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The Center for Cultural Power and BLD PWR launched Create With Us for climate storytellers and artists who are passionate about environmental justice to create compelling digital content for Climate Woke. On Earth Day 2024, we launched Create With Us in honor of Earth Month and climate justice, aiming to uplift climate intersectionality and inspire individuals and communities to feel like they are a part of climate solutions. We received dozens of submissions from artists and creators across the nation inspired to generate creative content exploring the intersectionality of climate change and social justice.
The content was specific to our themes of Land Back, Black Liberation x Climate Justice, Environmental Optimism, Climate Migration/Climate Gentrification, and Climate Change’s impact on Reproductive Freedom.
The Center for Cultural Power and BLD Power selectedwere honored to select two incredble projects, offeringwinning artists, one award of $10,000 for a narrative short film and an award of $5,000 award for shortper form creative video content.
The final productions will be shared in a special Cultural Power screening in Oakland, CA October 2024. We look forward to highlighting and uplifting the work of these wonderful selected artists as part of the Climate Woke campaign and future Climate Woke endeavors.
Lily Xie is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-determination for communities of color. In collaboration with local residents and grassroots organizers, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The work they create together often takes shape in animation, print media, and video. Lily is an Artist-in-Residence for the City of Boston and a member of Creative Wildfire, a national cohort of artists building a just transition. For her work in collaboration with artists and community members, Lily has been awarded grants from New England Foundation for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, the Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture Transformative Public Art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Transmedia Storytelling Initiative. Lily’s work has been displayed at the Boston Center for the Arts, Pao Arts Center, Weisner Gallery, and Unbound Visual Arts.
Lily’s Create With Us project will use experimental stop-motion techniques to animate the story of Movement Generation and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust returning 43 acres of land to Indigenous and Black stewardship in unceded Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area. This film seeks to capture the transformative power of Land Back and collective governance of resilient community spaces as vital root-cause solutions to the current ecological crisis, which includes pandemics, extreme climate events, multiple genocides, housing insecurity, further marginalization of queer and disabled folks, and more.
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Shenny De Los Angeles is a Dominican-American writer and filmmaker. Anchored in Black Caribbean folklore, her work excavates the beauty of being alive. Her docu-short, “the ritual to beauty,” is currently available to stream on The New Yorker. The film has gone on to be nominated by the British Film Institute, receive the Grand Jury Prize at SlamDance Film Festival, and receive the LOLA Award (highlighting the experience of the Afro Diaspora) at the Philadelphia Latinx Film Festival. Shenny has been a Playwright/Performance Artist in Residence at Harlem Stage, Mabou Mines Theatre, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She has also been commissioned by The Latinx Playwright Circle, Latina Magazine, and Ceremonia, to name a few. As a part of the 2023 Netflix and LALIFF Inclusion Fellowship, Shenny developed her narrative short film: sisters by water. Their current project, "looking for zora again", focuses on the state of Florida erasing Black & Brown writers from the cultural consciousness.Shenny and her creative partnerproducer, Amanda Morrell, will create a poetic meditative film centered around land restoration and the intrinsic connection between protecting the land and protecting our futureschildren. Blending elements of the supernatural with historical footage detailing real-life Dominican Farmer and Dominican historical Abolitionist figure, Mamáa Tingóo, we discover through the film that the protagonist is a descendant of Mamáa Tingóo, giving meaning to land restoration as inherently generational.
The Center for Cultural Power is a women-of-color, artist-led organization, that inspires artists and culture makers to imagine a world where power is distributed equitably and we live in harmony with nature. For press inquiries contact: hello@fullswingpr.com
