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 nine 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 Chavez, 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
Partial Community Engaged Fellowship grants were awarded to two current students in the MFA in Music Composition program:
Brian Shankar Adler, MFA in Music Composition, ’26
Michael Davis, MFA in Music Composition, ’26
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 Chavez, 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 ETCHED IN MEMORY, a documentary film that follows the journey of Crimean Tatar activists who fled to mainland Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The struggles of the Muslim-Turkic indigenous 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.
Brian Shankar Adler, Music Composition
Brian Shankar Adler was awarded a partial Community Engaged Fellowship for Dance of the Cephalopod, an immersive, electroacoustic solo percussion piece that invites audiences to gather, listen, dance, and activate polyethylene wind chimes while contemplating the delicate balance between humanity and nature. From the lonely cry to the ecstatic escape of a multi-limbed sea creature facing extinction, the intricate work shares a story of survival, struggle, and the consequences of environmental degradation. Brian Shankar Adler is collaborating with scientists at The Shaw Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research facility in Maine that focuses on connecting human health to environmental health through scientific research and community outreach, to gather data about plastic pollutants in the oceans as well as searching for innovative ways to engage the community.
Michael Davis, Music Composition
Michael Davis was awarded a partial Community Engaged Fellowship to compose a series of short musical pieces that reflect the missions, interests, and preferences of community-based LGBTQ+ musical ensembles in and around the Twin Cities.