🌟 Meet the 2024-25 Fellows of the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice!
🕸️ Interdependence in Action
We are thrilled to introduce the 2024-25 cohort of Fellows — visionary artists, thinkers, and change-makers selected for the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice, our fifth Black Utopian Fellowship and our first ever Disability Arts Curatorial Fellowship. This year’s Fellows push the boundaries of interdisciplinary creativity, using art, technology, and community-based practices to reimagine futures rooted in justice, care, and collective imagination. From regenerative food systems to afrofuturist storytelling, diasporic dreaming, and tools for food sovereignty, these fellows are crafting bold experiments in alternative infrastructures and shared healing.
Each Fellow’s work embodies the spirit of utopian practice by addressing critical social issues through participatory and experimental methods. Their projects offer transformative approaches to food insecurity, disability justice, diasporic identity, labor, and the unseen dynamics of urban life. We are honored to support their journeys as they forge paths to more inclusive and equitable worlds. Stay tuned as we share more about their projects and progress throughout the year.
Aiyo Cheboi
Culture Push Black Utopian Fellow 2024
Aiyo Cheboi (they/them) is a Black, genderqueer human seeking to nurture interpersonal connections via courageous and tender exchanges of knowledge. They are also an experimental artist / educator nestled within an ecosystem of bio art, cooking + food systems, physical computation + code, and research about regenerative technologies. Spiritually and politically, they’re committed to nurturing individual + collective expressions of imagination.
PROJECT : EXPERIMENTAL FOOD LAB
The Experimental Food Lab is a transitory food laboratory focused on increasing access to food science + regenerative food technologies for low-income, Black (students, grandmas, mothers, caregivers, chefs, artists, climate activists).
Camille Mbayo
Culture Push Black Utopian Fellow 2024
Camille-Louise “Cam” Kouba Mbayo (she, they, we) is a queer Congolese-born Brooklyn-based abolitionist, abortion doula, nerd-artist, daughter, sister, friend, process becoming. Cam is committed to living fully in the present moment and believes there is an artistry in that. With the engineering tools they’ve acquired through academia and their Indigenous knowledge systems Cam works at the intersection of art, tech, culture, and education.
Living themselves at the intersection of many identities, as they continue to figure out their place in the world and their relationship to land, belonging, and being good kin, they are learning how to build communities rooted in love, care, and right relationships. In the making of those communities, Cam is interested in exploring art as a portal to different futures. In between napping, Cam can be found in trees, on wheels, reading books, engineering, dancing, meditating, adventuring, talking about colonialism and the white christian supremacists, painting, playing board games, and loving and laughing with community.
The project is an immersive afrofuturist story that weaves together elements of the past and uses play to explore engineering concepts. The story unfolds based on participant interest, culminating in a co-created storybook for young children and a cooperative board game for older participants.
Megan Bent
Disability Arts Curatorial Fellow 2024
Megan Bent (she/her) is a lens-based artist interested in ways image-making can happen beyond "traditional" media and methods. She is drawn to processes that reflect and embrace her disabled experience; especially interdependence, impermanence, care, and slowness. Her most recent work focuses on personal experiences of healthcare denials and critiques the use of AI in healthcare. She is interested in weaving together her health justice activism and art practice. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad at venues including The U.N. Headquarters, NY, NY; Root Division, San Francisco, CA; form & concept, Santa Fe, NM; F1963, Busan, South Korea; and Fotonostrum, Barcelona, Spain. She was a recent recipient of the 2023 Wynn Newhouse Awards. Her work has been featured in Lenscratch, Analog Forever Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Rfotofolio, and Float Photography Magazine.
hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 & huiyin zhou)
Culture Push Fellow 2024
hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 & huiyin zhou) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, and collaborative writing. Since 2020, huiyin and Laura have collaborated on over 40 performances, workshops, and exhibitions exploring diasporic queer identity, family memory, generational trauma, and collective grief through ritualistic and community-centered processes. huiyin and Laura have been awarded residencies at Durham Art Guild, BRIClab, Pedantic Arts, and Feminist Incubator. Their work has received support from BRIC, Raleigh Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Queens Art Fund, Asian American Arts Alliance, Durham Arts Council, and beyond.
PROJECT : ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS: A QUEER JOURNEY OF DREAMS AND DIASPORA
"One Thousand and One Nights: A Queer Journey of Dreams and Diaspora" is a participatory art project collecting 1001 dreams and bedtime stories from queer and queer diasporic community members living in NYC in the form of text, audio, photo, and video through group interviews, voice box messages, and online submissions.
