Acra, NY—Wave Farm is pleased to announce fifteen grantees for the 2026 NYSCA/Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists, a regrant program with the New York State Council on the Arts.

Selected through a competitive panel process from an application pool of 233 proposals, the 2026 MAAF Grantees are: Mehrnoush Alia, Zoe Beloff, Tarik Jeremiah Brown, Eva Davidova, Julie Flandreau, Erin Johnson, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Yuka Murakami, Cherry Nin, Laura Parnes, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tina Spangler, Sara Stern, Jordan Strafer, James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists provides New York State media artists up to $7,500 for the completion and/or public presentation of new works in all genres of sound and moving image art, including emergent technology. Grant awards assist artists in completing new work, reaching public audiences, and advancing artistic exploration and public engagement in the media arts.

Detailed information about the fifteen 2026 MAAF for Artists funded projects is available below.

GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Mehrnoush Alia - 1001 Frames Expanded (Kings County)
1001 Frames Expanded is a storytelling project that addresses the urgent rise of abuses of power, racism, and exclusion intensified by global right-wing politics. Set within an audition room, the film uses the film industry as a microcosm to examine how power operates in workplaces and institutions, and how storytelling and artmaking can interrupt cycles of silence and violence. Following the screenings, participants are invited to share their own stories. These personal narratives, whether written, spoken, or visual, form a collective archive of lived experience, giving voice to those often silenced in institutional and creative spaces. 1001 Frames Expanded seeks to transform spectators into storytellers, and isolation into shared understanding. The project embodies the belief that storytelling can be both an act of resistance and a step toward healing, accountability, and change within the culture of work and artmaking itself. MAAF funding will support public presentation of this film.

Mehrnoush Alia is an Iranian-American filmmaker and playwright. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Columbia University and alumna of Berlin Talent Campus. Her debut feature premiered at Berlinale 2025, played at festivals including Melbourne, AFI, Rio, Taipei Golden Horse, and won four awards including the top prizes at the Thessaloniki IFF. She previously wrote/directed two award-winning shorts, a web-documentary, several promotional videos, and is the producer of over a dozen short films and a feature film. Alia is the co-founder and managing director of Maaa Art, which produces films and plays by Middle Eastern artists.

Zoe Beloff - Life Forgotten (New York County)
Life Forgotten brings together the sewing machine and the film projector, the garment worker, and the showman at the beginning of the 20th century. A gallery installation at City Lore will recreate a real ‘nickelodeon’, Frank Seiden’s storefront cinema, that once existed a few blocks away on New York’s Lower East Side. The film, which is the centerpiece of the installation, will situate archival footage in parallel with reenactment, introducing the audience to historical characters like labor activist Clara Lemlich, as well as everyday people whose voices echo from oral histories. Young women who without money, influence or powerful friends, were determined to change their world. The installation will include artworks, drawings over photographs of fading signage, posters created with wood type, and garment patterns that reveal the labor of their creation, extending this dialog across time. MAAF funding will support public presentation of this project.

Zoe Beloff is a filmmaker and artist working across media. With a focus on social justice, her work draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Zoe's projects often involve films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. Two themes are central: an exploration of early film from a feminist perspective and a focus on how communities of working people come together to create change. Her work has been featured in international venues that include the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center in Paris, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, IFFR and FID Marseille. She values having had the opportunity to share work in community spaces that are free and open for events and conversation, such as the NYPL, the Clemente and the Coney Island Museum.

Tarik Jeremiah Brown - Washed Up On A Black Monday (New York County)
Washed Up On A Black Monday is an experimental multi-channel film project that explores the metaphor of Black precarity as a climate by examining the convergence of financial collapse, racialized violence, and ecological upheaval between New York City and London in the 1980s. The title reflects a particular point of disruption caused by the Great Storm of 1987 and the coinciding financial crash known as Black Monday, foregrounding how “Black” is often used as a descriptor of economic catastrophe while Black communities bear the material and social consequences of these crises. The project imagines a speculative continuity between the environmental turbulence of the Great Storm and the racial violences that preceded it, including the 1980s Brixton Riots and the 1986 Howard Beach racial attack. The work is structured as a three-channel video installation combining newly shot footage between London and New York, as well as archival materials documenting these histories. MAAF funding will support completion of the project, including archival licensing, film development and scanning, and post-production in preparation for public presentation.

