2026 Winter GRANTEES

Literature Grantee - Sidik Fofana

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Literature Grant to Sidik Fofana for the story collection, tentatively titled "Brief Moments in Black History"  

Brief Moments in Black History is a collection of 3-10 page stories that each deal with an aspect of the black experience in America. They are stories that can each be read in one class period, among them one told from the perspective of To Kill a Mockingbird’s Tom Robinson and a tale of police aggression unconventionally rendered.

Performance Grantee - Benjamin Akio Kimitch

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Performance Grant to Benjamin Akio Kimitch for his upcoming currently untitled new work.

The ensemble work examines the global cultural forces that shaped Japanese American identity between the 1945 Hiroshima bombing and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. By juxtaposing postwar pressures toward conformity in the United States with the expressive freedoms of postwar art movements in U.S.-occupied Japan, the work reflects Kimitch's lived experience as a Japanese American artist. Kimitch’s new work will have its world premiere in fall 2026 in New York City. It will be accompanied by a public symposium to help communities unpack the piece’s layered influences, including postwar Japanese art, U.S. soft power, and Japanese American incarceration.

Visual Grantee - María Rodríguez Jiménez

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Visual Grant to María Rodríguez Jiménez for her upcoming installation “Crossroads”.

Crossroads is a large-scale, quilted-painting installation occuring during Long Island City's open studios weekend at Pure Moon Studios (early summer). The scale of this quilted painting is approximately 18 feet long by 6 feet high and double-sided, allowing viewers to experience both sides as they walk around the space. Crossroads will invite viewers to get lost and share in collective memory that color and repetition in patchwork allows.

Music Grantee - Patrick Cornelius

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Music Production Grant to Patrick Cornelius for the release of his collection of large ensemble work, titled “We Dare”.  

We Dare is simultaneously a career retrospective and a tribute to the resilience and abundant creativity in New York’s big band scene. It takes a certain, let’s say, “joyful insanity” to spend the kind of mental and physical energy required to compose music for large ensemble, print and tape all the parts, organize rehearsals and a concert or two for extremely limited money all for the pure joy of hearing something you wrote come alive out of the one organ that spans the length and breadth of jazz history: the big band. On any given night in New York City, there is a good chance that you could have the opportunity to hear 17 world-class instrumental virtuosos performing together for little more than their love of creative music, the community, and each other.