Meet The 2023 Fellows
It is with great excitement that we introduce the 2023 Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship recipients, at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) at Stanford University.
Laura Villalobos
Laura’s art practice centers around the exploration of illegality and criminalization of immigrants. She seeks to uplift and advocate for her community through artmaking and storytelling.
During her fellowship, she will be in charge of research, marketing, and project management for Undocu+Collective. Through exhibitions, publications, residencies, symposia, digital resources and convenings, the UNDOC+Collective builds knowledge and visibility of undocumented creatives working in the arts today, shedding spotlight on historically excluded practices, to reclaim and empower their collective experiences, celebrate aesthetics achievements, and shape the future of undocumentedness.
Skye Lyles
Skye is a sophomore who continues to overcome adversity. An aspiring writer and showrunner, Skye has gained great experience in language, linguistics, programming, and creative writing. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Symbolic Systems with a Minor in Creative Writing. As a Black queer woman writer, she will strive for liberation, decolonization, and dismantling of White cis-heteronormativity, one word and one television show at a time.
Baboon Animation: Founded by DREAMWORKS alumnus Mike de Seve, Baboon has grown to become one of the most accomplished animation writing and voicing teams worldwide, with 31 EMMYS collectively, and credits on dozens of the most popular animated films and series for families and teens.
Leila Tamale
Leila is a passionate student artivist, eager to further social justice and youth empowerment in Tonga through art. She will be working with Seleka, a local Art initiative which supports art that expands upon and transforms traditional art practices into new, beautiful evolutions of culture and art forms as a form of social justice.
To reduce the stigma around innovative art, she will center storytelling and record keeping by boosting Seleka’s online presence through social media, interviewing Seleka artists and providing an insight into their art and community organizing processes. A bold budding poet and spoken word artist, Leila will also spearhead Seleka poetry branch, gathering local poets, organizing open mic events, facilitating workshops and inviting Iocal Tongan poets to lead and create in a very collective space.
Asukulu Songolo
Asukulu Songolo is a sophomore majoring in International Relations and French. Through his various work experiences, Asukulu has demonstrated a keen expertise in data analysis and conducted research on African immigrants, refugee youth and youth engagement. As committee chair for Stanford African Students Union and also the Black Student Union, Asukulu has been instrumental in organizing fashion shows and cultural showcases to celebrate the beauty of the African diaspora and Black culture. As a child of African refugees, Asukulu has taken great pride in affirming his Congolese identity through his clothes. And his love of African fashion stems from the many gifts of African Print garments his mother would bring him back from the Congo throughout his childhood.
Asukulu will be working with Amah Ayivi, creative director of Marché Noir Lomé Paris, a sustainable fashion house which uses vintage, african artisanal textiles and secondhand clothing to redefine fashion. He will learn all the facets of the brand, from event planning, to styling for a shoot, to sourcing materials and tailoring as well as how to effectively scale a brand while reducing harm to the environment. He will also support the brand's marketing strategy through social media and content creation.
Esmeralda Reyes
Esmeralda is a senior pursuing a major in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. An honors student of the Leland Scholars Program, Esmeralda is a native New Yorker with strong ties to her East NY, Brooklyn community. After taking a film/photography class with Adrian Burrell, one of IDA’s Visiting Artists, she developed a deep interest for the arts as a foundational tool for creating social change. This summer, Esmeralda will be working with the Interference Archive as part of the Born Digital Working Group.
The Born Digital Working Group handles social movement materials that were originally created in digital format, or material for which we don't have physical copies. The work of the group is split between figuring out how Interference Archive should and/or can collect, preserve, and provide access to digital material, as well as thinking conceptually about trends in digital material production in social movements.
Isaiah “Zae” Woods
Isaiah is a junior majoring in Film in the Art & Art History Department. An honors student, Isaiah is passionate about filmmaking, public speaking, writing poetry and advocating for justice. Isaiah worked diligently to bring the renowned Netflix director, producer, and writer, David E. Talbert to campus this past April to learn about the craft of artistic choice in the film industry. Having successfully secured sponsorships of this amazing event from multiple on-campus partners including IDA, AAAS, Black Community Services Center and the Film & Media Program (to name a few), Isaiah was able to be in conversation with the filmmaker who will be his mentor this summer. Amongst his various tasks, Isaiah will work on script coverage during this internship.
David E. Talbert has been in the entertainment industry for 30 years. Talbert is heralded as one of the most prolific theater-makers in America. Having written and produced 14 national tours, he has garnered 24 NAACP nominations and won Best Playwright of the Year for The Fabric of a Man and the NAACP Trailblazer Award for his contributions and accomplishments in theatre. He has also received the New York Literary Award for Best Playwright of the Year for his musical, Love in the Nick of Tyme.Talbert most recently wrote, directed and produced Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, Netflix’s first original live-action musical.
