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Moab Music Festival

Our Grantees & Fellows

Meet Creative West’s grant awardees and fellows—artists, culture bearers, arts agencies, and organizations fostering creativity in their communities.

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Grants awarded from FY 2021 - FY 2023

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Leaders of Color alumni

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of FY 2023 Tourwest grants supported arts participation in rural areas

Thank you and si Yu'us Ma'asi for supporting Indigenous art and artists, and for giving me this opportunity to build a very special traditional canoe for our community!

Pete Perez

2024 BIPOC Artist Fund | Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands

It was an amazing experience that fueled me to work toward my goals in arts and culture. I hope that the connections we built throughout the last year will continue with support from the program. I'm grateful for all the work from the staff and am inspired by their passion for making a difference. The program certainly made a difference in my life.

Sam Zhang

23-24’ LoCF Fellow | Michigan

These funds will kick start a 2 year long process of become a Certified Economic Developer by the International Economic Development Council. My focus is on small business, entrepreneurship, placemaking, tech and how to finance small businesses including those in the creative economy. My goal is to obtain my credential over the next 2 years and transition in to a professional economic developer or chamber director role

Brandy Reitter

ELC 2014 | Eagle, Colorado

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Grantees & Fellows

Grantee Grant/Fellowship Year Awarded Location
500 Sails Cultural Sustainability 2024 Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

500 Sails
A. Alanda Gregory Leaders of Color Fellowship 2022 - 2023 Iowa
AAlexandraGregory

Co-Owner, Tri-Phoenix Media

My creative professional journey began as a youth. I am a creative professional and community and cultural advocate. In 2010 My company Tri-Phoenix Group, LLC was created and have since worked on a number of solo and collaborative projects. I use visual art to express my work. I am also a writer/poet/speaker and mixed media artist. I started the business to assist Independent artists and DJ’s with branding, social media, promotions, personal/professional development, artist management and PR. The company was also a platform for me to perform poetry and speaking skills. I have had the pleasure of writing blogs, newsletters and plays. In addition to my work I own and operate an internet radio station, and host a weekly YouTube show.

From small, solo projects to creative collaborations, I’m always looking for the chance to explore new techniques and learn something new that I can apply to my work. When I learn and cultivate something, I want to share with others. I believe in being a service to people. I can serve with artistic expression and skill.
Aaron Baumgardner National Arts Futures Fellowship Rock Hill, SC
BaumgardnerAaron_Photo - Aaron Baumgardner

A citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation, Aaron Baumgardner began studying traditional art in 2022 at the Catawba Cultural Center, learning pottery from master potters and elders. Drawing inspiration from his great-great-grandmother, Sallie Rebecca Brown Beck, he continues the 4,000-year-old tradition of Catawba pottery, a vital part of his people’s identity.

Baumgardner is also the first Catawba in over a century to create a river cane basket, a skill learned from Cherokee artist Gabe Crow. He now teaches these traditions to the next generation and collaborates with land conservancies to steward river cane and culturally important plants.

A 2024 South Carolina Arts Commission Emerging Artist, he is also a 2025 Running Strong for American Indian Youth Dreamstarter and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT awardee. Through these projects, Baumgardner teaches basketry, explores sustainable pottery methods, and helps sustain Catawba art as a living, community-rooted practice.
Abigail Gómez Leaders of Color Fellowship 2023 - 2024 Winchester, Virginia
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Abigail Gómez is a Latine visual artist, teaching artist, arts advocate, nonprofit founder, and the owner and artist at Pretty Girl Painting, LLC. She earned a BFA from Virginia Tech in 2007. She studied at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy in 2003. In December 2015 she was awarded an MFA in painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco CA.

Abigail teaches art in the community through Pretty Girl Painting, Fremont Street Nursery, and Arte Libre VA. She is also a Professor of Art and Design at Shenandoah University. At SU she is developing a BA program in Art and Design within an equity framework. She is also a COIL Fellow, Shenandoah Conversations Fellow, recipient of the 22/23 Faculty Development Grant, and leads study abroad trips for students to countries in Latin America.

Recently Abigail founded Arte Libre VA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization that empowers Latinx/e, Black, and Youth of Color through equitable access to quality arts education and programming. At Arte Libre VA, Abigail serves as the Executive Director and Chief Visionary, Maestra Principal. She facilitates and runs the visual arts-based programing offered tuition-free. She manages paid internships for Youth of the Global Majority, as well as the management and training of Teaching Artists and Assistant Teaching Artists, all of whom are paid. Through Arte Libre VA, Abigail has managed and facilitated over 30 collaborative and participatory public art projects and murals in the Northern Shenandoah Valley.
Adam Chuong Leaders of Color Fellowship 2022 - 2023 Rhode Island
AdamChuong-2.jpg

Education Manager, The Steel Yard

Adam Chuong is a Teochew American artist and educator whose work explores objects as containers for identity, grief, and care. As a child of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, the act of making heals their relationship to their cultural identity, once estranged by displacement and trauma.

Through the production of Taoist & Buddhist ritual and domestic objects, they seek to gain a deeper understanding of cultural practices and make new meanings from traditional forms. Queerness⁠—the agency to reinvent and rebirth⁠— mediates the recovery of their cultural identity; traditional patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist values are eschewed in favor of calls for softness, care, and intimacy.

