In this section:
Cohort II 2026-2028
Hadar Ahuvia
Hadar Ahuvia is a choreographer, performer, ritual facilitator and educator weaving genres and generations. Her work Everything You Have is Yours examining the creation and dissemination of Israeli folk dance earned her a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” in 2019, and inspired the documentary of the same name by Tatyana Tenenbaum (DOC NYC 2024). Ahuvia has presented her work across the US and internationally, is working towards rabbinic ordination, leads services at Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, organizes with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and is on faculty with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. She is working on a cycle of performances inspired by the sonic gestures of Eastern European Ashkenazi prayer.
Avi Amon
Avi Amon is an award-winning, Turkish-American composer and sound artist based in Brooklyn whose work examines themes of collective memory, grief, and being “in-between.” Theater work includes music, songs, & sound design for projects with: Arena Stage, Ars Nova, The Kennedy Center, New York Theater Workshop, The Old Globe, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, PAC NYC, Signature Theater, and The Public. Avi’s film music has been featured at Cannes, DOCNYC, HBO, Hulu, SWSX, Tribeca, and the Venice Film Festival. Scores for the documentary film, EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS YOURS, and the New York Times Critics’ Pick, WELL, I’LL LET YOU GO, are streaming everywhere. A MacDowell Fellow, Avi has received support from NYSCA, The Shed, the Jonathan Larson Grant, Berkeley Rep, Dramatists Guild, New Music USA, The O’Neill, and The Playwright’s Center, among others. Avi’s newest piece, MOTHER/ROAD, will premiere at The Shed in NYC. Avi is the music director at the 52nd Street Project, and teaches at NYU Tisch.
Beejhy Barhany
Beejhy Barhany is a chef, author, and cultural entrepreneur, born in Ethiopia, raised in Israel, and now a proud New Yorker. She is the founder of the Beta Israel of North America Cultural Foundation, dedicated to the inclusive celebration of the Jewish Diaspora. She is also the founder of Tsion Cafe in Harlem, a cultural hub where guests break bread, break barriers, and share the stories and flavors of Jewish peoplehood. She collaborates with diverse institutions, schools, and organizations to celebrate Jewish diversity and inclusion through food, culture, and storytelling. As a Black and Jewish leader, she builds bridges with the African American community and shines light on often-marginalized Jewish communities worldwide. Balancing public engagements with family and wellness, she continues to connect cultures — one shared plate at a time.
Yoni Avi Battat
Yoni Avi Battat amplifies and transforms the echoes of his Iraqi-Jewish ancestry to broaden perspectives, touch hearts, and build community. A dynamic singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, story-teller, and prayer leader, Yoni performs and records across North America preserving, transmitting, and innovating traditional and original melodies rooted in Arab musical forms. Described as “an education for the ear and the soul,” his debut album Fragments seeks to find new pathways to connect with ancestry and find healing around our fragmented identities. Yoni is the co-founder of Kedmah, a musical initiative that re-imagines Middle-Eastern and North-African piyyutim as a means of teaching cultural literacy, Jewish history, and spirituality. From 2021–2022 Yoni toured nationally as an actor and violinist with the Tony Award-winning musical, The Band’s Visit. Based in Boston, Yoni works locally and nationally to uplift Mizrahi identity and bring Arab music into the soundscape of American Jewish life.
Judith Berkson
Judith Berkson is a composer, vocalist, and pianist. Her multi-disciplinary work explores tuning as it relates to memory and perception. She explores small spaces between similarity and difference as in her string quartets where each instrument is tuned a syntonic comma apart. Her solo project, Liederkreis, draws from 19th century German lieder, noise, and electroacoustic performance. She is also a Cantor and officiates traditional liturgical chanting. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and on NPR. She has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, City Opera, Laurie Anderson and has worked with ensembles including Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire, Experiments in Opera, and the Boston Microtonal Society. She has recorded for ECM Records and has written two operas. She is currently based in Los Angeles.
Kitra Cahana
Kitra Cahana is a lens-based artist, filmmaker, and journalist whose practice is defined by radical closeness. She embeds within the worlds she documents, building relationships that unfold over months and years. Working at the intersection of documentary and art, she combines photography, film, and text into intimate narratives that honor the people and places she portrays. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, and ProPublica, among others. She is a Peabody Award winner, a World Press Photo Award recipient, and a TED Senior Fellow.