Tarik Jeremiah Brown works across analog film practices, collage, sculpture, sound, and digital image-making to explore “the current.” His work examines the resonance and tension that arises when past, present, and future fold into one another. Using archival materials and oral histories to construct visually represented allegory, he traces how Black life is both continuous and precarious, marked by recurrence yet always moving forward. His recent work engages Christina Sharpe’s framework of anti-Blackness as a climate, drawing sensorial connections to the metaphor of Black social conditions as weather. Brown has presented work internationally at Koppel Project Bank and Central Saint Martins in London, he will present a solo exhibition at Wave Hill, New York, in 2026. Brown is a 2026 Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill, and a recipient of the 2024 Henry and Adeline Collins Prize. He earned a BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Eva Davidova - Audience As Virus (New York County)
Audience As Virus is an interactive, immersive installation-performance that involves its audience in the possibility to break AI predictions of human movement and offers the public a clear capacity to intervene. It mis-uses ChatGPT and HMDM (Human Movement Diffusion Model) to counter the patterns of replication, mimicry, and averaging. Audience As Virus gathers practices often excluded from the Art & Technology canon—from Capoeira, Candomblé, and Circus traditions in Brazil to experimental choreography in the USA—to “counter-predict” dominant models and question which bodies and gestures are made invisible when AI decides what counts. Embracing complication and excess, the work challenges systems that privilege conformity over difference. MAAF funding will support public exhibition of this work, including a presentation at ISSUE Project Room, festival fees and outreach, and documentation of the performance for preservation and distribution.

Eva Davidova explores behavior, ecological disaster, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. She works with the human gesture and expression as a way to “mix” with and disrupt technologies, and use the failures in these technologies to reclaim them. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, La Regenta, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks, Instituto Cervantes, and the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in New York City.

Julie Flandreau - I Cite As Witness The Time (New York County)
I Cite As Witness The Time: The Story of Karen and Omar Askia Ali is a feature-length film telling the story of Omar Askia Ali, who passed away in prison in 2021 after serving five decades of a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. This film is made in collaboration with his widow Karen Ali, to preserve his legacy and share their story. The documentary relies on a polyphony of past and present voices, reaching across time and prison walls, weaving together the strands of the couple’s path-breaking work, damning legal saga and unswerving bond. MAAF funding will provide finishing support for the project, with the goal of sharing the project widely as a tool for education, connection and social change through community screenings, creating space for panel discussions and carrying on the Alis’ legacy as a living archive.

Julie Flandreau is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York. She sees the various sides of her work as distinct but complementary, offering alternative methods to understand, preserve and share human stories. Film has unique powers of poetry—a unique way to open space for collaboration and conversation. Her practice was shaped during years spent in Philadelphia. Prior to ICite As Witness The Time, she directed and edited Infinite Loop (8 min 23 sec, 2023), an experimental short centered on Seoul’s subway Circle Line 2.

Erin Johnson - The Ferns (New York County)
In The Ferns, Erin Johnson documents a scientist’s attempt to halt the closure of Duke University’s iconic 100-year-old herbarium through recourse to a speculative connection between ancient flora and queer embodiment. Pop iconography displaces taxonomy, and a flock of botanical drag queens interpret the ferns against the backdrop of the region’s anti-LGBTQ legislation. MAAF funding will support the completion of this project, festival submissions, and the public presentation of the work as a multi-channel video installation for gallery exhibition.

​​Erin Johnson is a visual artist and filmmaker based in New York. She was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and received the Working Artist Fellowship from Pioneer Works and the Rockefeller Foundation, awarded in recognition of artists shaping social change through community-engaged practices. Johnson has participated in residencies supporting the development of new work and interdisciplinary research, including Lighthouse Works, Hidrante, Jan van Eyck Academie, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Ankara Queer Art Program, Surf Point Foundation, and Pioneer Works, among others. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally across museums, galleries, public art venues, and festivals, most recently including e‑flux (New York, NY), MOCA Toronto (Toronto, Canada) and MUNCH (Oslo, Norway). She is currently Undergraduate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor of Studio Art at New York University.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - Crystal Films (Kings County)
Crystal Films is a new body of work that situates the contemporary screen within the longer, material history of cinema. It is a series of wall-mounted works composed of cast glass with optical elements placed directly over video screens. The glass components are produced from digitally generated 3D printed forms which translate computational structures into solid, light-bearing objects. Acting as lenses and filters, the glass bends, compresses, and fractures the moving image beneath it, recalling early cinematic moments when projection depended on the careful alignment of optics, surfaces, and light. In this way, the work treats the screen as something momentarily arrested—its flow of images held in suspension, as if cast in amber. MAAF funding will fund completion and public exhibition of this work, including support for both the physical and digital elements. The work is scheduled to be shown as work in progress in the spring of 2026 and as part of a larger exhibition in the Hudson Valley in the fall.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists whose interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, software, drawing, painting, and installation. Their work combines artistic production with research into how emerging technologies shape cultural narratives, systems of knowledge, and everyday perception. Using computational tools alongside archival materials, they examine how images are organized, mediated, and transformed by technological frameworks. Early projects include database-driven sculptures composed of television clips structured through categorical and algorithmic systems, as well as diorama-like miniature film sets activated by live cameras and custom software. These works function as experimental platforms that make visible the underlying logics of classification, automation, and design. Technology in their work operates not simply as a medium, but as an active social force that mediates relationships between individuals, images, and environments. Their installations foreground these processes, encouraging audiences to critically reflect on how technological systems influence what is seen, remembered, and valued.

