Five Pew Fellows Awarded 2015 Artist Residencies

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is pleased to announce that five new artist residencies have been awarded to Pew Fellows. Supported by the Center's ongoing partnership with the Alliance of Artists Communities, the Fellows will participate in residency programs at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California; The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada; Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California; MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and Ucross Foundation on the High Plains in Wyoming.

The 2015 Pew Fellow Artist Residency recipients are:

• Laynie Browne (2014, Literature) – MacDowell Colony
• Thomas Devaney (2014, Literature) – The Banff Centre
• Ted Passon (2014, Media Arts) – Headlands Center for the Arts
• Jumatatu Poe (2012, Dance) – 18th Street Arts Center
• J. C. Todd (2014, Literature) – Ucross Foundation

Poet Laynie Browne looks forward to "spending concentrated and uninterrupted time" on a number of works, including a collection of poems and a book of prose. "I was at MacDowell once previously when I was just beginning to write my first book. I remember this as a magical time. I am thrilled to be going back," Browne says. She hopes to return to Philadelphia with "a sense of what is possible within boundless time."

During his residency at The Banff Centre, author and poet Thomas Devaney plans to complete a manuscript for a book of poems inspired by his relationship to music. "I've been dreaming of this book for more than a decade," Devaney says. "Music is inside me and continues to influence my work. In my youth I was a serious and briefly professional musician playing clarinet, tenor sax, and flute...This history with music is my poet self's origin story."

While at Headlands, filmmaker and director Ted Passon will dedicate attention to two screenplay projects. He also welcomes a change of scenery: "I'm a total city person. Venturing into nature only rarely occurs to me, but I know when I'm there I feel a calm that is really helpful...I'm looking forward to working in a bit of a vacuum," he says. "I'm most interested to bring back a new sense of practice and routine around creating."

Choreographer and dancer Jumatatu Poe says he will continue research he began a few years ago with J-Sette artist Jermone Donte Beacham around "J-Sette performance, aesthetics of joy, rhythm and math permutations, Black contemporary aesthetics, notions of unison, and getting to the edge of time." While at 18th Street, he plans to create an athletic regiment around these artistic themes, and also hopes to "develop some beginnings of relationships and invite people into the studio."

The landscape at Ucross Foundation promises to inspire poet J.C. Todd's creative process: "I plan to write on foot, en plein air, opening to the place as a change agent of perception and so of language," she says. "I have no personal language for that sky, for how its rain falls, for walking the high land under that blue. Even if I don't write 'about' the place, I'll be writing 'from' it and 'in' it, making language that's new to me."

Since 2011, the Center's residency partnership with the consortium has provided a number of Pew Fellows with time and space for creative development, inspiration, and the cultivation of meaningful connections with artists and creative professionals outside the Philadelphia region.

Learn more about the Pew Fellow artist residency program and see all past recipients >>