Tamar Ettun
Tamar Ettun (she/they) works with sculpture, video, and performance art to invert the semiotics of our existing political, social, religious, and personal rituals. Ettun has exhibited and performed at The Jewish Museum, Museum of Art and Design, The Ford Foundation, The Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, The Chinati Foundation, The Shelburne Museum, The Watermill Center, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, PERFORMA, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Sculpture Center. Her practice has been supported by The Pollock Krasner Foundation and MacDowell. Ettun is a 2025–2026 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she is researching how contemporary female artists engage with themes of bodily autonomy, reproductive health and protective practices. Barbara London curated her new film, IVF Documents, for CYFEST video program at the 2026 Venice Biennale. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.
Ezra Furman
Ezra Furman is a writer of songs and prose who sometimes goes around the world singing with her band. She has released ten full-length albums, has published a book about Lou Reed, and is currently finishing a memoir about the biblical exodus from Egypt, if you can imagine that. She composed and recorded a soundtrack for the popular Netflix show Sex Education. With playwright Agnes Borinsky, she co-created a podcast about Judaism and queerness called 2 Queers 4 Questions. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Efrat Hakimi
Efrat Hakimi (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Working across technologies and crafts, she studies and interprets images, objects, and sites to explore the relationships between bodies and cultural artifacts, particularly those that bear witness to the female body. Hakimi’s practice is grounded in contemporary feminist thinking, Arab-Jewish narratives and their intersection with art and media. Recent exhibitions include the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Secrist Beach Gallery, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and Roots and Culture, Chicago. Hakimi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019) and her BSc from Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva (2010). Her awards include the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (2023), the Presser Photography Award from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2020), and the Katz International Photography Award (2018).
MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman (he/they) is a Brooklyn-based playwright who also dabbles in film, tv and fiction. Their work centers queer and trans characters, explores themes of desire, death, kinship, gender and power, and often takes place in forests. Their plays have been seen at the Mark Taper Forum, the Public Theater and theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russia and Australia. MJ has received funding from The NYC Mayor’s Office, a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award and residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony and New Dramatists. MJ’s film Therapist Crush won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at TRANSlations film festival. They recently completed the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and are at work on a novel about trans fatherhood. MJ teaches in the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Leah Koenig
Leah Koenig is an IACP Award-winning author of seven cookbooks including the acclaimed The Jewish Cookbook and PORTICO: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen, which was the IACP 2024 International Cookbook winner, and a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards. Her forthcoming cookbook The Dessert Table: 100 Joyful Jewish Sweets will be published by W.W. Norton September, 2026. Leah’s writing and recipes can be found in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Food & Wine, Epicurious, and Food52, among other publications. She also writes a weekly newsletter, The Jewish Table, which shares recipes and stories from the world of Jewish food. In addition to writing, Leah leads cooking demonstrations and workshops around the country and world. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
Brandon Kramer
Brandon Kramer is a Washington, DC-based filmmaker whose work tells intimate and complex stories unfolding within socially divided spaces. His most recent film, HOLDING LIAT, was shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Awards, won Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, and aired on BBC Storyville. His previous films include THE FIRST STEP, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; CITY OF TREES, released on PBS and Netflix; and the Webby Award-winning documentary series THE MESSY TRUTH, which aired on CNN. His work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, Jewish Story Partners, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brandon is the co-founder of Meridian Hill Pictures with his brother Lance Kramer and holds a bachelor’s degree in film and cultural anthropology from Boston University.
Abigail Levine
Abigail Levine is a choreographer and writer working in New York City. Called by The New York Times “an ingenious, imaginative, dryly witty writer” whose choreography is “at once funny, fascinating, and disturbing,” Levine’s work is rooted in dance, but moves across media — performance, text, drawing, sound. Recent works have been supported by MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, New York State Council on the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and New Music USA. Abigail collaborated with pioneering electronics composer Alvin Lucier (ISSUE Project Room, 2020) and performed with both Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. Abigail’s writing has been published in Documents in Contemporary Art, Interim Poetics, Art21, Peripheries Journal, Women & Performance, Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and Movement Research Performance Journal. Her next work premieres in 2027 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Sharon Mashihi
Sharon Mashihi is an audio storyteller whose rigorously vulnerable, form-bending work blends documentary, autofiction, theater, and cinematic sound design to explore how families navigate displacement and cultural difference. She is the creator of the audio mind trip Appearances, described by New York Magazine as “a breakthrough for the podcast form” and named a Best Podcast of the Year by The New York Times, The Economist, and Vulture. Her previous audio documentary, Man Choubam (I Am Good), won the Third Coast International Audio Festival Silver Prize. Sharon also makes theater and installation work. She has performed and exhibited at the ICA in Richmond, VA, and with New York Theater Workshop at Dartmouth University. Sharon is an adjunct podcast journalism professor at The New School and in 2025, she was commissioned by Audible to create “30 Days to Rediscover Your Creativity”.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Moriel Rothman-Zecher (they/he) is a National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a MacDowell Fellow, and is the author of two novels: Before All the World, which was named an NPR Best Book of 2022 and which Moriel is currently adapting into a play; and Sadness Is a White Bird, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Moriel’s first poetry collection, I Still Won’t Have Known, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2028. Moriel’s work has been published in the American Poetry Review, Ayin Press, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, the Common, Jewish Currents, Lit Hub, the New York Times, Poetry Daily, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Philadelphia, and teaches creative writing at Swarthmore College.
