naci projecting all voices

Projecting All Voices

Trenzando, performance by former fellow Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, supported by Projecting All Voices. Photo by Katie Ann Franklin, image courtesy of the artist.

Supporting racial equity and inclusion in the arts

Projecting All Voices supports racial equity and inclusion in the arts so that our nation’s cultural life honors and represents the full creative diversity of our country’s population and is a program of the Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable Communities. The Projecting All Voices Fellowship is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and provides opportunities for artists and culture workers to advance ideas and projects that investigate race, identity, cultural heritage, power, policy, ability and/or place and community.  

Through a partnership between the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and ASU Gammage, we seek to inform how educational and cultural institutions must adapt to prepare, support and advance the creative voices of a changing America through an equitable lens and framework of practice.

    Our work


    The Projecting All Voices Fellowship supports underrepresented artists from the Southwest region who are interested in exploring issues of racial equity in the arts. Fellows are part of, and work within, communities underrepresented in higher education and art institutions.  

    We support the advancement of artists from Southwest communities by activating ASU’s network of resources, including mentorship, unrestricted financial support, professional development experiences, opportunities to develop and present their work, and connection to experts in the field.

    The fellows inform conversations about how educational and cultural institutions must adapt to prepare, support and advance the creative voices of a changing America through an equitable lens and framework of practice.

    Who’s involved

    2022–2023 Projecting All Voices Fellows

    Amber Doe is an interdisciplinary artist working in textile, sculpture, installation, sound, photography and video. Doe creates work with a historical and contemporary understanding of American and post colonial western societies' desire to control and subdue black bodies, along with a vivid material portrait of her immediate family, diasporic and interspecies family. She does not see her experience highlighted in dominant culture, so she uses her art to rectify this representational void.

    Her work has been exhibited at the Amarillo Museum of Art, TX; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; the Museum of Museums, Seattle, WA; and the LeRoy Neiman Art Center in New York City; as well as featured in a solo exhibition at Snake Bite Gallery in Tucson, AZ in October 2022. Doe was awarded a 2021 Between the Dots Fellowship, a 2021 Abbey Awards Fellowship in Painting at the British School in Rome, Italy, and has been awarded residencies at Arteles in Haukijärvi, Finland; Can Serrat in Barcelona, Spain; and La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received her BFA in Sculpture, Film, and American History from Sarah Lawrence College.

    Nuttaphol Ma is a multidisciplinary artist whose work connects the seemingly disconnected notes from unfolding everyday moments. He uses patterns from his subconscious, dreams, and past to compose stories about longing, loss, memory, survival, and the labor of adapting to a new home. His work is presented in varying forms including installations, participatory workshops, and public interventions through performances. Ephemera are recorded as artist books, essay films, and storytelling.

    Ma’s recent work titled Meditative Shit: A Collective Ritual to Heal, Repair, Mend was selected for the 2022 Imagining America National Gathering at Tulane University. The piece draws strengths from his ancestors and cultural roots as ways to heal, repair and mend through rituals. He currently runs a nomadic self-imposed sweatshop entitled The China Outpost that migrates across the country. Within The China Outpost, he alters a flag from an immigrant’s lens at public spaces. Such action is a direct response to the unrelenting xenophobic rhetoric that has dominated the airwaves and social media in recent times. Ma holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, Architectural Conservation, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics.

    Instagram and Twitter: @thechinaoutpost

    Amber McCrary is Diné poet, zinester, feminist and artist. She is Red House born for Mexican people. Originally from Shonto, Arizona and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at Mills College. She is also the creator of DANG! Zine (Daydreaming, Awkward, Native, Girl) Vol. 1 and Vol.2, Angsty Asdzáá: Tales of an angry Indigenous woman zine and The Asdzáá Beat. She recently released a chapbook titled, Electric Deserts! (Tolsun Books). McCrary is the owner and founder of Abalone Mountain Press, a press dedicated to publishing Indigenous voices. She is a board member of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, the AZ Humanities 2022 Rising Star of the year and a 2022 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT awardee. McCrary currently resides on Akimel O’odham lands.

