3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, honors the milestone 15th anniversary of the 3Arts Awards with nearly half a million dollars in unrestricted grants to Chicago artists. The 15th annual 3Arts Awards Celebration takes place Monday, November 7 via livestream on YouTube where the organization will honor ten new 3Arts Awards recipients with $30,000 cash grants, announce $50,000 Next Level/Spare Room awardees, and award ten additional artists with $2,000 cash grants through Make a Wave. The online event is free to the public and features commissioned performances by 3Arts artists, including Aram Han Sifuentes, Bethany Thomas, Robby Lee Williams, and Santiago X. Registration is required at https://3arts.org/event/.
In its 15-year history, 3Arts has supported more than 1,800 artists across all program areas, representing approximately 70% women artists, 70% artists of color, and 20% Deaf and disabled artists working in the six-county metropolitan area, and distributed $5.8 million in direct grants. Through cash awards, project funding, residency fellowships, professional development, and promotion, 3Arts cultivates and sustains the vibrancy of Chicago’s art community by allowing artists to take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers.
Since its founding in 1912 as The Three Arts Club of Chicago by activist Jane Addams and other visionaries, women have been leading the 3Arts organization in its mission to support under-represented artists. In addition to marking the 110th anniversary of the founding of The Three Arts Club of Chicago, 2022 also marks 20 years of women-led leadership under Executive Director Esther Grimm, currently at the helm of 3Arts. During her tenure, the awards have grown significantly to include artists of all performing arts disciplines and the largest grant program for teaching artists in the country. In addition, 3Arts has established and expanded programs that respond to specific moments and changing needs of Chicago artists, such as with the organization’s critical COVID-19 relief funding, the unique Make a Wave initiative, and the newest Next Level/Spare Room Awards in which past 3Arts artists receive second grants of $50,000 each.
"It has been an honor to be a part of the ever-expanding 3Arts community for the past 20 years," reflects 3Arts Executive Director Grimm, "3Arts is more than a granting organization: it is truly a community of artists supporting each other and coming together to enrich and empower our great city. During the 2022 awards ceremony, we invite the whole city to join in our community for an evening of sharing joy, hope, and love with our award recipients and all the artists who call Chicago home."
The 2022 recipients of 3Arts Awards are:
Dance artists Winifred Haun and Sarita Smith Childs; musicians Akenya and Nashon Holloway; teaching artists Peregrine Bermas and Simone Reynolds; theater artists Miranda Gonzalez and Omar Abbas Salem; and visual artists Rozalinda Borcilă and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal.
3Arts will additionally celebrate the recipients of Make a Wave, a groundbreaking artist-to-artist grant program in which past 3Arts Awards recipients select another ten Chicago artists to receive surprise cash awards, sending a “wave” of support through Chicago’s cultural communities. Make a Wave artists receive $2,000 per artist, thanks to the generous partnership of the Siragusa Family Foundation. The 2022 recipients of Make A Wave grants are Zahra Glenda Baker (vocalist, storyteller, and teaching artist); Maggie Brown (vocalist and teaching artist); Stephanie “Stef Skills” Garland (street art muralist and educator); Leah Ra’Chel Gipson (interdisciplinary artist and scholar); Terry Guest (playwright, actor, and director); Malik Johnson aka 99TheProducer (cellist, composer, and producer); Ivan Lozano (visual artist and podcaster); Elisabeth YJ Seonwoo aka Kerberus (dancer); Andrea Yarbrough (maker, curator, and educator); and Wai Yim (actor, director, choreographer, and playwright).
The celebratory evening is co-chaired by Candace Hunter (past 3Arts awardee), Lynn M. Lockwood (civic leader), and Mel Smith (3Arts Treasurer).
In addition to supporting artists with cash grants, 3Arts will premiere new commissions by Chicago artists during the Awards celebration. This year’s event features: Aram Han Sifuentes (past 3Arts and Next Level awardee) in a new performance with the all-women percussion group Woori Sori (“Our Voice”); Bethany Thomas (past 3Arts awardee) in a new music video for her original song “Walls + Ceilings” from her debut album BT/SHE/HER; Robby Lee Williams (past 3Arts/Bodies of Work Fellow, and dancer and disability advocate) in a new dance film with fellow dancer Connor Cornelius and visual artist Genevieve Ramos; and Santiago X (past 3Arts awardee) presenting a new video from his Land Acknowledgement serie
More information on the 2022 3Arts Awards recipients:
DANCE
Winifred Haun, 3Arts Awardee
Winfred Haun is the founder, choreographer, and artistic director of her own contemporary dance company, Winifred Haun & Dancers. Since the 1990’s, Haun has created over 70 new dance works, including one full-length ballet and four dance films. She has received numerous awards and accolades for her choreography, including a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Award to create a new work in collaboration with renowned Australian circus artist, Emma Serjeant. Haun’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Dance Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, See Chicago Dance, and many others. From 1985 to 1992, Haun performed, toured, and conducted dance residencies with the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, under the direction of Joseph Holmes and Randy Duncan. She was also a dance instructor at Hubbard Street Dance Center for more than 14 years.
