2023 Culture & Narrative Fellows
The Opportunity Agenda’s Culture & Narrative Fellowship was founded on the belief that artists and cultural strategists can play an active role in narrative and culture change. Housed within the Narrative Innovators Lab, fellows have the opportunity to ideate and collaborate with participants from our Communications Institute. Fellows also receive a $15,000 award and strategic support for their proposed art or cultural interventions during a six-month period.
Using the latest in narrative research and communication tools, this year’s Fellows will have an opportunity to explore and challenge white supremacist narratives alongside advocates and thought leaders.
The Culture & Narrative Fellowship: At A Glance
- A $15,000 award to support a new or existing project
- Two in-person events:
- A week-long in-person experiential training in New York City with other artists, leading advocates, and communicators (late March 2023)
- TOA’s week-long Creative Change Retreat (late August 2023)
- Online community-led learning sessions
- A social practice component: fellows will pursue 1-3 creative audience engagement strategies to connect with their target audiences
- Virtual bi-weekly office hours with TOA staff, including a virtual closing session
Meet the 2023 Fellows
Adamu Chan
Adamu Chan is a filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. He produced numerous short films while incarcerated, using his vantage point and experience as an incarcerated person as a...
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Marcos Echeverria Ortiz
Marcos Echeverría Ortiz is an award-winning multimedia journalist, photographer, and documentary maker specializing in transmedia storytelling and new media. He has written, filmed, and photographed the underground cultural scene of Latin America for Noisey VICE and Radio COCOA, among other media outlets.
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Salomé Egas
Salomé Egas is proudly Ecuadorian, and an interdisciplinary performer, arts educator and children’s books author.
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Jesse Krimes
Jesse Krimes is an artist whose work explores societal mechanisms of power and control with a focus on criminal and racial justice. While serving a six-year prison sentence he produced and smuggled out numerous bodies of work, established prison art programs, and co-created artist collectives. After his release, he co-founded...
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Jessica Valoris
Jessica Valoris is a multidisciplinary artist and community facilitator. Through ritual performance, sound collage, and mixed media painting, Jessica creates sacred spaces that honor the earth-based traditions of her Black and Jewish ancestors. Her art is rooted in practices of collective care, ancestral reverence and embodied study.
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Monique Verdin
Monique Verdin is a transdisciplinary storyteller, citizen of the Houma Nation and director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, responding to the complex interconnectedness of environment, economics, culture, climate, and change in the Gulf South.
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ChristinaMaria Xochitlzihuatl
ChristinaMaria is co-founder of the art collective, Las Imaginistas and the Cosmic Weaver for the immigrant rights network, Voces Unidas. Both organizations work towards liberation of all beings across time, space and vibrational frequencies.
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