
I aim to archive the No Arena in Chinatown campaign through the voices and creative process of the Philadelphians behind the movement. Through art workshops in spaces crucial to the campaign, participants will gain the tools to capture and reflect on movements that have shaped their personal [lives] and their community’s lives. The art from these workshops, alongside protest ephemera and primary source material, will be collected into a zine, distributed throughout Philadelphia as an act of resistance against ongoing displacement.

 

Codes & Messages: New Improvisational Textile Compositions
Betty Leacraft (she/her)

Codes & Messages is a series of 10 to 12 improvisationally hand-dyed textiles that explore the use of color and symbol as coded communication and honors the subversive mechanisms of survival that Black people utilized from enslavement to present day. Through workshops, exhibition, and artist talks, this project combats the continued erasure of African-American history and passes down textile practices/traditions from the African Diaspora, reminding new generations of tools that could be useful in these challenging and uncertain times.

 

Colors of the Healing Garden
Talia Greene (she/her) with Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center, Artemisia Orchards

Colors of the Healing Garden is a collaborative art project and mural that builds on the horticulture program at the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center. Participants will engage in a series of individual and group projects leading to the creation of a permanent relief-style mural. The mural will be composed of individually painted blocks of scrap wood that will reflect the changing colors of the garden over time.

 

Covers: Music Migration and Memory of the Korean Diaspora
Prisca Choe (she/her) with Team MP3

Covers archives the memories of migration of the Korean diaspora through album cover recreations of the music elders listened to during their immigration.

 

 

 

 

Disabling the Queer Lens
Uriah Bussey (they/them)

 

I will continue a film and digital photography series that I began this summer, Disabling the Queer Lens (working title). I started photographing my community of Black and Brown queer disabled people with COVID safer portraits. My goals are to create a photobook of the series and to produce cyanotype prints to accompany the photos I have taken. The series will culminate in a local public art exhibition.

 

Miriam Down the River
Zoë Hodge (she/her) with Darien Woodard

Miriam Down the River is a short film about a trans woman who kidnaps her estranged sister for one last day of sisterly bonding. The film explores sibling connection, identity, and the idea that bigotry is taught not inherited. Once completed, we will host local and festival screenings alongside talkback sessions to start conversations and make real-world impact.

 

 

Moving towards Home
Laila Tauqeer (she/her)

This project invites Muslim high school and college students in Philadelphia to explore poetry and visual art through five in-person sessions held across the city—in parks, bookstores, cafés, libraries, and museums. Participants will create collages, zines, oral histories, self-portraits, and more, with the process and outcomes coming together in a public exhibition. Titled Moving towards Home, after a poem by June Jordan, the project draws on traditions of resistance and solidarity by engaging both historical and contemporary poets. It aims to nurture creative expression and community connection while grounding participants in radical artistic and poetic lineages—past and present—ultimately supporting students in discovering their own agency to organize, imagine, and build solidarities through art and storytelling.

 

PRIESTESS PORTALS
Nia Witherspoon (she/they)

I’m currently working on a project called PRIESTESS PORTALS — a traveling temple installation and ritual-performance space offering healing experiences to Black femme communities in modular, site specific, nature-based, and sustainable modalities. Participating communities will receive a divination which will determine the modules that travel to them drawn from the larger work. Modules can be drawn from one of 7 chambers (Dream, Birth, Death, etc.) and one of 5 scrolls, each re-telling an aspect of Isis’ underworld journey mythology.

 

Routes to Roots
Yvonne Lung (she/her) with Cindy M. Ngo, Lily Xie, Hanna Kim, and Yidan Zeng

Routes to Roots fosters joy, connection, and solidarity for immigrant communities impacted by ICE kidnappings. Through shared meals and cultural storytelling, we highlight histories and voices from communities most affected. Each event features a menu that pairs recipes with personal stories and actionable ways to support those directly impacted. The project will culminate in a zine compiling these recipes, stories, and actions, honoring the routes our neighbors have walked and celebrating the roots they’ve planted in Philadelphia.

 

Scissors: Building Community Infrastructure for Lesbians of Color
Imani Douglas (they/them) with Anya, Nali, & Des

Scissors is a Philadelphia-based visual arts and publishing project by and for Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color lesbians. Combining graphic design, collage, and print media, the project expands through public workshops, interviews, and a Lesbian of Color Zinesters Cohort connecting artists across cities. By using visual storytelling and community design practices, Scissors makes art and knowledge accessible to those most often left out of traditional cultural spaces.

 

 

Seeding and Growing Our Trans/Queer Liberatory Futures
W. Chen (he/him) with Ginger Arts Center

Due to the current administration, we have seen increasing violent transphobia and the threat it poses to queer youth autonomy. We present a two-pronged response: 1) seeding: providing tools for youth to begin experimenting with gender and identity expression through community-led arts workshops, and 2) growing: nourishing youth perspectives to imagine alternative, liberatory trans and queer futures through connecting youth to trans and queer guidance figures and accessible spaces.

 

Swing Mezzo: Ancestral Reclamation through Jazz, Poetry, and Projection
Raina León (she/her)

Swing Mezzo is a community-rooted, artist-led performance reclaiming the legacy of Doris Rheubottom, a Swing-era vocalist erased by racism and sexism who lived in Philadelphia for over 30 years. Though featured in Black newspapers and the film Smash Your Baggage, she and her peers remain absent from jazz histories. This project transforms archival fragments into visual-poetic performance, weaving projections of press clippings, playbills, and photographs with live poetry, jazz, and ritual. The result is both art and communal intervention. For over 40 years, her grave went unmarked, but Doris Rheubottom still wants to sing. Her grave is now marked; now it’s time to celebrate her and her voice.

 

Teatro ambulante
Andrea Garcia (ella)

We will create mobile sets that echoes the roots of the dances, so that each performance by Ńuuxakun community group — which I founded and directed for the last three years — conveys the Magic of Latino Culture. We aim to combine the children’s movements with visual backdrops and three-dimensional props such as painted canvases and handcrafted items such as headdresses, made with the children, teens, and the parents of the group.

 

trans by nature
Hagudeza Rullán-Fantauzzi (she/her)

trans by nature is a multimedia installation and public art project centering the voices of trans Philadelphians. Through video, sound, and sculptural projection, the work affirms transness as a natural state of being, inseparable from the diversity that exists across all forms of life. Participants appear in public spaces, performing a shared gesture, while their recorded affirmations, “___ by nature”, form an immersive soundscape. Rooted in collaboration, trans by nature builds a collective portrait of trans identity, visibility, and belonging.

 

About the Panelists
The 2026 Velocity Fund review panel comprised four panelists who are artists, curators, and arts administrators with robust experience in Philadelphia and beyond: Jova Lynne, Co-Director and Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD); Nina Elizabeth “Lyrispect” Ball, Deputy Director of the Painted Bride Art Center; Sarah Mueller, 2018 Velocity Fund Grantee, and Executive Director and Founder of cinéSPEAK; and Sidney Mori Garrett, Director of Programs at 3Arts, the home of another Regional Regranting Program.