Bee Sacks
Bee Sacks is the author of two novels, THE LOVER (HarperCollins) and CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES (HarperCollins), awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, a silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California for first fiction, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. They are the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Sacks is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, where they were awarded the Henfield Prize and a Mellon-Sawyer Documenting War Fellowship. A Ph.D. candidate at UNLV, they live on the West Coast with their dog, Pupik.
Abraham (Abie) Troen
Abraham (Abie) Troen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He’s lensed and led film projects across Israel, Kenya, India, the U.S. and Canada, with work for Netflix, BBC, ARTE, Vanity Fair, and more, screened at Tribeca, TIFF, SXSW, DOC NYC and IDFA and supported by the Sundance Institute, Jewish Story Partners, Jewish Film Institute, IDA, Bertha, DOC Society and more. Abie studied film at the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem, earned a BA at Brandeis (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MFA from USC, where he received the Annenberg Fellowship. His films include Just Sing, Finding Home and ‘Til Kingdom Come. He was selected as one of the 2026 filmmakers in residence for the Jewish Film Institute. Family Pictures will be his second feature documentary as a director.
Rachel Lin Weaver
Rachel Lin Weaver (she/they) is a filmmaker, artist, musician, writer, curator, and educator. Thematically, Weaver’s multivalent projects reflect an upbringing in rural Alaska and West Virginia and explore interdependence, loss, and human collisions with the more-than-human world. Her work has been screened and exhibited in 49 countries. A member of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network, Weaver curates experimental film and emerging media for the New Orleans Film Festival, directs an ongoing documentary series for a CDC initiative to prevent vector-borne disease, and supports her local food economy through collaborations with Deep Roots Milling at Woodson’s Mill. Weaver is currently developing several new screenplays exploring apocalypse, cultural memory, and the price we pay for self-actualization. Based in Appalachia, Weaver is a licensed commercial culinary mushroom forager, nascent seaweed farmer, and Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
Hadar Ahuvia
Hadar Ahuvia is a choreographer, performer, ritual facilitator and educator weaving genres and generations. Her work Everything You Have is Yours examining the creation and dissemination of Israeli folk dance earned her a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” in 2019, and inspired the documentary of the same name by Tatyana Tenenbaum (DOC NYC 2024). Ahuvia has presented her work across the US and internationally, is working towards rabbinic ordination, leads services at Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, organizes with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and is on faculty with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. She is working on a cycle of performances inspired by the sonic gestures of Eastern European Ashkenazi prayer.
Avi Amon
Avi Amon is an award-winning, Turkish-American composer and sound artist based in Brooklyn whose work examines themes of collective memory, grief, and being “in-between.” Theater work includes music, songs, & sound design for projects with: Arena Stage, Ars Nova, The Kennedy Center, New York Theater Workshop, The Old Globe, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, PAC NYC, Signature Theater, and The Public. Avi’s film music has been featured at Cannes, DOCNYC, HBO, Hulu, SWSX, Tribeca, and the Venice Film Festival. Scores for the documentary film, EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS YOURS, and the New York Times Critics’ Pick, WELL, I’LL LET YOU GO, are streaming everywhere. A MacDowell Fellow, Avi has received support from NYSCA, The Shed, the Jonathan Larson Grant, Berkeley Rep, Dramatists Guild, New Music USA, The O’Neill, and The Playwright’s Center, among others. Avi’s newest piece, MOTHER/ROAD, will premiere at The Shed in NYC. Avi is the music director at the 52nd Street Project, and teaches at NYU Tisch.