2022 Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellows
Tyler Newman
Tyler Newman is a product design major and filmmaker working in Los Angeles, CA. A gifted media maker, Tyler is using the fellowship to work both with media company @staymacro and arts and justice org @bldpwr. With MACRO, Tyler contributes to script coverage, location scouting and research for upcoming projects. With BLDPWR, she works on deck design and social media content creation for diverse filmmakers and creatives.
Victoria Sampors Chiek
Victoria Sampors Chiek is an Anthropology major using the fellowship to work internationally in Cambodia with media company KUDU Studios. With the company, Victoria supports complex projects that increase visibility for Cambodian history, culture, news, and politics through film. Currently they are working on gathering archival footage and interviews for both KUDU Studios and their own academic research, which will fuel their honors thesis in the fall.
Tristyn McClure Thomas
Tristyn McClure Thomas is a Stanford artist working in New York City with artist Lucien Smith, founder of Serve the People. Serve the People is a non-profit digital community connecting innovators with audiences globally to facilitate opportunities for them to share their work. Tristyn has been working on brand outreach for various social media platforms, doing research, ideation, and design with the team across various projects big and small. Tristyn looks forward to continuing to amplify the voices and artworks of underrepresented communities through their work this summer and beyond.
Sequoiah Blaire Hippolyte
Sequoiah Blaire Hippolyte is a recent Stanford graduate class of 2022 and an award-winning theater artist and filmmaker. Sequoiah moved to Los Angeles for their summer fellowship and is working with cinema company Sunhaus under the direction of artist Arthur Jafa. Sequoiah has been supporting logistics for visiting filmmakers and writers, and doing creative analysis on readings, music, and selections from the Sunhaus archives. Sequoiah recently accepted a position with Sunhaus full time in the fall.
Kiara T. Dunbar
Kiara T. Dunbar is a recent Stanford graduate class of 2022, writer, and filmmaker. Kiara used the fellowship to work in New York City this summer with filmmaker Annalise Lockhart. Kiara has been supporting Annalise’s original scripts for revision and feedback while attending meetings related to pre-production for the upcoming cinematic project. Kiara has also been researching local community partners, artists, and locations, while providing hands-on support both on and off set.
2021 Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellows
Tyra Blackwater
Tyra Blackwater (she/they) is a multidisciplinary creative whose work includes film, beading, acting and sculpture. They are from the Navajo Reservation and are inspired by their relations and love for their homelands. Tyra is a community based artist and openly shares the knowledge she has learned in community with others.
Tyra will use the Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship to work with Indigenous Goddess Gang, an online community platform and magazine which shares medicine through poetry, food, seed knowledge, herbalism, music and more. The organization works to reclaim knowledge from an Indigenous femme lens, and Tyra will help to develop and steward that knowledge using the organization’s online magazine to provide visibility for this crucial work. In addition, Tyra also co-curates a column called For Our Relatives which showcases Indigenous, queer and/or two spirit art, existence, and beauty.
Alexander Feliciano Mejía
Alexander Feliciano Mejía (he/they) is a doctoral candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. His research interests are centered on language, identity, diaspora, and labor. His guiding research question has been: How do Indigenous Guatemalan youth develop language and identity at school, at work, and in the neighborhoods of East Oakland? While Alex’s research started off focused on language, education, and identity, questions of everyday aesthetics, sound, and dance have emerged as central to answering that question. As part of the Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship, Alex will be collaborating with the community based Indigenous cultural organization Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena, with the collaboration of Henry Sales, leader in the Maya-Mam community in Oakland. The two will work together within the community to create film and installation based works amplifying Maya-Mam cultural practices in the diaspora.
Sierra Porter
Sierra Porter (she/her) is a producer, dramaturg, and performer majoring in Human Biology. Her portfolio includes the TAPS production of To Wake the Air, Revival , StageCast, and Godot Has Come, and Ram’s Head’s Spring Show production of Heathers: The Musical. This summer she will be working with The Fire This Time Festival, an Obie Award winning festival for Black playwrights. Since 2009, The Fire This Time Festival has produced the work of close to 100 Black playwrights—for many this was their first production ever. The festival's core mission is to expand awareness of thevast spectrum of the Black experience. Working with professional creative directors, producers, and writers, Sierra hopes to develop her professional skills, collaboration skills, and writing. She will receive playwriting mentorship from the festival and will work to develop a new play. Sierra’s goal is to develop a work that can be produced at Stanford and beyond. Through the Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship, Sierra hopes to support Black creatives as they share their art and stories, and pursue a career full of passion and love.
