2020 FALL GrAntees

Music Grantee - Shilpa Ananth

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Fall Music Production Grant to Shilpa Ananth for her EP “Reproduction”.

Reproduction will be for for all the people that have defied the patriarchy, that want equality, that are brave enough to believe in themselves and take the risk of following through with their dreams, and that are done with being discriminated against because on their skin color, sexuality, choices, and identity.

Visual Grantee - Seongmin Anh

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Fall Visual Grant to Seongmin Anh to continue the creation of a community mural, designed to bring a subtle but powerful message of reassurance to people whose lives have been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. Again:다시시작 is a hybrid letter painting ornamented text conveying the conviction that we can begin again. The decoratively designed word “Again” will be transferred in multiple international languages onto large-scale exterior walls. The conjunction of different languages suggests cross-cultural exchange and an underlying connection between various ethnic groups. Korean letters are stylized with Western ornaments and English letters are decorated with Asian motives such as a dragon and clouds pattern.

Performance Grantee - Stephanie Fleischmann/Christina Campanella

A Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation NYC 2020 Fall Performance Grant has been awarded to composer Christina Campanella and playwright/librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s for their collaboration, The Visitation.

Inspired by the appearance of a one-antlered deer in Harlem in 2016, this site-specific sound walk is a meditation on the presence of the mythic in the everyday and the uneasy relationship between the built environment and the natural world. An urban odyssey in search of the collective memory of the deer’s sojourn in Harlem’s Jackie Robinson Park, The Visitation (produced by HERE Arts Center, premiering April 23, 2021) takes us on a hunt not just for the deer, but for Artemis, goddess of nature—absent from our contemporary lives.

Performance Grantees - Ruben Polendo

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Fall Performance Grant to Rubén Polendo for Utopian Hotline a composition of three parts: an in-person theatrical production, an interactive digital artwork, and an original album with a central theme… in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecrafts to study the outer solar system and bring a message to other intelligent life in the universe.

The unique format, specifically designed for flexible engagement amidst a public health crisis, offers three pathways for audiences to explore the question of how we imagine a more perfect future? Directed by Rubén Polendo, Utopian Hotline is scheduled for production at MITU580 in Gowanus Brooklyn in September 2021.

Literature Grantee - Lynn Melnick

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Fall Literature Grant to Lynn Melnick, a writer living in Brooklyn for her upcoming project, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence and Dolly Parton, to be published by University of Texas Press in 2022. Lynn’s book is an exploration of Dolly Parton, her work, and her legacy, as it intersects with feminism, American history, our current cultural and political moment, and Lynn’s own history.

Literature Grantee - Kat Mustatea

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Fall Literature Grant to Kat Mustatea to help continue her work on Voidopolis, a retelling of Dante's Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of Virgil, the narrator's guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. The text, made only with words that do not contain the letter "E, " is an example of synthetic language, composed in collaboration with a modified AI text generating tool.