2023 - 2024 Selection Committee JUDGES

RICHARD BARONE

Richard Barone is a recording artist, performer, producer, and author. Since pioneering the indie rock scene in Hoboken, NJ as frontman of The Bongos and helping to launch the chamber pop movement with his solo debut “cool blue halo”, Barone has produced numerous studio recordings and worked with artists in every musical genre. His list of collaborators has included producer Tony Visconti, Donovan, Lou Reed, and folk legend Pete Seeger. He has scored shows and staged all-star concert events at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and SummerStage in Central Park. His memoir Frontman: Surviving The Rock Star Myth was published in 2007. His album Sorrows & Promises and his latest book, Music + Revolution (2022), are celebrations of the 1960s music scene in Greenwich Village NYC, where Barone lives. He teaches the course “Music + Revolution” at The New School’s School of Jazz & Contemporary Music, has served on the Board of Governors of The Recording Academy (GRAMMYs), serves on the Advisory Board of Anthology Film Archives, and hosts Folk Radio on WBAI New York.

ViSUAL Judges

ELEANOR HEARTNEY

Eleanor Heartney is a New York based art writer and cultural critic who has been writing about art since 1981. She is Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail and former Contributing Editor to Art in America and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other magazines as Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and has also received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Asian Cultural Council. A collection of Heartney’s essays was published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press under the title Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads. Other books include Postmodernism published in 2001 by the Tate Gallery Publishers and Cambridge University Press; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art published by Midmarch Arts Press in 2004 and reissued in 2018 by Silver Hollow Press; Defending Complexity, published in 2004 by Hard Press editions; and Art and Today, a survey of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present published by Phaidon in 2008 and updated in 2013. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, (2007, Prestel) which won the Susan Koppelman Award. She is also co-author, with the same team, of The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium (2014, Prestel,) and the forthcoming Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art, (Lund Humphries.) Heartney is past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

NANCY PRINCENTHAL - VISUAL

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (Thames & Hudson, 2019) was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times, and one of the best of the decade by Art News. Her previous, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and her essays have appeared in monographs on Katherine Bradford, Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold, Willie Cole, Gary Simmons, Lesley Dill and Alfredo Jaar, among many others. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, she has also contributed to such publications as the New York Times, Bomb magazine, Apollo, Hyperallergic and the Brooklyn Rail. Princenthal has taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, the School of Visual Arts and NYU’s Institute of Fine Art. She is currently working on a biography of Louise Bourgeois.

PERFORMANCE Judges

ALEC DUFFY

Alec Duffy is a theater director and the founder of the OBIE-winning Brooklyn performance space JACK, which he led for ten years before transitioning from leadership in 2022. With his theater company Hoi Polloi, he has created many original works, including White on White (JACK, 2022), Quiet, Comfort (JACK, 2016), All Hands (Incubator Arts Project, 2012), The Less We Talk (Incubator Arts Project, 2009), and Dysphoria (Incubator Arts Project, 2007). In 2010, he shared an OBIE Award for Three Pianos, a paean to Schubert's "Winterreise" song cycle, co-written and performed with Dave Malloy and Rick Burkhardt. His production of Moto Osada’s opera Four Nights of Dream premiered at Japan Society in 2017 and subsequently toured to the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan. Duffy is a former NEA/TCG directing fellow and a Drama League Directing Fellow. He attended the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

JONATHAN McCRORY

Jonathan McCrory is a Tony Award and Emmy Award nominated producer & director, two time Obie Award-winning, Harlem-based artist who has served as Executive Artistic Director at National Black Theatre since 2012 under the leadership of CEO, Sade Lythcott. He has directed numerous professional productions and concerts which include: How the Light Gets In (NYMF), Klook and Iron John (NAMT),  Dead and Breathing, HandsUp, Hope Speaks, Blacken The Bubble, Asking for More, Last Laugh and Enter Your Sleep. He has worked at ETW at TISCH NYU with Emergence: A Communion and evoking him: Baldwinand at Suny Purchase directing Exit Strategy, &  A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes. He has been acknowledged as an exceptional leader additionally through Craine’s New York Business 2020 Notable LGBTQ Leaders and Executives. In 2013, he was awarded the Emerging Producer Award by the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and the Torch Bearer Award by theatrical legend Woodie King Jr. He is a founding member of the collaborative producing organizations Harlem9, Black Theatre Commons, The Jubilee, Next Generation National Network and The Movement Theatre Company. McCrory sits on the National Advisory Committee for Howlround.com and was a member of the original cohort for ArtEquity. A Washington, DC native, McCrory attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and New York University’s TISCH School of the Arts. To learn more, please visit www.jonathanmccrory.com.

LITERATURE Judges

ELIZABETH CRANE

Elizabeth Crane is the author of four collections of short stories, Turf, When the Messenger is Hot, All this Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter as well as two novels, We Only Know So Much and The History of Great Things. Her work has been translated into several languages and has been featured in numerous publications including Other Voices, Nerve, Ecotone, Swink, Guernica, Catapult, Electric Literature, lithub, Commentary, Coachella Review, Mississippi Review, Florida Review, Bat City Review, fivechapters, The Collagist, Make, Hobart, Rookie, Fairy Tale Review, failbetter, The Huffington Post, Eating Well, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Reader and The Believer, Oldster, air/light, and anthologies including Altared, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Best Underground Fiction, Who Can Save Us Now?, Brute Neighbors and Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2008 and 2010, Small Odysseys, Love in the Time of Time’s Up. Her stories have been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Crane is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award, and her work has been adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater company, and also been adapted for film. She teaches in the UCR-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. A film adaptation of We Only Know So Much is now streaming on most VOD services. Her debut memoir, This Story Will Change, came out in August 2022 from Counterpoint Books.

JARED JACKSON

Jared Jackson is a writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator born in Hartford, CT. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was the recipient of a Chair’s Fellowship and Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships from MacDowell (’21,’23), Yaddo, Center for Fiction, Baldwin for the Arts, Tin House, and Plympton’s Writing Downtown Residency. His writing has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, and elsewhere. His short story “Bebo” will be anthologized in the Best American Short Stories 2023, guest edited by Min Jin Lee. He is at work on a story collection titled Locals.Jackson is also a contributing editor at Apogee Journal, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University, and the program director of literary programs at PEN America, where he oversees writing programs including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, the Dreaming Out Loud workshop series, and the Worker Writers School. Additionally, he administers PEN Out Loud, PEN America’s flagship literary conversation series showcasing literary excellence and a wide range of diverse voices including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Presidential Medal of Freedom-recipient Isabel Allende, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson, among others. In 2022, he was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Executive Leader of Color.

In recognition of the time, effort, and professional expertise that our Selection Committee Judges devote to the grant selection process, Café Royal Cultural Foundation provides a stipend to honor their commitment.