Meet VCFA’s 2025 Center Fellows
VCFA’s Center for Arts + Social Justice is thrilled to celebrate our 2025 cohort of Individual and Community Engaged Fellows.
Established in 2019, the VCFA Center for Arts + Social Justice was developed with the mission to support, equip, and elevate the impact of emerging artists in their communities for social good. The Center Fellowship Program offers annual grants to VCFA current students working at the intersection of the arts and social justice.
The Center awards two grants: The Individual Fellowship, a one-time award of $2,500 for an individual currently developing a project working in the social justice space, and the Community Engaged Fellowship, a one-time award of $5,000 awarded to an individual working in collaboration with an existing nonprofit organization, agency, or other collective on a project with mutually-beneficial outcomes.
In 2025, the Center awarded seven grants to current students across our MFA programs:
Individual Fellowship Recipients
Keliko Adams, MFA in WCYA, ’25
Jesse Albatrosov, MFA in Writing, ’25
Mason Bendewald, MFA in Film, ’25
Shannon Doronio, MFA in Graphic Design, ’25
Jayda Skidmore, MFA in Writing, ’25
Community Engaged Fellowship Recipients
Christina Paschyn, MFA in Film, ’25
Carla Wojczuk, MFA in Visual Art, ’25
In addition to their grants, the Fellows will engage in networking opportunities and monthly meetings, and have platforms at VCFA residencies to share their work with the broader community.
Learn more about our 2025 Center Fellows, and their projects, below.
Meet our Individual Fellowship Recipients
Keliko Adams, Writing for Children & Young Adults
Keliko Adams was awarded an Individual Fellowship for a middle grade short story cycle that takes place in a small town on O‘ahu, far outside of the tourist tract, based on the author’s hometown. The stories feature a variety of kids in the town in their daily lives, representing and affirming the existence of modern-day Hawaiian childhood. The author will portray Hawaiian and Pacific Islander voices and stories that have historically been underrepresented in publishing.
Jesse Albatrosov, Writing
Jesse Albatrosov was awarded an Individual Fellowship for a translation project that incorporates individual, social, and linguistic histories through the perspective of a Ukrainian survivor of WWII who escaped the Soviet Union and details his experiences of displacement, war, identity, and belonging in a hybrid, cross-genre book-length work.
Mason Bendewald, Film
Mason Bendewald was awarded an Individual Fellowship for SHOULD AMY SWIM, a feature-length narrative film addressing gender identity and inclusion in sports. The film centers on Amy, a trans athlete on a suburban high school swim team, and the deliberations prompted by whether Amy should be allowed to compete on a women’s team.
Shannon Doronio, Graphic Design
Shannon Doronio was awarded an Individual Fellowship for Imago DEIsign, a multidimensional project that challenges traditional design pedagogy by centering self-actualization, community, and cultural literacy among graphic design practitioners. The project uses a framework of tools, resources, and community activations that invite practitioners to reflect on their practices and the socio-political implications of their work, and helps them to synthesize experiences and insights.
Jayda Skidmore, Writing
Jayda Skidmore was awarded an Individual Fellowship for a novel in progress that explores themes of religious oppression, patriarchal control, and personal freedom, whose protagonist, a young woman raised in a fundamentalist religious sect, grapples with her queer identity, and challenges the authority of both family and faith.
Meet our Community Engaged Fellowship Recipients
Christina Paschyn, Film
Christina Paschyn was awarded a Community Engaged Fellowship for QIRIM RESISTA, a documentary film that follows the journey of Crimean Tatar activists who fled to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The struggles of these indigenous Muslim Turkic people of Crimea are rarely represented in international media and these activists currently face the potential of permanent exile from their homeland.
Carla Wojczuk, Visual Art
Carla Wojczuk was awarded a Community Engaged Fellowship to build on “Narratives of Displacement and Resistance,” a 2014 mural project, facilitated in collaboration with Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in San Francisco’s Mission District. This new project will find a new, more permanent site for the mural and to develop and incorporate new stories and materials under the theme.