2024 Spring GRANTEES

Performance Grantee - Anna Sperber

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Performance Grant to Anna Sperber for her upcoming ensemble dance work.

Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic.”

The ensemble dance work (currently Untitled) invites the audience to attune to the room, their own bodies and the resonant bodies of the performers. Offering an unordinary feeling of time, the work heightens attention to the rhythms held in our collective bodies and the environment we share. Strength in the work is derived from duration and endurance. With fierce grace, the cast of collaborating dancers express moments of collective solidarity, not often available or accessible in our daily lives. Together we offer the audience an expansive, encompassing atmosphere that holds the collective body.

Visual Grantee - Yiyao Tang

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Visual Grant to Yiyao Tao for her upcoming installation, “Faulting”

Yiyao Tang was born in Wenzhou, China, and now lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MA from Harvard University. Tang’s practice coalesces mediums of intervention, projection, and installation to explore how social and political systems are embedded within images and objects.

Her latest installation, "Faulting" explores the multifaceted nature of information and its disarmingly pervasive distribution in contemporary society through various material, linguistic, and corporeal registers. It metaphorically represents fractures caused by tensional forces in how information is subjected to political, social, and moral structures.

Music Production Grantee - Grant Richards

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Music Grant to Grant Richards for the debut album of “Orbits Trio”.

Grant Richards is an award-winning pianist, composer, and educator based in Brooklyn. A native of Portland, Oregon and graduate of Berklee College of Music, Grant is an improviser steeped in the jazz tradition whose compositions strive to explore fresh territory and push the music in bold new directions.

The album will showcase an extensive body of new repertoire exploring the concept of coaction, the process of two or more things or people working together, especially to have an effect or achieve something.

Literature Grantee - Emma Deshpande

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Literature Grant to Emma Deshpande for her novel “Anant”.

Emma Deshpande writes short fiction and is currently at work on two novels. She was a finalist in the 2022 Simon and Schuster BOOKS LIKE US First Novel Contest and was longlisted for the 2022 Granum Foundation Prize. Her short fiction has recently appeared in On the Run, Passengers Journal, and the 2020 anthology More Time. She was shortlisted for the 53rd Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest in 2020 and won the University College London Publishers' Prize in 2018.

Anant is loosely inspired by the life experiences of Emma’s paternal grandfather, who served in the Royal Air Force as a medical officer after immigrating to England from India in the 1950s. Following three characters from the 1940s through the 1960s in India and England, this novel examines society in post-Partition India and interactions between marginalized groups in England during and after World War Two.