Sarita Smith Childs, 3Arts/Stan Lipkin & Evelyn Appell Lipkin Awardee
Sarita Smith Childs is a choreographer and teaching artist. A native of Chicago’s West Side, she is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she received a B.A. degree with concentrations in Dance and Economics. She began her professional career with Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre and performed with companies and choreographers in Chicago and in New York, including Thodos Dance Chicago and Randy Duncan Choreography. In 2022, Smith Childs was honored with South Chicago Dance Theatre’s Cultural Hero Award, and she is a past recipient of the Ruth Page Award for Dance Achievement and the Black Theater Alliance Award for Best Performance in a Music/Dance Program. Recent projects include works for: Visceral Dance Chicago; Grammy Nominated Blues harpist Billy Branch for Chicago Blues Fest; Blues/Folk fiddler Anne Harris & Grayscale Dance Los Angeles; Voice of the City Vaudeville Underground; and Dance in the Parks. She has held teaching positions with numerous dance conservatories, studios, and schools. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University and a part-time instructor at Loyola University Chicago.
MUSIC
Akenya, 3Arts Awardee
Akenya is a multi-genre singer, pianist, composer, and arranger. Her music is an eclectic synthesis of jazz, hip-hop, soul, pop, classical, and world music. She has collaborated with influential artists such as fellow Chicago natives, Chance the Rapper, Noname, and legend Mavis Staples; jazz icons such as Esperanza Spalding, Dave Holland, and Fred Hersch; and pop/rock sweetheart Hayley Williams of Paramore. Her debut chamber orchestral piece, Fear the Lamb - a tribute to the life of Emmett Till, was commissioned and premiered by Palaver Strings and featured on their debut album Ready or Not. Her eclectic style and keen musicianship have garnered the attention of publications such as Chicago Tribune, Afropunk, and The Fader. She has performed her music globally and is preparing to release her first full-length album, Moon in the 4th
Nashon Holloway, 3Arts/BMO Harris Bank Community Awardee
a name meaning “oracle,” Nashon Holloway was born to sing healing. National Public Radio refers to the Kalamazoo-born, Chicago-bred singer’s sound as “crisp and colorful” and her soulful jazz-tinged voice and guitar-playing as being where Jill Scott meets Lianne La Havas. Holloway often says, “harmony is a lifestyle." Having composed original music for symphony orchestra, she is now recording with producer Narada Michael Walden, who wrote Whitney Houston’s first seven Billboard charting hits including "How Will I Know." Holloway has been seen on The Oprah Winfrey Show with David Foster, Hans Zimmer Live with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Tank and the Bangas with LiV Warfield of Prince's New Power Generation, Bobby McFerrin, Kelly Rowland, Chicago Children's Choir, Jennifer Hudson, Paulo Szot, Nobuo Uematsu, Drake, and more—but Holloway is also an artist in her own right. Listeners and audience-goers can find her touring under her own name with her gospel and funk-influenced band of celebrated musicians.
TEACHING ARTS
Peregrine Bermas, 3Arts/HMS Fund Awardee
Peregrine Bermas is a curious earthling living in their birthplace, so-called Chicago. Their artistic practice takes many forms—all stimulating the intersections of land-based relationships and collective care. In 2022-2023 they are illustrating the second in a series of educational coloring zines about so-called “weeds” and leading Freedom Fighter Herbs, an autonomous herbal mutual aid effort. Through her craft and breath, she honors elders, ancestors, and guides: mountains, oceans, and raspberries, and humans whose creative inclinations led them to be teachers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, earthkeepers, excellent cooks, and medicine makers. As a community herbalist, Bermas is passionate about sharing kitchen-accessible and bioregional medicine, and uplifting QT2S (Queer, Trans, Two Spirit) Indigenous and Melanated soil stewards and wisdom teachers.
Simone Reynolds, 3Arts/Chandler Family Awardee
Simone Reynolds is a Black, queer Chicago South Sider, interdisciplinary artist, community art educator, and arts worker. Through music, theater, writing, and media, they lure the magic in the mundane of an everyday marginalized life and people. She has performed, facilitated, and curated creative learning experiences across Chicago since adolescence, including Community Actors Program, Teen Arts Council, Street Level Youth Media, and CoCre8. In 2020, Reynolds initiated at-home youth art kits that included snacks, art supplies, and prompts channeling Black radical thought and artistry. She has also taught numerous workshops focusing on storytelling through visual art, movement, language, and sound. Reynolds studied Theatre Arts and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University. They have trained with the Black Art Institute and Artists as Citizen. Reynolds’s performance credits include Rewriting the Declaration, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, In the Next Room, 9 to 5: The Musical, and Lollapalooza 2020. She also writes and performs with Rebirth Poetry Ensemble and SOL Collective.
