2023 FALL GRANTEES

Performance Grantee - keiyaA

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Performance Grant to keiya for her upcoming performance of “milk thot”.

keiyaA is a singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in NYC. Raised in Chicago’s South Side, keiyaA synthesizes her jazz training, R&B sensibilities, and hip-hop upbringing to create new soul sounds inundated with her powerful, sultry voice and dense lyricism. She aims to center the narrative and intellect of the black woman in the late-stage capitalist world.

milk thot is a choreopoem composed by keiyaA, featuring music, poetry, choreography, and technological experiments to explore self-image, family lineage, and society's reliance on extraction. The performances will take place at Abrons Arts Center in New York City's Lower East Side on April 11, 12, and 13.

Visual Grantee - Mickey Aloisio

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Visual Grant to Mickey Aloisio for his upcoming exhibition, “E is for Empty Yourself”

E is for Empty Yourself is a large-scale photographic installation focusing on Mickey’s father, their relationship, and his journey through drug addiction and substance abuse recovery in the aftermath of a career as a police officer. Mickey’s dad, Paul, worked the night shift as an NYPD officer in the Bronx during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Last year, Paul moved into a new apartment in Queens; the first time he’s lived alone in over 15 years.  This project will focus on this new chapter of his life, creating photographs centered on five main categories: drug addiction and alcoholism, religion, economic precarity, attempts at self-agency, and the relationship he has created with iconographic– and predominantly male– pop cultural symbols that he surrounds himself with.

This work will be presented in the AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in spring 2024.

Music Production Grantee - GABI

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Music Production Grant to GABI for her upcoming project, “Cave of Silence.”

GABI, is a composer, and vocalist. Cave of Silence is about breaking open. It can be both painful and beautiful. It can be funny and dark. The sounds try to build spaces for people to enter into and find their own inner peace or feeling. 

This record is a deeply raw space that was created through moments of solitude, loss, explorations in improvisation and finding solace and hope through collaboration.

Literature Grantee - Nicole Sealey

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Literature Grant to Nicole Sealey for her project “talking out of turn”.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

talking out of turn is a collection of personal essays recounting my time as one of a few Black women senior-level literary arts professionals. talking out of turn is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2025.