Beejhy Barhany
Beejhy Barhany is a chef, author, and cultural entrepreneur, born in Ethiopia, raised in Israel, and now a proud New Yorker. She is the founder of the Beta Israel of North America Cultural Foundation, dedicated to the inclusive celebration of the Jewish Diaspora. She is also the founder of Tsion Cafe in Harlem, a cultural hub where guests break bread, break barriers, and share the stories and flavors of Jewish peoplehood. She collaborates with diverse institutions, schools, and organizations to celebrate Jewish diversity and inclusion through food, culture, and storytelling. As a Black and Jewish leader, she builds bridges with the African American community and shines light on often-marginalized Jewish communities worldwide. Balancing public engagements with family and wellness, she continues to connect cultures — one shared plate at a time.
Yoni Avi Battat
Yoni Avi Battat amplifies and transforms the echoes of his Iraqi-Jewish ancestry to broaden perspectives, touch hearts, and build community. A dynamic singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, story-teller, and prayer leader, Yoni performs and records across North America preserving, transmitting, and innovating traditional and original melodies rooted in Arab musical forms. Described as “an education for the ear and the soul,” his debut album Fragments seeks to find new pathways to connect with ancestry and find healing around our fragmented identities. Yoni is the co-founder of Kedmah, a musical initiative that re-imagines Middle-Eastern and North-African piyyutim as a means of teaching cultural literacy, Jewish history, and spirituality. From 2021–2022 Yoni toured nationally as an actor and violinist with the Tony Award-winning musical, The Band’s Visit. Based in Boston, Yoni works locally and nationally to uplift Mizrahi identity and bring Arab music into the soundscape of American Jewish life.
Judith Berkson
Judith Berkson is a composer, vocalist, and pianist. Her multi-disciplinary work explores tuning as it relates to memory and perception. She explores small spaces between similarity and difference as in her string quartets where each instrument is tuned a syntonic comma apart. Her solo project, Liederkreis, draws from 19th century German lieder, noise, and electroacoustic performance. She is also a Cantor and officiates traditional liturgical chanting. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and on NPR. She has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, City Opera, Laurie Anderson and has worked with ensembles including Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire, Experiments in Opera, and the Boston Microtonal Society. She has recorded for ECM Records and has written two operas. She is currently based in Los Angeles.
Kitra Cahana
Kitra Cahana is a lens-based artist, filmmaker, and journalist whose practice is defined by radical closeness. She embeds within the worlds she documents, building relationships that unfold over months and years. Working at the intersection of documentary and art, she combines photography, film, and text into intimate narratives that honor the people and places she portrays. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, and ProPublica, among others. She is a Peabody Award winner, a World Press Photo Award recipient, and a TED Senior Fellow.
Tamar Ettun
Tamar Ettun (she/they) works with sculpture, video, and performance art to invert the semiotics of our existing political, social, religious, and personal rituals. Ettun has exhibited and performed at The Jewish Museum, Museum of Art and Design, The Ford Foundation, The Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, The Chinati Foundation, The Shelburne Museum, The Watermill Center, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, PERFORMA, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Sculpture Center. Her practice has been supported by The Pollock Krasner Foundation and MacDowell. Ettun is a 2025–2026 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she is researching how contemporary female artists engage with themes of bodily autonomy, reproductive health and protective practices. Barbara London curated her new film, IVF Documents, for CYFEST video program at the 2026 Venice Biennale. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.
Ezra Furman
Ezra Furman is a writer of songs and prose who sometimes goes around the world singing with her band. She has released ten full-length albums, has published a book about Lou Reed, and is currently finishing a memoir about the biblical exodus from Egypt, if you can imagine that. She composed and recorded a soundtrack for the popular Netflix show Sex Education. With playwright Agnes Borinsky, she co-created a podcast about Judaism and queerness called 2 Queers 4 Questions. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Efrat Hakimi
Efrat Hakimi (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Working across technologies and crafts, she studies and interprets images, objects, and sites to explore the relationships between bodies and cultural artifacts, particularly those that bear witness to the female body. Hakimi’s practice is grounded in contemporary feminist thinking, Arab-Jewish narratives and their intersection with art and media. Recent exhibitions include the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Secrist Beach Gallery, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and Roots and Culture, Chicago. Hakimi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019) and her BSc from Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva (2010). Her awards include the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (2023), the Presser Photography Award from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2020), and the Katz International Photography Award (2018).
MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman (he/they) is a Brooklyn-based playwright who also dabbles in film, tv and fiction. Their work centers queer and trans characters, explores themes of desire, death, kinship, gender and power, and often takes place in forests. Their plays have been seen at the Mark Taper Forum, the Public Theater and theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russia and Australia. MJ has received funding from The NYC Mayor’s Office, a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award and residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony and New Dramatists. MJ’s film Therapist Crush won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at TRANSlations film festival. They recently completed the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and are at work on a novel about trans fatherhood. MJ teaches in the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Leah Koenig
Leah Koenig is an IACP Award-winning author of seven cookbooks including the acclaimed The Jewish Cookbook and PORTICO: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen, which was the IACP 2024 International Cookbook winner, and a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards. Her forthcoming cookbook The Dessert Table: 100 Joyful Jewish Sweets will be published by W.W. Norton September, 2026. Leah’s writing and recipes can be found in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Food & Wine, Epicurious, and Food52, among other publications. She also writes a weekly newsletter, The Jewish Table, which shares recipes and stories from the world of Jewish food. In addition to writing, Leah leads cooking demonstrations and workshops around the country and world. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
Abigail Levine
Abigail Levine is a choreographer and writer working in New York City. Called by The New York Times “an ingenious, imaginative, dryly witty writer” whose choreography is “at once funny, fascinating, and disturbing,” Levine’s work is rooted in dance, but moves across media — performance, text, drawing, sound. Recent works have been supported by MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, New York State Council on the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and New Music USA. Abigail collaborated with pioneering electronics composer Alvin Lucier (ISSUE Project Room, 2020) and performed with both Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. Abigail’s writing has been published in Documents in Contemporary Art, Interim Poetics, Art21, Peripheries Journal, Women & Performance, Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and Movement Research Performance Journal. Her next work premieres in 2027 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Sharon Mashihi
Sharon Mashihi is an audio storyteller whose rigorously vulnerable, form-bending work blends documentary, autofiction, theater, and cinematic sound design to explore how families navigate displacement and cultural difference. She is the creator of the audio mind trip Appearances, described by New York Magazine as “a breakthrough for the podcast form” and named a Best Podcast of the Year by The New York Times, The Economist, and Vulture. Her previous audio documentary, Man Choubam (I Am Good), won the Third Coast International Audio Festival Silver Prize. Sharon also makes theater and installation work. She has performed and exhibited at the ICA in Richmond, VA, and with New York Theater Workshop at Dartmouth University. Sharon is an adjunct podcast journalism professor at The New School and in 2025, she was commissioned by Audible to create “30 Days to Rediscover Your Creativity”.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Moriel Rothman-Zecher (they/he) is a National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a MacDowell Fellow, and is the author of two novels: Before All the World, which was named an NPR Best Book of 2022 and which Moriel is currently adapting into a play; and Sadness Is a White Bird, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Moriel’s first poetry collection, I Still Won’t Have Known, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2028. Moriel’s work has been published in the American Poetry Review, Ayin Press, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, the Common, Jewish Currents, Lit Hub, the New York Times, Poetry Daily, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Philadelphia, and teaches creative writing at Swarthmore College.
Bee Sacks
Bee Sacks is the author of two novels, THE LOVER (HarperCollins) and CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES (HarperCollins), awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, a silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California for first fiction, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. They are the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Sacks is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, where they were awarded the Henfield Prize and a Mellon-Sawyer Documenting War Fellowship. A Ph.D. candidate at UNLV, they live on the West Coast with their dog, Pupik.
Abraham (Abie) Troen
Abraham (Abie) Troen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He’s lensed and led film projects across Israel, Kenya, India, the U.S. and Canada, with work for Netflix, BBC, ARTE, Vanity Fair, and more, screened at Tribeca, TIFF, SXSW, DOC NYC and IDFA and supported by the Sundance Institute, Jewish Story Partners, Jewish Film Institute, IDA, Bertha, DOC Society and more. Abie studied film at the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem, earned a BA at Brandeis (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MFA from USC, where he received the Annenberg Fellowship. His films include Just Sing, Finding Home and ‘Til Kingdom Come. He was selected as one of the 2026 filmmakers in residence for the Jewish Film Institute. Family Pictures will be his second feature documentary as a director.
