2026 Spring GRANTEES

Music Grantee - Angélica Negrón

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Music Production Grant to Angélica Negrón for the release of her project, titled “Entreformas”.  

Entreformas is a new album of experimental ambient pop songs by composer and performer Angélica Negrón. The project explores shifting states of matter and being, inhabiting the spaces between natural and artificial, consciousness and unconsciousness, and silence and noise. The music unfolds within a lush sonic world that is dreamy, tropical, playful, and surreal.

Literature Grantee - sheena daree romero

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Literature Grant to sheena daree romero for her short story project, titled “On Guacamole That Comes Out of a Squirt Gun”.

On Guacamole That Comes Out of a Squirt Gun, is a short story collection-in-progress that grapples with black girlhood, queerness, and education, and explores the locations we teach black girls to scour for joy, worth, and understanding.

Performance Grantee - Robin Frohardt

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Performance Grant to Robin Frohardt for her performance titled "Shopping Center of the Universe"  

Shopping Center of the Universe is a live performance that blends puppetry, film, prose, and music to explore how the architecture of consumer culture shapes our sense of self and our relationship to nature.  Onstage, intricately hand-built puppets and cardboard sets are animated live by performers in front of multiple cameras. The live feed is projected above them alongside narration and musical score, allowing the audience to experience both the raw mechanics and their cinematic expression simultaneously. Inspired by a real Home Depot parking lot that I have been living across the street from for 18 years, Shopping Center of the Universe asks if we think of a parking lot as a naturally occurring phenomenon, does that make us feel more like natural creatures?  How do we reconcile the predicament of being born a soul in a body, raised in a Walmart?

Visual Grantee - Hilda Shen

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Visual Grant to Hilda Shen for her upcoming exhibition  “Ever Beyond”.

“Ever Beyond” is a solo exhibition of recent and new sculptures, which opens at the Museum of Chinese in America in October 2026.  The exhibition also includes several related prints in the installation. The work addresses ideas of landscape, memory, temporality and motion as expressed materially through clay, and on paper. Referencing antiquity and craft tradition, Chinese landscape painting and Shen’s own personal history of travel and wanderings, the works affect a sensation of moving through- negotiating states of interiority/ exteriority.