Open Society Foundations Announce 2019 Soros Arts Fellows
NEW YORK—The Open Society Foundations today announced the 2019 cohort of the Soros Arts Fellowship, including 11 artists, curators, researchers, and filmmakers working at the intersection of migration, public space, and the arts. From the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Lebanon, Morocco, the United States, Zimbabwe, and their respective diasporas, the individuals and collaboratives selected each receive an $80,000 stipend to realize an ambitious project over the next 18 months.
“We are proud to support visionary artists and cultural producers exploring the aesthetic and political realities of migration from personal, familial, historical, and conceptual perspectives,” said Rashida Bumbray, senior program manager of Open Society’s Arts Exchange. “Across the globe, the political environment is increasingly characterized by polarizing and reductive notions about people who migrate. That’s why this work to broaden understandings of migration, share self-determined narratives, stimulate critical discourse, and create momentum for change is so urgent.”
Working in diverse artistic forms and global contexts, the fellows will pursue projects of their own design, including a theatrical version of the film The Infiltratorsto raise awareness around for-profit detention centers, the politics of deportation, and strategies of resistance developed by undocumented immigrants in the United States; a series of healing workshops, mental health resources, and performance classes for young immigrant communities dealing with traumas of migration; and an installation along Lebanon’s northern border with Syria that will broach essential questions of love, refuge, and survival...