Rachel Lin Weaver
Rachel Lin Weaver (she/they) is a filmmaker, artist, musician, writer, curator, and educator. Thematically, Weaver’s multivalent projects reflect an upbringing in rural Alaska and West Virginia and explore interdependence, loss, and human collisions with the more-than-human world. Her work has been screened and exhibited in 49 countries. A member of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network, Weaver curates experimental film and emerging media for the New Orleans Film Festival, directs an ongoing documentary series for a CDC initiative to prevent vector-borne disease, and supports her local food economy through collaborations with Deep Roots Milling at Woodson’s Mill. Weaver is currently developing several new screenplays exploring apocalypse, cultural memory, and the price we pay for self-actualization. Based in Appalachia, Weaver is a licensed commercial culinary mushroom forager, nascent seaweed farmer, and Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
Brandon Kramer
Brandon Kramer is a Washington, DC-based filmmaker whose work tells intimate and complex stories unfolding within socially divided spaces. His most recent film, HOLDING LIAT, was shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Awards, won Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, and aired on BBC Storyville. His previous films include THE FIRST STEP, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; CITY OF TREES, released on PBS and Netflix; and the Webby Award-winning documentary series THE MESSY TRUTH, which aired on CNN. His work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, Jewish Story Partners, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brandon is the co-founder of Meridian Hill Pictures with his brother Lance Kramer and holds a bachelor’s degree in film and cultural anthropology from Boston University.
Cohort I 2023-2025
Agnes Borinsky
Agnes Borinsky (she/they) is a writer, performer, and theater-maker based in Los Angeles. She is interested in the unintended transformations that become possible when the things we’ve planned fail. Her projects include many plays (The Trees, A Song of Songs, Of Government, Ding Dong It’s the Ocean), experiments in participation (Working Group for a New Spirit, Weird Classrooms), and fiction (Sasha Masha). She has made work in collaboration with theater institutions – Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb – and outside of them, in basements, backyards, circus tents, community centers, and online. Photo credit: Taft Mashburn
Sam Butin
Sam Butin (he/him) is a writer/narrative designer. His work blends cinematic storytelling with game design to explore stories of revolution, gentrification, climate change, racial injustice, and more through the mechanics of gamification. His past projects include: 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (BAFTA, SXSW, Facebook Game of the Year), HERO (Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Festival Winner) and Fire Escape: An Interactive Narrative Series (NYFF, Tribeca, VIFF). He has developed original stories for partners including Google, Verizon, Eko & The Brown Institute.
Lee Conell
Lee Conell (she/her) is the author of the novel The Party Upstairs (Penguin Press), which was awarded the Wallant Award, and the story collection Subcortical (Johns Hopkins University Press), which was awarded The Story Prize Spotlight Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan-US Creative Artist Program, Yaddo, Willapa Bay AiR, Millay Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her stories and essays–which appear in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Paris Review daily, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction online, and elsewhere–have received the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, and have been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a writer mentor with Visible Ink at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, and has taught creative writing at Tufts University, Vanderbilt University, and Sewanee: The University of the South.
Maya Cueva
Maya Cueva (she/her) is a Jewish Latina award-winning director and producer with a background in documentary, radio, and audio production. She was a Netflix Nonfiction Director and Producer fellow and was listed on DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40 Filmmakers” co-presented by HBO Documentary Films. Maya’s work has been featured on The New Yorker, NPR’s All Things Considered, Latino USA, The Atlantic, Teen Vogue, and National Geographic. She received a student Emmy for her short film, The Provider, and her feature film, On the Divide, premiered in the documentary competition at Tribeca Film Festival in 2021. She was also a Sundance Ignite fellow in 2019. Her most recent short documentary ALE LIBRE was acquired by The New Yorker and was selected to screen at several Oscar qualifying festivals, including Big Sky Documentary Festival, Hot Docs, Aspen Film Festival, and SFFILM. On the Divide broadcasted on POV on PBS in Spring 2022.
Laura Elkeslassy
Laura Elkeslassy (she/her) is a singer, theater maker, spiritual leader and educator based in Brooklyn. Born and raised in France, with Moroccan and Israeli roots, Laura’s work focuses on reclaiming the North African Jewish folk and liturgical musical heritage from a feminist standpoint. In 2021, she released the multimedia project Ya Ghorbati: Divas in Exile. Developed in collaboration with Ira Khonen Temple, Ya Ghorbati weaves together the music and stories of Judeo-Arab divas from mid-century North Africa. Laura has performed music at countless venues including Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the World Music Institute. She was the lead singer fo the New York Andalus Ensemble for 5 years, where she started performing in Hebrew, Arabic, and Ladino in 2015. In the theater, she has worked at the National Opera of Paris the Venice Film Festival, La MaMa ETC, Here Arts Center, Target Margin, among others. As a spiritual leader, Laura has been active in developing Egalitarian Sephardi practice in New York, Boston and Paris over the last four years. Laura has taught sacred and folk music across the country, including at Yale University, Pratt University, and Hebrew Union College, as well as internationally at Segal Performance Center, Limud UK, and beyond. Laura holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University and is a multiple-time recipient of the Rise Up! Fellowship, the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, the Rising Leader Fellowship with the Open Society Foundation, and a multi-year grantee of Brooklyn Arts Council. Last year, Laura was selected as one of New York Jewish Week’s 36 to Watch.
