Meet the 2024-2025 Assembling Voices Fellows
Launched in 2020, Incite Institute’s Assembling Voices Fellowship supports activists, artists, scholars, workers, and others with ideas for public initiatives that bring people together to address community-identified issues in novel ways. The Fellowship’s core concept is assembly, a process of gathering to develop new capacities in ourselves, our communities, and the world.
Throughout the program year, Fellows receive $25,000 in income, initiative, and travel support, as well as intellectual, administrative, and professional support from Incite staff and other Columbia University affiliates. In addition, Fellows come together in New York City for training, collaboration, and networking.
Past Fellowship initiatives have included a home movie archive that brings awareness to life in Texas’ Boca Chica Beach, a community photography event that brought together siloed New Yorkers from all five boroughs, and an experiment in cultural programming for and by unhoused people in San Diego.
This summer, we set out to find our fourth Assembling Voices cohort. After our most competitive application season yet, receiving hundreds of applications from across the country, we have put together a promising new cohort.
Madeline Alexander, Director of Programs at Incite, expressed her enthusiasm about this year’s Fellows. “The 2024-2025 cohort is united by practices that fuse art and organizing to build capacities in community,” she said. Working together, the cohort will explore how communities can define and address issues in unexpected and effective ways.
With that, we are pleased to introduce you to our 2024-2025 Assembling Voices Fellows and their initiatives.
Moving Beyond Memorial
New York, NY
Youth in Brownsville, New York participate in a Beyond Memorial Installation.
Common in the aftermath of shootings, New Yorkers often build candle memorials that offer a space for mourning and reflection.
However, once these memorials are taken down, the sites they occupied often remain overshadowed by grief and anxiety, perpetuating feelings of unsafety and stigma. These spaces also historically have generational or historical trauma due to decades of disinvestment and systemic injustice, leaving these spaces feeling unsafe and stigmatized.
Public artist and spatial justice designer Immanuel Oni has been working with Brownsville youth to reclaim these sites through public art activations as part of an initiative called Beyond Memorial.
This initiative facilitates dialogue with multiple community groups across the city to reclaim various sites of loss, including an African Burial Ground and a Bed-Stuy environmental community center.
With Incite’s support, Oni will focus his efforts on building capacity within and beyond Brownsville to sustain and evolve this work through his non-profit, Liminal.
Fighting for Arts Equity
Nashville, TN
Christine Hall, Lydia Yousief, Alayna Anderson, and Sangeetha Ekambaram of Arts Equity Nashville organized the SALT Mutual Aid Society community art show and artist micro-grants, hosting a celebration on April 6, 2024
Nashville is home to thousands of working artists who have earned the city its reputation as a locally vibrant and internationally influential cultural center. However, these same artists face underpayment, a monopolistic field, and ongoing defunding of independent artists and small arts organizations.
In 2023, Arts Equity Nashville—a collective of artists, community groups, and businesses—organized to advocate for artists and organizations that are left behind by Nashville’s arts budget. In June 2023, the group’s base sent over 12,000 letters to Metro Council and made dozens of public comments at Council meetings. In a July 2023 vote, Nashville’s Metro Arts Commission voted to approve $2,000,000 in funding for local artists through its Thrive program, designed to ensure public arts funding reaches every neighborhood in the city.
This initial victory was short-lived—after the vote, Metro Legal intervened and pressured a vote to rescind the funding, citing the 2023 Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in colleges. In response, Arts Equity Nashville filed a Title VI complaint, leading to a conciliation agreement designed to bring much-needed funding back to artists.
As Assembling Voices Fellows, Arts Equity Nashville members Christine Hall, Lydia Yousief, and Alayna Renae Anderson augment their ongoing fight for arts equity in two ways. First, the team will create a podcast that archives the fight and provides a community-centered narrative to counter local media. Second, the team will conduct a survey for working-class artists in Nashville to collect critical data on wages, labor conditions, and accessibility. Both endeavors will center artists’ experiences, needs, and demands.
Inspiring Climate Action
New York, NY
Scene from a September 2024 Embodied Earth pilot in Harlem, New York.
New York City artists are increasingly responding to the climate crisis in their art. However, their production often occurs in silos—away from each other, from the researchers whose works inform our understanding of the climate, and from the publics these artists hope to reach.
As such, the New York City-based initiative Embodied Earth is breaking siloed forms of climate knowledge by creating and empowering “Pods”. Each Pod, selected by Embodied Earth and Project III, brings together an artist, choreographer, and climate scientist who work together over a six-week production timeline to create an interactive public work. Together the Pod selects a climate justice topic to investigate and co-produce an event where audiences interact with the performance of the Pod's Project, affecting the result of the creation as it unfolds. Through the perspectives of artists, Embodied Earth centers art—in its diverse forms—as an effective medium to inspire collective climate action.
As Assembling Voices Fellows, Embodied Earth founder Nicole Jackson and People’s Performance Project (Project III) founder Kasey Broekema are working to produce two Embodied Earth Pod experiments in New York. Embodied Earth's pilot programming was developed under the Project III umbrella, and will be incorporated separately in 2025.
The 2024–2025 Assembling Voices cohort will be gathering in New York City this December for our first meeting. We’ll keep you posted on their work as their initiatives develop.
Support Assembling Voices
Each year, Assembling Voices receives hundreds of applications from promising community leaders across the country.
We’re currently accepting new sponsors and gifts for our 2025–2026 cohort. To make a gift or sponsor a Fellowship, get in touch at incite@columbia.edu.
Incite Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute at Columbia University. We produce knowledge for public action. We do so by joining with people and organizations within and outside the university to rethink our understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s created, and how it can be used.