2025 fAll GRANTEES

Performance Grantee - Stacy Grossfield

TThe Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Performance Grant to Stacy Grossfield for “metamorphosis III episode 4”.

Built from a place of rigor and experimentation, Metamorphosis III serves as the capstone to Stacy Grossfield’s six-year performance trilogy. Grossfield pushes her surreal storytelling into ambitious new terrain by integrating an alt-rock band, state-of-the-art special effects, and live video. This final chapter is a fully independent production housed at Collapsable Hole on February 12th and 13th at 8pm.

Visual Grantee - Kian McKeown

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Visual Grant to Kian McKeown for a new body of work to be included in an upcoming exhibition at 205 Hudson gallery in Tribeca NY, titled “Body Bureau Bunker”.  

The exhibition will feature works that showcase common hardware alongside or within the body as a way to reflect on our relationship with technology and industry. Kian McKeown will be exhibiting a suite of colored pencil drawings and large multi-media sculptures,

Music Grantee - Wade Schuman

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Music Production Grant to Wade Schuman for the recording "Good Friend."

The new material will be dedicated to the memory of Joseph Daley, a remarkable man and uniquely multitalented musician and composer from New York City who passed away this August, and who was a fundamental founding member of the band HazMat Modine for almost three decades.

Literature Grantee - Catherine Bai

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Literature Grant to Catherine Bai for her upcoming fiction project, tentatively titled Five Diptychs.

Five Diptychs is a translingual, experimental short story collection that is interested in language and blood ties, the burden of being loved too much, and the helplessness of living within the various and inexorable “breakups” that define a Chinese American condition. The work is also driven by a diasporic ache for “return,” mediated through sensuality and connections with the natural world and thwarted by failures of communication and the instability of selfhood and cultural authenticity.