Liana Finck
Liana Finck (she/her) is the author of several books, including Let There Be Light (Random House, 2022), an adaptation of the Book of Genesis with a female God, and A Bintel Brief (Ecco, 2014), and is a contracted New Yorker cartoonist. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Jewish Book Award, an Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a NYFA Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She’s had artist residencies with the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction at Barnard College. She plans to use her time in the fellowship to work on a tongue-in-cheek etiquette guide called What to Do When (Random House, 2026), which will draw from Jewish sets of rules for living life, among other things. Photo credit: Jorge Colombo
Igor Golyak
Igor Golyak (he/him) is the founder and producing artistic director of Arlekin Players Theater and Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab in Boston. A global leader in the virtual theater movement, he is currently directing The Orchard Off-Broadway, a hybrid production (both live and virtual), featuring Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov. During the pandemic he conceived and directed WITNESS, chekhovOS /an experimental game/ and State vs. Natasha Banina, each of which became international virtual theater sensations, receiving multiple New York Times Critic’s Picks and garner a 2022 Special Citation from the Boston Critic’s Association for “pushing the boundaries of digital space to create a new genre of theater.” Golyak’s work has received numeros Elliot Norton Awards for The Seagull, The Stone, and Dead Man’s Man’s Diary, including an award for Best Director. His work also received This Week In New York Pandemic Awards (WITNESS and chekhovOS). He directed The Merchant of Venice for Actors’ Shakespeare Project, productions at Northeastern University and Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and has taught at Boston Conservatory, Boston University, Harvard University, Lesley College, Wellesley College, New England Theater Conference, the Russian Academy of Theater Arts/Middlesex University, Moscow Specialized Institute for the Arts, and the ARBOS Theatre Festival. Golyak is from Ukraine, and with his team at Arlekin, has led the #Artists4Ukraine initiative, engaging artists to share messages of hope, peace and solidarity, and raising funds for humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain
Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain (she/her) is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and educator. Her work explores identity, history, Indigenous Futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage through a lens based media installations. She is a Sundance New Frontier and Indigenous MacArthur Fellow, was a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, and has received support for her work from the Mike Kelley Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, Cousin Collective, and more. She has also been an Interactive Storyteller for Tribeca Film Institute. LaFountain was born into a family artists and raised in Sante Fe, New Mexico. She is a member of the Echo Park Film Center Collective. She teaches experimental film, photography, and portfolio development workshops at the California Institute of the Arts, where she was also the Assistant Director of Admissions for the School of Film/Video. She holds a BA from Hampshire College, and a dual MFA in Film & Video and Photography & Media from CalArts.
Antonia Lassar
Antonia Lassar (she/they) is a Jewish comedian/actor/hottie based in LA. She’s best known for her viral TikToks about Jewish life, along with her solo shows “Post Traumatic Super Delightful” and “God Box.” Antonia has performed her solo work at The New Repertory Theatre, Yale, UC Berkeley, Smith College, and many more. Her work using comedy as a tool for social change has been featured by Marie Claire, Glamour, and Autostraddle. She has delivered many keynotes about the intersection of comedy and social justice, including at the 2018 National March Against Rape Culture. She’s currently touring a new Jewish standup show that mixes comedy and group singing to examine the uniquely Jewish tension between pleasure and obligation. Antonia is a member of the acclaimed UCB Theatre and performs stand up regularly in LA and at your mom’s synagogue.
Cara Levine
Cara Levine (she/they) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Using sculpture, video, and socially engaged practices, she explores the interactions of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic, and illusionary. She is the founder of This is Not A Gun, a multidisciplinary project aiming to creative awareness and activism through collective creative action. She directs Outlook Is ___ Projects, an artist-run project space in Los Angeles. Her work has been presented in one-person, group exhibitions, and participatory events in venues around the world such as The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2023), MOCA Geffen Warehouse, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Creative Tim, New York, NY (2019); The Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK (2019), Tenderloin Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2012); and Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (2006). Levine has participated in residency programs including Santa Fe Art Institute (2017); The Arctic Circle, International Territory of Svalbard (2017); Sedona Arts Colony, Sedona, AZ (2016); SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015); Anderson Ranch, Aspen, CO (2014); and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2013). Levine is currently an associate adjunct professor in Fine Art and Foundations at Otis College of Art and Design and has worked in the disability arts community since 2011 in roles at various progressive art studios including the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, Inglewood, CA and Creative Growth, Oakland, CA. She organized the first annual Self-Taught Artists Fair with Public Annex in Portland, OR in 2017. Photo credit: Ashley Randall
Erika Meitner
Erika Meitner (she/her) is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in April of 2022. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including The New Yorke, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, Blue Mountain Center, T.S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Bethany Arts Community. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program in Creative Writing.
