The Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation have unveiled the recipients of the 2024 Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative administered by United States Artists. The three-cycle fellowship aims to increase visibility for disabled artists and address their financial and professional challenges, and has distributed $1 million annually for three years, with each of the 20 recipients receiving a $50,000 unrestricted grant.
Among this year’s distinguished cohort is CalArts alum Johanna Hedva (Art MFA 2013, Critical Studies MA 2014), a Korean American writer, musician, and artist. Hedva’s work delves into themes of grief, illness, and disability through the lenses of mysticism, ritual, and myth.
“Since the program’s launch in 2020, we have seen the Disability Futures fellows’ widespread resonance throughout the cultural sphere, and are thrilled to announce another impressive cohort of creative leaders in the program’s final cycle,” said Judilee Reed, president and CEO of United States Artists, in a statement. “We look forward to seeing their practices continue to grow, pushing the boundaries of their disciplines and supporting structures of care and coalition-building within their communities.”
Hedva, raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now residing in both LA and Berlin, embodies a practice that intertwines magic, necromancy, and divination with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. Hedva is dedicated to exploring deviant forms of knowledge and viewing doom as a liberatory condition. Their work spans novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, video games, installation, video, sculpture, drawings, paintings, and trickery, all of which serve as different forms of writing and language embodied. Their forthcoming collection of essays, How to Tell When We Will Die, will be published by Hillman Grad Books on Sept. 3, 2024.