Yuka Murakami - In Other Words (Kings County)
In Other Words is a short documentary-essay film on translation and its relationship to performance. An investigation of how a live interpreter assumes a role akin to that of an actor, or a marionette, on stage. Through vérité footage and a choreographed puppet sequence, the film explores the grace of self-displacement needed to channel another’s voice, asking where the performance ends and the translation begins. MAAF funding will support the public exhibition of this film.

Yuka Murakami is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Her work uses close observation to explore systems of performance across history, linguistics, labor, and ritual. She is a graduate from the California Institute of the Arts’s MFA in Film Directing, where she was awarded the Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking and the Lillian Disney Critical Reader Scholarship. She was a recipient of an Emmy Award as a producer on the documentary Masters of Modern Design in 2020.

Cherry Nin - Take the Oath (Dutchess County)
A story of contemporary ennui and spiritual isolation, Take the Oath is a short narrative film following a shadowy, placeless young person struggling with grief, homelessness, and the will to live after the death of their mother. Set within a lush rural New York landscape shaped by extraction, the film evokes a contemporary search for connection on a disconnected, violent land. MAAF funding will support completion of the film, including final post-production to prepare the film for public exhibition.

Cherry Nin is a director and artist whose projects center subvert ecologies and the reification of life in defiance of capitalist death drives. Their films have been presented at Canal Projects, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Spectacle Theater, The Kitchen, and basements, galleries, and theaters across the United States. They hold an MFA in Moving Image from Bard College, and have participated in residencies including Wexner Center for the Arts’ Film/Video Studio, KAJE, and Outpost Artist Resources. Nin is a recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant, and the Philadelphia Independent Media Fund.

Laura Parnes - Magic Thinking (Kings County)
Magic Thinking is a multi-platform film installation steeped in the current moment when climate catastrophe, the COVID pandemic, and the rise of fundamentalism combine to contribute to an apocalyptic aura. Through this aura, magical thinking can become a survival strategy, creating surprising overlaps, namely the confluence of far-right extremism and the “wellness” world. MAAF funding will support the completion and public exhibition of this work, including the fabrication of neon signs, vitrines, and handmade seating.

Laura Parnes’ multiplatform installations fuse comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Informed by traditions and genres in narrative film, video art and queer theater, her work blurs the lines between conventions of storytelling and experimentation. Her works have been screened and exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMA/PS1 (New York), Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (Florida), The Brooklyn Museum (New York), Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art (Athens), and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid). Her recent solo exhibitions include: LAXART, LA, Participant Inc., and Pioneer Works, and solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and The Kitchen.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky - The Afterlife (New York County)
The Afterlife, a performance based video, responds to “The Four Fates of Man”, a group of four sculptures attributed to Caspicara, the most renowned Indigenous sculptor of the Quito School (an 18th-century sculptural atelier). Although Caspicara’s name is synonymous with artistic excellence, he remains largely unknown outside of Ecuador. The Afterlife traces the sculptures’ provenance and explores representations of death in Catholicism—Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell—and how these concepts are figuratively Depicted. In the video, each of the sculptures is embodied by the artist who roams through the museum, pausing before Spanish paintings, staring into the portraits, and mimicking their gestures. This performance can be interpreted as a confrontation with the colonial era that sought to render mestizo and Indigenous peoples as subjects of the colony—in this case, Spain. The video further engages with issues surrounding the antiquities market and the intersection of race and gender. The Afterlife premiered at Capilla Azul in January 2026. MAAF funding will support public presentation, including exhibitions in New York City and Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital and the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Recent exhibitions include: Metamorphosis at Capilla Azul (Chiloé, CH), Dispossessions in the Americas at Wrightwood 659 Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou, 2024 (Malaga, SP).