Anthony Russell
Anthony Russell (he/him) is a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. His work in Ashkenazi Jewish musical forms led to a musical exploration of his own ethnic roots through the research, arrangement and performance of a hendred years of African American music, resulting in the EP Convergence (2018), a collaboration with Klezmer consrt Veretski Pass. Inspired by an ethnographic trip to Belarus and Poland as a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow, Anthony formed a duo, Tsvey Brider (“Two Brothers”), with accordionist and pianist Dmitri Gaskin for the composition and performance of original music set to Yiddish poetry. Their recent release, Komopolitn, features their settings of 20th century modernist poetry for voice and string ensemble. A Hadar Rising Song Fellow (2021-22), Anthony has expanded his work into cultural activism through collaboration with the Workers Circle and as an essayist in a number of publications including The Forward, Tablet Magazine, JTA, PROTOCOLS, Full Stop Magazine, Ayin Press and Jewish Currents. Anthony lives in Atlanta, GA with his husband of eight years, Rabbi Michael Rothbaum. Photo credit: Adam Wiseman
Jessica Valoris
Jessica Valoris (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and community facilitator based in Washington, DC. She weaves together mixed media painting, installation, ritual performance and social practice, to create sacred spaces. Her art activates ancestral wisdom, personal reflection, and community study. Inspired by the earth-based traditions of her Black American and Jewish ancestry, Jessica engages in metaphysics, spirituality, and Afrofuturism in her work. her art is both balm and blueprint: mapping out pathways for the Black liberatory imagination and reviving recipes for collective care. Jessica collaborates with organizers and cultural workers to facilitate community rituals of remembrance and conversations about reparations, abolition, earth-stewardship, and more. Jessica Valoris is currently a Culture and Narrative Fellow with The Opportunity Agenda and a recipient of the Washington Award of S&R Evermay. She has completed fellowships with VisArts Studio Fellowship, Public Interest Design Lab, Intercultural Leadership Institute, and Halcyon Arts Lab. Iterations of her recent body of work, Black Fugitive Folklore, have been shown at the Phillips Collection, The Kreeger Museum, Africana Film Festival, The REACH Kennedy Center, VisArts and Brentwood Arts Exchange.
Frieda Vizel
Frieda Vizel (she/her) grew up in the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel, the fifth of fitteen children. After an arranged marriage an young motherhood, Vizel embarked on a journey to find a new place in the world. Although she is no longer Hasidic, she carries with her the deep history and culture of her formative years. She has a passion for understanding human societies–specifically Hasidic culture–which she shares with a humanizing warmth. Since 2013, she has been leading thousands of people in small-group educational tours through Hasidic Brooklyn. She also runs a popular YouTube channel where she explores Hasidic food, architecture, art, technology and conducts intimate interviews. Her work is appreciated by Hasidim and non-Hasidim alike. She is the recipient of the 2023 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre award. Her work has been reviewed in many major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Brooklyn Eagle, Times of Israel and the Jewish Daily Forverts.
Netta Yerushalmy
Netta Yerushalmy (she/her) is a choreographer and performer based in new York City. Her research-based dance-making is propelled by a passion for, and trust in, the body as a site of ineluctable knowledge. Her work is aesthetically and ethically committed to generating questions, rather than answers. Recognized with a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, Yerushalmy was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the New York Public Library, Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York City Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, National Dance Project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been presented by venues such as Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, Hebbel am Ufer, PEAK Performances, Wexner, and the Guggenheim Museum, to name a few. She received development support from organizations including Baryshnikov Arts Center, Watermill Center, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Bogliasco Foundation. Netta works across genres and disciplines: she contributed to sculptor Josiah McElheny’s Prismatic Park, choreographed a Red hot Chili Peppers music video, worked with cellist Maya Beiser and composer Julia Wolfe on Spinning, and collaborated on evenings of theory and performance at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin. Netta has danced and toured internationally with Doug Varone and Dancers, Pam Tanowitz Dance, Joanna Kotze, and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. She grew up in Galilee, Israel, and received her BFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she is currently on faculty.