2022 SUMMER GRANTEES

Literature Grantee - Sarah Aziza

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Literature Visual Grant to Sarah Aziza for her upcoming book, tentatively titled The Hollow Half.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she is a current fellow at the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and a 2022 resident at Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She’s the recipient of three overseas Foreign Language Fellowships for advanced Arabic study and translation from the Department of Education and numerous Pulitzer Center grants for Middle East reportage.

Performance Grantee - Javier Antonio González

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Performance Grant to Javier Antonio González for the 2023 production of the original play, “Zoetrope.”

Javier Antonio González is a playwright, director, and filmmaker originally from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico and the founding artistic director of the bilingual experimental ensemble Caborca. Zoetrope, an original play in English and Spanish takes place Lares, 1951. Inés and Severino are in love. In less than a year they’ll be married and he will die in New York in the arms of another woman. A generation later, their son will reenact his father’s affair for an experimental film. Throughout all, Puerto Rico will remain a colony, as it is today. Zoetrope is a playfully polyphonic work with dance theatre and live-feed video about a leftist working class family on an archipelago without political agency.

Visual Grantee - Nicola Ginzel

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Visual Grant to Nicola Ginzel to help her with her project, “How Do You Restructure Form?”.

”How Do You Restructure Form?” is a metaphorical cleansing ritual exorcising a patriarchal pathology, whose arcane dogma—regardless of nation, culture, belief, or Age—dissolves into many possibilities. The series, maps the footprint of the prestigious Palais Equitable in Vienna, Austria. The Palais, built around 1880 for the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America, is known for housing Vienna’s oldest landmark from the Middle Ages. It is a nail-tree talisman that is said to symbolize the city’s Mythical Center.

Music Grantee - Victor Lowrie Tafoya

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Music Grant to Victor Lowrie Tafoya for his album, “Mivos Quartet: Playing With Seeds.”

Victor is the violist, executive director, and one of the founding members of the Mivos Quartet. Since its inception in 2008, Mivos Quartet has been dedicated to advancing and performing new music in all its variety to diverse audiences worldwide. The quartet commissions and premieres new repertoire for string quartet, working closely with composers over extended time periods, treating each new piece as a true collaboration.