2025 Spring GRANTEES

Music Grantee - Kinan Azmeh

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Music Production Grant to Kinan Azmeh for the recording "Concertino Grosso."

An original composition for string orchestra, percussion, and improvising soloists was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the Knights Orchestra. The work has been toured in the US and will now be recorded at the Power Station in Manhattan for an early 2026 release.

Literature Grantee - Angie Sijun Lou

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Literature Grant to Angie Sijun Lou for her upcoming novel Pure Leisure.

Pure Leisure is a novel about revolutionary failure and China’s rise as a global techno-capital force, the alienations of girlhood contrasted with an alienated labor economy. 

Performance Grantee - Jerry Lieblich

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Performance Grant to Jerry Lieblich, for their project, without mirrors. 

An experimental-language solo play exploring hopelessness, isolation and a perhaps misguided search for a fundamentally “true” self.  Written and directed by Jerry Lieblich, without mirrors will be performed by six-time OBIE winner David Greenspan at The Brick in Williamsburg, November 5th-23rd, 2025.

Visual Grantee - Juyon Lee

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Visual Grant to Juyon Lee for her her new body of work Weighing of the Light.

In this new multimedia series, images are sculpted and integrated into materials that hold memory within their making process, such as glass and metal, alongside moving elements like light emitted from neon tubing and water.