THEATER
Miranda Gonzalez, 3Arts Awardee
Miranda Gonzalez, born and raised in Chicago, is a writer, director, producer, and consultant. She is the Producing Artistic Director at UrbanTheater Company (UTC) in Humboldt Park and a founding ensemble member of Chicago’s all-Latina theater company, Teatro Luna, and has devised and developed plays since 2000. She is currently developing a play about the history of the underground railroad to Mexico as a part of Latino Theater Company’s Imaginistas cohort in Los Angeles. Some of Gonzalez’s directing credits include: the theatrical film Brujaja by Melissa Duprey; Thank You for Coming.Take Care by Stacey Rose at Court Theatre; Ashes of Light by Marco Antonio Rodriguez; and La Gringa by Carmen Rivera. She is also an Executive Producer for the web series 50 Blind Dates with Melissa DuPrey and has written episodes for the web series Ruby's World Yo, created by Marilyn Camacho.
Omer Abbas Salem, 3Arts/SIF Fund at The Chicago Community Foundation Awardee in honor of Samuel G. Roberson Jr.
Omer Abbas Salem is an actor and playwright. As an actor, Salem has worked at The Goodman Theater, About Face Theater, The New Coordinates, Steep Theatre, Jackalope Theatre, Silk Road Rising, Griffin Theatre, The House, Bailiwick Chicago, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Repertory Theater of St. Louis, Roundabout Theater, and The Atlantic Theater. As a playwright, Salem’s work has been produced at Steppenwolf Theater Company, The Goodman Theater, About Face Theatre, Jackalope Theater, First Floor Theater, Theater School at DePaul, National Queer Theater, Definition Theatre, and The New Coordinates. He is the winner of Steppenwolf's SCOUT Development Project (2020/2021), Definition Theatre's Amplify Commission 20(20/2021), Goodman Theater's Future Labs Development (2021), The Cunningham Commission at DePaul Theatre School (2021/2022), The Goodman Theater's Playwright's Unit (2021/2022), and First Floor Theater's Blueprint Commission (2021/2022). He was an apprentice of the Actors Theatre of Louisville (2017/2018) and is also a proud ensemble member with Steep Theatre, Jackalope Theatre, First Floor Theater, and The New Coordinates. He is represented by DDO Artist Agency and The Gersh Agency.
VISUAL ARTS:
Rozalinda Borcilă, 3Arts/Reva & David Logan Foundation Awardee
Rozalinda Borcilă is a Romanian immigrant, artist, researcher, and activist. She develops long-term projects that take the form of publications, video essays, installations, media/web platforms, and experimental learning walks. Her work traces the ways racialized banishment, ecocide, Indigenous dispossession, and extractive violence are encoded in settler colonial placemaking. Borcilă explores material forms and flows of capital around institutional structures and forms of property—as well as modes of feeling, modes of relation, and everyday experiences of being in place—in sites such as transportation corridors, canal zones, wetland development sites, and foreign trade zones. Recently she has focused on the governance of waterscapes under the calculative logic of offsetting and on glacial narratives as modes of colonial knowing. She works in different institutional and counter-institutional settings: museums, universities, art centers, community spaces, squats, and in the streets.
zakkiyyah najeeabah dumas-o'neal, 3Arts/Gary & Denise Gardner Fund Awardee
zakkiyyah najeeabah dumas-o'neal’s work explores personal and social histories related to family, queer identities, self interiority, and belonging. Within her projects there is an overlying theme of trying to make sense of, and complicating, what and who she belongs to across time, location, and space. dumas-o'neal has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, Indiana University, and South Bend Museum of Art. Her work has been presented in various forms at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, Art Institute of Chicago, August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has also curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department, Blanc Gallery, and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She was recently a 2021 Artist in Residence at Arts + Public Life at University of Chicago and a 2021 Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
About 3Arts
3Arts is a nonprofit organization that supports Chicago’s women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists who work in the performing, teaching, and visual arts. By providing cash awards, project funding, residency fellowships, professional development, and promotion, 3Arts helps artists take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers.
3Arts extends special thanks to the 2022 Award Partners: The Chandler Family, Gary & Denise Gardner Fund, The HMS Fund, Stan Lipkin & Evelyn Appell Lipkin, The Reva & David Logan Foundation, and The SIF Fund at the Chicago Community Foundation. One of the ten 3Arts Awards, designated for Nashon Holloway as the 3Arts/BMO Community Award, is named in honor of the 114 community donors who contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to fund the award along with a $15,000 match from 2022 Community Award Partner, BMO Harris Bank.
3Arts also recognizes support for the Next Level/Spare Room Awards (to be announced at the event on November 7) from an anonymous donor at The Chicago Community Foundation, as well as Make a Wave Partner: The Siragusa Family Foundation.
3Arts gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors: Presenting Sponsor: Allstate Insurance Company; Lead Sponsors: AEI Center for Advanced Emotional Intelligence and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois; Corporate Friends: The Chicago Community Trust, LCM Architects, Mariano’s, Northern Trust, Perkins Coie, Seeger Weiss LLP; and Media Sponsor: Chicago Magazine.
For more information about 3Arts, please visit www.3arts.org.