    You can find her poems, interviews and art at ambermccrary.com and abalonemountainpress.com.

    Daisy Quezada Ureña is a visual artist and educator based in Santa Fe, NM. She creates ceramic works and installations that center identity and place. Informed through her Mexican-American background, her work bridges the personal to the social, forming a relationship between immigration, gender inequality, labor and class issues. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at: The Denver Art Museum (Denver, Colorado), Summerhall (Edinburg, Scotland), New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (New Taipei, Taiwan), Gyeonggi Ceramic Art Museum (Icheon, South Korea) and Wheelright Museum of American Indian.

    Her most recent publication bosque brotante documents the interactions and objects involved in her sculptural and participatory art project about the Rio Grande, or bosque region. As an extension of her practice Quezada Ureña has also worked alongside non-for-profit organizations, including El Otro Lado/The Other Side and Downtown Aurora Visual Arts, which impact community at a local level by working with youth.

    Past fellows

    Countermapping Arizona

    Countermapping Arizona: Rebuilding BIPOC Artistic Ecosystems Across Borders is a project led by Jake Skeets, Diné poet and Projecting All Voices Fellowship alum. Funded by an NEA grant, Countermapping Arizona will convene a cohort of Indigenous artists in 2023, from across Arizona and the Borderlands, to remap the evolution of artistic ecosystems in urban, rural, indigenous and border communities, post-COVID-19.

    The project brings together visual artists and poets to collaborate and design gatherings connecting the sovereign nations of Diné, Tohono O’odham, and urban and border communities in Sells and Flagstaff, Arizona. The project will culminate in a collaborative artwork, centering indigeneity and strengthening state-wide artistic networks of support for Arizona artists, students and communities. Participating artists include Makaye Lewis (Tohono O’odham), Sky Duncan (Apache/Hidatsa/Arikara/Mandan) and Manny Loley (Diné).

    Jake Skeets (he/him) is Tsi’naajínii born for Tábąąhá; his maternal grandparents are the Táchii’nii and his paternal grandparents are the Tódík’ózhí. Skeets is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers,” winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Whiting Award. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His honors include a 2020-2021 Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is an assistant professor and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

    sky duncan

    Sky Duncan (26) is from the San Carlos Apache, Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan tribes. He grew up in Mesa, Arizona, as a hoop dancer with his family. His preferred gender pronouns are he, him, his and they. He identifies as Two-Spirit and gay.
    The vibrant colors in Pow Wows, pop music and Pokémon sparked his first interest in art. Duncan creates paintings, mainly colorful and abstract portraits of escapism or rumination.

    Makaye Lewis is a Tohono O’odham multidisciplinary artist working mainly in printmaking. Lewis comes from the small, secluded village of Ventana on the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona but currently resides in the village of Ak Chin. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2019. Her work is inspired by her lived experiences from life in the borderlands as an Indigenous person to life as a new mom. She is also largely influenced by her O’odham culture.

    manny loley

    Manny Loley is ‘Áshįįhi born for Tó Baazhní’ázhí; his maternal grandparents are the Tódích’íi’nii and his paternal grandparents are the Kinyaa’áanii. Loley is from Tsétah Tó Ák’olí. He is a current PhD candidate in English and literary arts at the University of Denver. Loley is director of the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute. His work has found homes in Poetry MagazinePleaides MagazineThe Massachusetts ReviewThe Santa Fe Literary ReviewBroadsided Pressthe Yellow Medicine Review and the Diné Reader: an Anthology of Navajo Literature, among others. His writing has been thrice nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Loley is at work on a novel titled “They Collect Rain in Their Palms.”

    Program advisors

    • Christina You-sun Park, Assistant Director, ASU Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable Communities
    • Christian Ramirez, Exhibitions and Residency Manager, Artpace 
    • Horacio Rodriguez, PAV Fellow Alumnus
    • Jaclyn Roessel, Director, Grownup Navajo; Co-Founder, Native Women Lead; and Director of Decolonized Futures & Radical Dreams, U.S. Department of Arts and Culture
    • Jake Skeets, PAV Fellow Alumnus and Assistant Professor, Diné College

    Principal investigators

    ASU News

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