Tina Spangler - Finding Fanny (Sullivan County)
Finding Fanny is a 60-minute documentary that uncovers the life and legacy of Fanny Palmer, one of 19th-century America’s most prolific lithographers, whose imagery helped shape the nation’s visual identity through her work with Currier & Ives—while her name was nearly erased from history. Through rare archival materials, first-person investigation, and a visually driven cinematic approach, the film re-presents Palmer’s artwork for contemporary audiences while confronting the broader erasure of women artists in American art history. MAAF Funding will support completion of this project.

Tina Spangler draws on over a decade of expertise founding and running the prestigious Big Eddy Film Festival, as well as establishing trusted partnerships within the historical print community. As a writer/director for television, she has showcased her work on wide-reaching platforms including Sundance TV (1999–2005) and Sesame Street (2020–2025). Her passion and expertise are dedicated to unveiling hidden historical narratives through documentary films. Among her notable independent projects is the acclaimed historical short film Lucky Lake, (2008).

Sara Stern - MARSH (Kings County)
MARSH is an experimental plein air stop motion animation filmed in a salt marsh in Provincetown, MA. The piece responds to this place of constant change and animacy with improvised movement. Fantastical characters perform and sing on behalf of the marsh, as if performing a fragmented ecological opera for this site where human activity is metabolized but never fully digested. MAAF funding will support the completion and public presentation of the work.

Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. Stern works across and between moving image installation, multimedia performance, animation, architectural intervention, printmaking, and sculpture. Stern has presented her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore). Stern’s work has been supported by the Watermill Center Artist Residency, the Harvestworks New Works Residency, a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Stern is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program on Governors Island.

Jordan Strafer - Talk Show (Kings County)
Talk Show is the third and final film in Loophole, a trilogy drawn from the 1991 nationally televised rape trial of William Kennedy Smith. The film stages a speculative trans-historical tribunal in the afterlife, formatted as a 1990s talk show hosted by an Oprah look-alike named Rosa. The work opens in a Palm Beach bar at dawn, moves through the crashing plane of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and arrives at an afterlife courtroom where cases of civilian women raped by American GIs in Normandy, Japan, and Bavaria are adjudicated as the millennium countdown begins. Operating within the aesthetics of American television and the erotic thriller, Talk Show examines how entertainment culture mediates trauma and what it might mean to imagine legal institutions outside of patriarchal and white supremacist frameworks. An installation version of this film premiered at the 2026 Whitney Biennial. MAAF funding will support final post-production, including sound design, color grading, DCP creation, and festival submissions for the festival distribution version.

Jordan Strafer is an American artist and filmmaker. Through her multidisciplinary work, Strafer uncovers apparatuses of power and societal dysfunction. Her work has been exhibited at Fluentum (Berlin), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Secession (Vienna), Index (Stockholm), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, PARTICIPANT INC (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum (New York), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and SculptureCenter (New York). Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2025, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned her MFA from Bard College and her BFA from The New School.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins - THE MISCONCEIVED (Queens County)
THE MISCONCEIVED is a feature-length satire about the creative class rendered entirely with a video game engine utilizing motion capture performances. Co-written by James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir, it is a thematic follow-up to their feature, The Plagiarists (2019). Through its handmade digital assembly, THE MISCONCEIVED argues for the possibility of a type of filmmaking freed from the constraints of the physical world (and demands of the film industry), while remaining rooted in the economic and social concerns of the world, bringing together the tools and techniques of cinema’s past and future.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker, writer and artist based in New York City. In addition to THE MISCONCIEVED (2026), his feature-length movies include Still Film (Visions du Réel, MoMA Doc Fortnight ‘23), The Plagiarists (Berlinale, New Directors/New Films '19), Common Carrier (BAMcinemaFest '17) and Public Hearing (CPH:DOX ‘12). In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial. His writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The Metrograph magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and MUBI Notebook, among other publications. He currently teaches in the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College (The New School).

About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture, and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million in FY 2026, serving organizations and artists across all 10 state regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is a transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit https://wavefarm.org.