Doris Rodriguez
‘Dory’ Rodriguez (they/them) is a designer and visual artist majoring in Science, Technology and Society. Their fashion designs exist at the intersection of gender inclusion, sustainability and queer joy. As a former FSI Global Policy Fellow at the Habibie Center in Indonesia, Dory has experience researching human rights with a focus on the fashion industry. They learned about how fast fashion utilizes environmental racism— through the pollution of rivers by factories, and exploitative labor practices— to create the world's clothing in such excess. During their fellowship, Dory will apprentice with a group of local seamstresses to help develop their skills in garment construction and sewing. They will also conduct oral interviews, learning more about the working conditions, wages and overall life of garment factory workers in Miami. Dory will use their skills in the social sciences to conduct a thematic analysis of the interviews, and then will create a final visual art project of textiles and garments created alongside visual collages of quotes and pictures of them in the process of creating. Dory’s work will highlight seamstresses as artists in the community and the racialized discourses of how certain labor is valued.
Benny Siam
Benny Siam (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist dedicated to the transformative potential of decolonization, radical love, and abolitionism. They are majoring in Art Practice and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Through photographic intervention, photo collage, and abstract painting Benny explores the deeply private yet simultaneously public act of being non-binary. Benny is interested in creating community especially amongst trans/queer people of color through the workshop and gallery spaces. This summer as part of the Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellowship, Benny will be receiving mentorship from LA-based trans artist Cassils, a former Stanford Visiting Artist, whose work is rooted in an analysis of physicality and the material of performance. Benny will be a studio assistant supporting the artistic and administrative tasks of the studio. While there, they hope to gain a better understanding of what work as a professional artist looks like, how to secure grant funding, and other pedagogical principles rooted in the artist’s social practice.
2020 Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellows
Rachel Lam
Rachel Lam '20, is an artist who works visually, auditorily, and through movement and dance. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma as well as a first-generation Malaysian-American, Rachel grapples with the notion that the Cherokee way of understanding and engaging with the world is dying. With this primary concern in mind, Rachel’s goal for this fellowship is to write and illustrate children’s books in the Cherokee language. Rachel will work with Snowbird Traditions–a community organization that revitalizes Cherokee traditions —including language, arts and crafts, and traditional medicine. Her experience as a Stanford Cherokee language teaching assistant has given her a strong Cherokee language-specific background in classroom management, instructional assistance and curriculum development, as well as the ability to talk about positionally and the skill of inner-group cultural humility. She states: "Working with Snowbird Traditions means working with the Cherokee language and with Cherokee children. I want my children’s books to be extremely intentional and this experience would greatly enhance my ability to be intentional."
Clarissa Scranage-Carter
Clarissa Scranage-Carter '20, is a coterm-senior and a Gates Millennium Scholar pursuing a graduate degree in Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT). A talented singer/performer and accomplished music producer, Clarissa has been working on technological solutions to increase female representation within the music industry, particularly within music production and engineering. She will be interning with Women's Audio Mission (WAM) a San Francisco/Oakland-based nonprofit organization– the only professional recording studio in the world built and run by women and GNC individuals. WAM’s award-winning curriculum weaves art and music with science, technology and computer programming and works to close the critical gender gap in creative technology careers. Clarissa remarks: "An experience [with WAM] will help me continue to seek accountable ways to solve the gender gap in this industry."
Shannen Torres
Shannen Torres '21, is a visual artist who works to bridge art and community for change. This primary goal led them to return home to the South Bronx during the summer of 2018 where they worked with NYC muralist crew TatsCru to paint murals initiated and commissioned by communities around the city. Their lived experience informs their research on Black and brown struggles in urban communities and how artwork, like graffiti, reflects this history. Moreover, they are interested in how artists working within such communities lead to personal and collective radicalization.
This fellowship will allow for a second collaboration with the U.S. Latinx Art Forum to work as an archivist to create a public database of Latinx artists across multiple generations. Their role would be to help fill generational gaps and answer some key questions such as: "How do I best take into consideration identity, identity politics, and the differences between various fields of study (i.e. Latinx Art vs. Art of the Americas vs. Latin American Art) to best represent Latinx artists who have passed and who are still with us today?"
Dayonna Tucker
During Fall 2019, Dayonna Tucker '20, was Assistant Costume Designer to Dana Kawano during TAPS' mainstage production of REVIVAL: Millennial Rememberings in the Afro Now, devised by Amara Tabor-Smith and the Committee on Black Performing Arts. The two co-designed an egun-gun costume together and it was through continued collaboration that Dayonna learned new skills in design with further intentionality and purpose toward healing and ritual. Dayonna recently completed her honors thesis in African and African American Studies where her thesis theorized about biological bondage and argued that garments could be cloaks of protection and promise for Black Women.
The Lyric McHenry fellowship will enable her to deepen her relationship with her mentor Dana by further assisting her in a personal project to restore vintage Japanese umbrellas for survivors of concentration camps. Dayonna will also be designing her first collection of sustainable clothing for black women as ritual garments of wellness and protection. Further cultivating ancestral practices of using textiles as tools for activism, she will be incorporating quilting techniques and patterns in her designs as a way of communicating messages of empowerment. She remarks: "Every class and conversation always leaves me more empowered to make my own work that is rooted in intellectualism, thorough research, and community activism. This opportunity would grant me the time and space to put these theories into praxis."
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