Kenneth Rainin Foundation Announces Four Bay Area Artists for Inaugural Fellowship

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced today the inaugural recipients of The Rainin Fellowship, a new initiative to support visionary artists working across disciplines in the Bay Area. Administered by United States Artists, the Fellowship has awarded four artists with unrestricted grants of $100,000, as well as supplemental support tailored to address each Fellow's specific needs and goals, including financial planning, communications and marketing help, and legal services.

The Fellowship funds artists working across different disciplines-Dance, Film, Public Space, and Theater-who push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities, and advance the field.

The four 2021 Rainin Fellows are:

Amara Tabor-Smith (Dance) is an Oakland-based choreographer and performance maker who describes her work as Conjure Art. Her interdisciplinary site-responsive performance-making practice utilizes Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging. She seeks to create performance experiences where audience and performers converge in mutual vulnerability and transformation. Amara is the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. Amara is a 2020 recipient of the Hewlett 50 grant with East Side Arts Alliance; a 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, 2018 United States Artist Fellow and a 2018 recipient of KQED's "Bay Brilliant" award. Amara is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University.

Margo Hall (Theater) is an award-winning actor, director, playwright, and educator, who has been a leading performer and director in the Bay Area for over 30 years. In 2018 she was awarded the Jerry Friedman Lifetime Achievement Award by the San Francisco Theatre Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. In 2020 she was appointed the new Artistic Director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater of San Francisco. Hall's film credits include Blindspotting with Daveed Diggs and the Netflix film All Day and A Night. She is a founding member of Campo Santo, a multicultural theater company in San Francisco, and is a professor at University of California, Berkeley and Chabot College in the Theater Department.

People's Kitchen Collective (Public Space) works at the intersection of art and activism as a food-centered political education project. Based in Oakland, California and co-founded by Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson, and Saqib Keval, People's Kitchen Collective (PKC) is rooted in decolonization with the belief that written in our family's recipes are the maps of our migrations and the stories of our resilience. Their immersive accessible community dining experiences celebrate centuries of shared survival. PKC believes that sharing food with each other is a powerful tool for organizing communities. PKC received the Kenneth Rainin Open Spaces Grant and the Creative Capital Award, both for their interdisciplinary social art practice. PKC installed their "Kitchen Remedies" project at the Smithsonian and was also named "Rising Star Chef" by the San Francisco Chronicle, honored on the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 list, and was presented with the advocate award at the Center for Asian American Media Feast.

Rodrigo Reyes (Film) is an Oakland-based Mexican director who makes films deeply grounded in his identity as an immigrant artist, crafting a poetic gaze from the margins of both cultures. Rodrigo's latest film 499 won Best Cinematography at Tribeca, as well as the Special Jury Award at Hot Docs and the Golden Frog at Camerimage. His work has screened on national public broadcast on America ReFramed and has been commissioned by Netflix. Rodrigo is also a proud recipient of the prestigious Sundance Spotlight on Storytellers Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Creative Capital Award. In fall of 2020, Rodrigo was named the new Co-Director for the Bay Area Video Coalition Mediamaker Fellowship, and in 2021, he was recognized with the Non-Fiction Vanguard Award from San Francisco Indie Fest.

"The Foundation is thrilled to announce the inaugural Rainin Fellows. These artists create poignant, evocative, and provocative art experiences that resonate deeply with those who witness and participate in them. Their distinct and unique artistic visions capture the incredibly rich arts landscape of the Bay Area while reaching far beyond the bounds of geography," said Shelley Trott, Chief Program Officer at the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. "The Rainin Fellowship is an important addition to a set of strategic initiatives designed to help Bay Area artists thrive, and we are delighted to partner with United States Artists to make that happen."

This year's Fellows were nominated by Bay Area artists and cultural leaders and selected through a two-part review process with the help of national reviewers and a panel of four local jurors. The reviewers were Anna Glass, Arthur Avilés, Claudia Alick, Diya Vij, Ilyse McKimmie, Lizania Denisse Cruz, Meiyin Wang, Meropi Peponides, Miriam Bale, Nehad Khader, Pramila Vasudevan, and Prerana Reddy. The jurors were Laura Elaine Ellis, Director of the African and African American Performing Arts Coalition; Lisa Evans, Performance Artist and Cultural Worker; Stephen Gong, Executive Director of the Center for Asian American Media; and Weston Teruya, Artist at Related Tactics.

The Rainin Fellowship was established to recognize and support visionary Bay Area artists who are deeply committed to the region and whose practices influence and inspire others. The Foundation believes in the power of the arts to tell diverse stories and help us better understand our own lives and the world around us. At this critical moment, the Rainin Foundation is elevating the artist's voice to help advance equity, transcend divisions, and reconnect us with our shared humanity.

The Rainin Fellowship will continue annually. More information about this year's Fellows and the program in general can be found on the Kenneth Rainin Foundation's website here.

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