BPMplus FELLOWSHIP

BPMplus Fellowships provide some combination of production support, seed funding, public engagement, and professional development for creative technologists and their projects. BPMplus Fellows work directly with BPM’s immersive producers to develop their projects.

Meet our Fellows

bearded black man in beige shirt looks at camera while buttoning top botton

Baff Akoto

Country: UK
Project: Collateral Echos
linktr.ee/baffakoto

Bio

Lidz-Ama Appiah

Country: UK
Project: Collateral Echos

Bio

Jazsalyn

Country: USA
Project: Natal Dimension
jazsalyn.com

Bio

LaJuné McMillian

Country: USA
Project: The Unseen

Bio
a mustached black man wearing clear glasses and a high-top fade hairstyle stares straight ahead wearing a gold-colored t-shirt

Dominick Rabrun

Country: USA
Project: Ki Es Ou Ye?
domrabrun.com

Bio

Ainslee Alem Robson

Country: USA
Project: Kandaka
ainsleealemrobson.com

Bio

MaryAnn Talavera

Country: Dominican Republic
Project: axé meus ancestrais
maryanntalavera.wixsite.com/rolos

Bio

Elisha Tawe

Country: Cameroon
Project: Image Frequency Modulation

Bio

Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Country: Cameroon
Project: Image Frequency Modulation
artofetheltawe.com

Bio

Andrea Walls

Country: USA
Project: Museum of Black Joy: Ring Shouts, Rituals, and Rising Signs
linktr.ee/phillywalls.com

Bio
black woman in head wrap pointing her camera at camera

Eboni Zamani

Country: USA
Project: Air Quality Orange Interactive
linktr.ee/ebzamani

Bio

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Baff Akoto

Baff Akoto’s artistic practice spans immersive technology, performance, sculpture, still and moving images. His work embraces the fluidity of visual grammar, notions of plurality, (self) perceptions and societal implications of human bodily movement (disability, ritual, dance). Most recently Akoto has been exploring how emerging technology and digital mediums can enfranchise non-traditional art audiences while avoiding the same ingrained prejudices, exclusions and inequalities which arose from our industrial and colonial eras. A recurring theme of Akoto’s work focuses on how the digital interacts with individual spaces, audiences and communities in the built environment.

 

bearded black man in beige shirt looks at camera while buttoning top botton

Baff Akoto

Lidz-Ama Appiah

With narrative and production talents honed over 20 years at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal working in news and documentary production, Lidz-Ama Appiah now develops and produces artist film, feature film and XR experiences through the digital studio Recurring Dreams. Key exec/producing credits include: the VR series “Virtual (Black) Reality” (Google/Youtube/Tribeca Film Institute) and the moving image art work “Leave the Edges,” both from artist Baff Akoto; and the 2022 theatrical release of feature film “Queen of Glory” (from debut director Nana Mensah).

 

Lidz-Ama Appiah

Jazsalyn

Jazsalyn is an artist and technologist working where fiction and reality collide. Through alternative and computer-based media, she explores the practice of re-indigenization and ritual to recover ancestral intelligence. Jazsalyn has designed experiences and presented work at the New Museum, Creative Time, The Kitchen, OXN Studio of the Onassis Foundation and more. She is the director of “Black Beyond” and teaches at The New School where she has written studio coursework on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. Her work has been featured in publications such as Cultured Magazine, It’s Nice That, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

 

Jazsalyn

LaJuné McMillian

LaJuné (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication.

They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJuné believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being. Previously, they were the director of skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.

LaJuné McMililan

Dominick Rabrun

Dominick is an artist, teacher, writer, producer, director, and general maker of things. His work seeks to link and explain the fragmented sections of his unique life and experiences. Much of his worldview was shaped by his status as a first-generation immigrant, survivor of childhood trauma, and having grown up in a deeply conservative Christian household.

His processes were shaped by 12 years of experience working as an IT specialist for the US government. Combine these off with natural inclinations towards technology, video games, biology, music, and art education; at the intersection of all these points, you get Dominick’s artistic practice. First and foremost, his art attempts to create a language or system wherein he can compartmentalize all of his competing inspirations. Allowing these a space to inform and interact with one another serves as his greatest catalyst for creative inspiration and evolution.

Dominick Rabrun

Ainslee Alem Robson

Based in Los Angeles, Ainslee Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer, and media artist who crafts emancipatory narratives and worlds. She is a Sundance Interdisciplinary “Art of Practice” Fellow (2021-2022) and Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow (2022-2023). With a BA in philosophy and MA in fiction and entertainment, Ainslee focuses on narratives that deconstruct hierarchy and colonial legacies using emerging technologies in digital art and film. She developed an experimental visual language for reconstructing memory in the afrosurreal experience “Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR,” which premiered at Tribeca, and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at NewImages in Paris. Robson’s commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by IDEAL Barcelona, Zurcher Hochschule De Kunste, Forum de Images, Institue für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), and MoMA New York, respectively.

Ainslee Alem Robson

Elisha Tawe

Elisha Tawe is a filmmaker, writer, programmer, and producer. His active inquires into the impacts of physical and digital realms on the internal worlds of African people and our diaspora manifest most frequently as essays and moving image works. Elisha’s writings on art and politics have appeared in Dazed & Confused, Wallpaper*, Quartz Business, Mubi and more. His film works have been commissioned by Apple TV and Boy.Brother.Friend.

 

Elisha Tawe

Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Ethel (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) was named an NCU Fellow in 2024.  She is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and creative researcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-traveling compose the framework of her inquiry. From collage to moving image, Ethel examines space and time-based technologies often from a speculative lens. Her burgeoning curatorial practice took form in an inaugural exhibition titled ‘African Ancient Futures,’ and continues to expand in myriad audiovisual experiments. Ethel is a recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Grant-Program for her project “Image Frequency Modulation,” which was also recently selected by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2023 DocLab Forum.

Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Andrea Walls

Andrea “Philly” Walls is a multidisciplinary artist, informed and inspired by the writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. She is the founder of Museum of Black Joy and among the first cohort of artists to be designated as Philadelphia Cultural Treasures. She is pleased that her writing, scholarship, and visual art have been supported by organizations she admires, including the Leeway Foundation, VONA/Voices Workshops for Writers of Color; Black Public Media; MIT Open Documentary Lab, Hedgebrook Residencies for Women Authoring Change; The Colored Girls Museum; Writers Room at Drexel University; The Studio Museum of Harlem; The Women’s Mobile Museum, Eastern State Penitentiary; Mural Arts Philadelphia; and FabYouth Philly. In addition to The Museum of Black Joy, Andrea is the creator and curator of The D’Archive.com, author of the poetry chapbook, Ultraviolet Catastrophe (Thread Makes Blanket Press) and the digital web-collection, The Black Body Curve. com. She finds joy in the small things.

black woman in head wrap pointing her camera at camera

Andrea Walls

Eboni Zamani

Eboni was most recently on crew for HBO’s Mare of Easttown. She has been an active Sundance Collab Community Leader. Her work with EZ Exposures (her boutique photography company) has recently been seen on NBC10 and President Joe Biden’s Instagram. She is also a member of Councilman Isaiah Thomas’s Arts & Culture Taskforce.

Currently, Eboni writing and producing films and various media projects via her production company, Pearl’s Girl Productions.

Eboni Zamani