Having been estranged from knowledge bearers of Asian culture, access to traditions is often through the lens of white appropriation and reinterpretation. Thus, publishing and circulation of zines is integral to their practice, in order to reclaim, circulate, and archive marginalized knowledges.
Adina M. Zamora Pacific Jurisdictions Artist Fund 2025 Yona, Guam

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Crafts&Visual Arts

Adina Zamora is a cultural artisan born in California and raised in Harmon, Dededo, Guam. Of Chamorro heritage, she is the eldest of 21 siblings and grew up helping raise her family. Inspired as a teenager by her Palauan neighbors, Zamora developed a passion for coconut leaf weaving, later learning from Samoan, Yapese, and Chamorro teachers. She creates handmade shell jewelry and hopes to open a shop in Chamorro Village where she can sell her work and teach weaving to all ages—preserving a fading cultural tradition and sharing it with the next generation.
Adonis Holmes Leaders of Color Fellowship 2023 - 2024 Chicago, Illinois
AdonisHolmes

Writer, Performer, Comedian

Adonis Holmes is a Writer, Performer, and Comedian out of Chicago. Adonis graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has been featured in several sketch shows throughout the city, including Chicago Sketch Fest and the Best of Annoyance sketch show. Adonis was a featured performer and writer for the Second City’s Black Excellence Revue, ‘Dance Like There Are Black People Watching’ and is currently acting as understudy for the Mainstage production of ‘Don’t Quit Your Daydream’. Along with Co-founding and directing of the All-Black improv show ‘Satirical Race Theory’, Adonis is a member of Devil’s Daughter Improv, the Improv trope The Mermaids, a 2022 Bob Curry Fellow, and is the Co-Artistic Director of the iO Theater.
AfroMundo TourWest 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico
AfroMundo ArtsHERE 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico

Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Agency for Better Living Endeavors Pacific Initiative 2024 Pago Pago, American Samoa

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Arts

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Agency for Better Living Endeavors, Inc. Cultural Sustainability 2024 American Samoa

Agency for Better Living Endeavors, Inc.

Aisha S Harrison BIPOC Artist Fund 2024 Olympia, Washington
BIPOCArtistFund_37_Aisha Harrison

Discipline: Crafts

Aisha is a studio and public artist working primarily in clay and bronze. She discovered clay in a community studio, while working toward a degree in Spanish at Grinnell College in Iowa. After graduating, she spent the next two years teaching third and fourth grades in Atlanta, Georgia, and exploring clay at Callenwolde Fine Arts Center in Georgia, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Aisha decided to go back to school and received a BFA from Washington State University, and an MFA from University of Nebraska- Lincoln. She is currently working on a large-scale outdoor public art commission with The University of Washington Tacoma and the Washington State Arts Commission. Her studio work is shown nationally with recent work at The Whatcom Museum, The Bascom: Center for the Visual Arts, Crocker Art Museum, Northern Clay Center, Wa Na Wari, Bainbridge Museum of Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum at WSU, and at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at South Sound Community College.
Akilah Martinez BIPOC Artist Fund 2024 Vanderwagen, New Mexico
BIPOCArtistFund_36_Akilah Martinez

Discipline: Multidisciplinary

Akilah Martinez (artist name: Glittering World Girl) is an award-winning Diné artist, creative technologist and cultural bearer who focuses on Indigenous language & culture revitalization through video art and XR technology. Akilah holds a BFA from The University of New Mexico.

Akilah’s lifelong goal to use modern media to perpetuate the Navajo language & culture began at the young age of 3, after constantly witnessing her Grandparents (unilingual Diné bizaad speakers) have to watch TV programming only offered in English.

The 2019 Crux XR Immersive Technology Fellowship enabled Akilah to travel between NYC and LA to learn from leading XR technologists, social entrepreneurs and impact investors. Akilah is a recipient of Fulcrum Fund 2022, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT 2022, The Artizen Fund 2023, 2024 New Mexico Women in Tech Emerging Leader Award, is a guest speaker at the MIT XR Reality Hackathon and a current 2024 City of Albuquerque UETF Resiliency Artist in Residence.
Alaska Arts Southeast, Inc. TourWest 2024 Sitka, Alaska
Alaska Arts Southeast, Inc. TourWest 2023 Sitka, Alaska
Alaska Arts Southeast, Inc. TourWest 2022 Sitka, Alaska
Alaska Junior Theater TourWest 2024 Anchorage, Alaska
Alaska Junior Theater TourWest 2023 Anchorage, Alaska
Alaska Junior Theater TourWest 2022 Anchorage, Alaska
Alaska Native Heritage Center ArtsHERE 2024 Anchorage, Alaska

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Crafts&Visual Arts
Alberta Bair Theater TourWest 2024 Billings, Montana
Alberta Bair Theater TourWest 2023 Billings, Montana
Albuquerque Museum Foundation Inc TourWest 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico
Alejandro Bermudes Agulto Pacific Jurisdictions Artist Fund 2025 Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

Discipline: Media Arts

The founder of Marianas Visuals is a dedicated videographer and filmmaker from the Northern Mariana Islands. Their work is deeply rooted in capturing and preserving the rich cultural heritage of the CNMI through documentaries on traditional practices, local artists, and cultural events.

Primarily self-taught with a 2004 film school certification, they also contribute to cultural and language preservation as a media specialist at the Chamorro Carolinian Language Policy Commission. Beyond cultural documentation, their diverse portfolio includes sports and special events, product commercials, hotel promotions, family portraits, and wildlife photography. Through Marianas Visuals, they actively uplift Pacific traditions and connect with their community by sharing its unique stories and beauty.

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