Drawing from Chinese Taoist cosmology and shamanistic practices in Northeastern Asia, this project views dreams as one of the least surveilled/(self)-censored forms of knowledge—a direct and unfiltered means of relearning and healing. At the intersection of ongoing global conflicts, genocides, and social movements, the work holds collective dreams in a womb-like, fugitive space for (im)migrants and marginalized communities, who are constantly being put through a transitory and crisis-response state. The work asks to center rest and care and examines the radical potential of collective dreaming as a political form for creative infrastructure (re)building and alternative healing.
Kwé Neshai
Culture Push Fellow 2024
Kwé is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary researcher and artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rooted in the intersections of ecology, social justice, and community science, their work explores how participatory practices within science and design can create justice-oriented solutions for marginalized urban communities. Kwé’s research has earned recognition in Nature magazine and has been presented in international circles, including the 2019 Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting. As a 2023 Confident Futures Fellow, they developed international collaborations fostering culturally informed youth programs in both Brooklyn and Amsterdam. Their work is dedicated to forging intercommunal connections and breaking down systemic barriers to opportunity.
PROJECT : MY FOODSCAPE
Designed to transform the way food insecure communities interact with their food environment, ‘My Foodscape’ is a concept for a digital mapping tool that allows users to chart stores, vendors, events, community hubs, and other point sources of affordable, nutritious foods at the hyperlocal level.
Urban areas face a unique manifestation of food insecurity driven by sustained structural inequality and unjust distribution processes, often leaving entire neighborhoods in nutritional deficit. ‘My Foodscape’ is an experiment in leveraging GIS mapping and digital networks to empower communities to reveal and engage with existing nutritional resources in their food environment.
Through community design activations and workshops, this project aims to produce an interactive geographical database of nutritious food sources for underserved communities, and develop tools to help people with limited financial resources learn to eat well in their neighborhoods.
Miguel Alejandro Castillo
Culture Push Fellow 2024
Recently recognized as one of the "25 to Watch" in 2024 by Dance Magazine, Miguel Alejandro Castillo is drawn to the permeability of art forms and the new inquiries that arise from cross-disciplinary and multicultural collaborations. A director, choreographer, performer and educator, his research explores diasporic imagination and future folklore. Castillo has performed in works by Faye Driscoll, Jeanine Durning, and Tzveta Kassabova, among others. He choreographed John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary at the Volksoper in Vienna. He was a 2021 danceWEB scholar at the ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna and a 2022–2023 Fresh Tracks Artist in Residence at New York Live Arts. He holds a bachelor’s degree in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.
PROJECT: ELMO-MENTO
ELMO-MENTO is an interdisciplinary dance-theatre performance that shines a light on the untold stories of "new New Yorkers" who work as cartoon character performers in Times Square. By juxtaposing personal narratives with surreal embodiment, blending cartoon soundtracks with cityscapes and interviews, and mixing iconic costumes with everyday clothing, this performance explores themes of labor, anonymity, immigration, capitalism, and solidarity. This project aims to provoke dialogue, challenge perceptions, and shape immigration policies in New York City, all while celebrating the resilience and delightful absurdity that characterizes moving and staying in this metropolis.
Suzanne Shulz
Culture Push Fellow 2024
Suzanne Schulz (she/her) is a video artist, researcher, and educator. Her videos, which explore work, debt, reconciliation, and friendship have screened at Rooftop films, Hunter College, and at the University Film and Video Association. Suzanne is an MFA candidate in the Integrated Media Arts at CUNY-Hunter College and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the Library of Congress. In her research-based artistic practice and her teaching at Bard Early College Queens, Suzanne draws on her experiences and training in South Asian Studies and Media Studies.
PROJECT: I NEED MORE TIME MACHINE
The I Need More Time Machine is a multifaceted research, oral history, and video installation project that draws on the experiences of a wide array of female-identifying New Yorkers in the past, present and future to examine labor, feeling of overwhelm, exhaustion, and technologies of rest. The project seeks to test, model, and create a fantasy-imbued solution for female workers-caretakers’ race against a relentless capitalist clock. The I Need More Time Machine alters the labor movement's credo "8 hours labor, 8 hours rest, 8 hours recreation," with the motto: “Limitless hours of rejuvenating dream time.” The project will culminate in the public installation of viewing/listening spaces.