2026 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency
Interrupting Criminalization is thrilled to announce the selection of 14 young artists for the 2026 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency! Learn more about the artists below.
About the Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency
The Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency awards young artists (ages 16-24) directly impacted by criminalization, policing, or punishment with $2,500 grants to work on creative projects. The residency supports young artists with time and resources to make art on their own schedule!
Re-launching this year after its inaugural year in 2022, the residency is named after Stevie Wilson, a Black, queer, formerly incarcerated abolitionist writing, organizing, and building study groups and community in Pennsylvania. His work explores the meanings of identity, belonging, freedom, and community.
In 2022, 18 young artists from across the country were awarded residency grants. They painted, danced, sketched, wrote poems, took photographs, designed coloring books, worked with clay, fabric, film, and designed public sculptures and street art. They visited museums, created healing circles, sketched on riverbanks, and drew inspiration from new cities. Artists submitted their own project budgets and used the residency grants to cover expenses like monthly rent, groceries, transportation, cell phone bills, and art supplies. Read more about the residency in the 2022 report.
2026 Residency
The 2026 residency is a project of Interrupting Criminalization, a movement resource hub offering information, cross-movement networks, learning, and practice for organizers, practitioners, and advocates on the cutting edge of efforts to build a world free of criminalization, policing, punishment, and violence.
The awardees were selected by a small group of artists and organizers: Stevie Wilson (Philadelphia, PA), Rachael Zafer (Project Coordinator in Ypsilanti, MI), Aricka Foreman (Chicago, IL), AyLaina Thornton (Detroit, MI), Michelle Daniel Jones (Indianapolis, IN), and Abigail Cook (Atlanta, GA). You can learn more about members of the selection committee below, towards the bottom of the page.
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the Mellon Foundation for funding this project!
2026 Artists
14 young artists were selected by a committee to each receive a $2,500 grant to work on their creative project or idea between July 1 and December 1, 2026. From Chicago to Louisville to Philadelphia, these young people are creating incredible art across a wide range of disciplines, including poetry and writing, oil paint, ceramic arts, multimedia and large-form art, and more. Learn more about the artists and check out some of their work!
Alex Sosa
Alex Sosa is a movement artist and organizer in Salem, Oregon. Their project will create a large-scale mural on a new community building that showcases the work of a local organization called Latinos Unidos Siempre, celebrates the people it serves, and reflects the culture, resilience, youth and families and stories of the community.
Amuri Morris
Amuri Morris is an oil painter located in Virginia. Their project will create an exhibition focused on black-women-centric fantasy pieces. She will create work that she thinks of an alternative history that also thinks reflectively about displacement and the biases of actual history.
Cyrus Sanchez
Cyrus Sanchez is a mixed-media artist in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Their project seeks to integrate his identities as a first-generation Mexican-American and transgender individual into his photography. His work explores self-expression, culture, body, and the continuous journey of transition.
Isaiah Scott
Isaiah Scott is a multidimensional artist in Louisville, Kentucky. Expressed through movement, nourishment, and spirit, their project will remind people that the highest form of art is life itself, and hold space for people to experience the beauty, love and healing life has to offer.
Reese Girdner
Reese Girdner is a ceramic artist in Cozad, Nebraska. His project will be to create work that reflects the creative direction of his art practice, represents his artistic voice, and demonstrates technical growth and confidence in his artwork.
Ruby P. Hernandez
Ruby P. Hernandez is a visual artist in Minneapolis. Their project will consist of varied medias from an overseas trip expressing her culture.
DXNALY
DXNALY is a Musical artist in Little Rock, Arkansas. Their project will share a short-film visual album blending music and storytelling to explore criminalization, policing, and systemic punishment through Stevie Wilson’s story and its relevance today, connecting past and present experiences in an immersive and impactful way.
Jakhi McCray
Jakhi McCray is a writer and filmmaker in North Jersey/New York City. His project will focus on his experience on house arrest amidst intense political repression and global tension.
Nia Richardson
Nia Richardson is a mixed-media artist in Columbus, Ohio. Her project, Archive of Daily Survival, will document the realities of work, creativity, and community through a series of mixed-media artworks and a magazine-style artist book that preserves the artifacts, stories, and experiences of everyday life.
Prudence
Prudence is a multidimensional creator of photographs currently based in Philadelphia. Their project will involve imaginative documentation of southern swampland as grounds for rematriation and reinhabitation as a living ancestor place-making in the elsewhere of carceral margins.
Shanel Brown
Shanel Brown is a poetry artist in Chicago, Illinois. Her project will use poetry to amplify the voices of individuals in underserved communities, sharing stories about healthcare access, resilience, and the challenges people face while advocating for greater equity and understanding.
solo
solo is a Black, agender and nonbinary, disabled and neurodivergent, femme lesbian multivarious artist from Cleveland, Ohio. their project will be centered on Black queer personhood.
Versacii
Versacii is a versatile artist, with an East Coast edge with a southern flare. His exciting, debut EP "Book Of The Damned" takes us on an exhilarating, psychedelic trip through our favorite holiday — HALLOWEEN!
Wooda
Wooda is a multimedia activist artist in Chicago. Their project will aim to share the voices of incarcerated people and the stories of the people that survived by chronicling the lives and stories of the impacted.
2026 Selection Committee
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Stevie Wilson
Stevie Wilson (he/him) is a formerly imprisoned, Philly-based writer and organizer. While incarcerated, he founded 9971, an inside abolitionist study group, and In The Belly, an abolitionist journal. He is a fellow with Critical Resistance and the Fellowship Coordinator for The Work and Us. He is still freedom-dreaming.
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Rachael Zafer
Rachael Zafer (she/her) is a writer and community organizer in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She launched the DIY residency program with Mariame Kaba and Project Nia in 2022. A lover of people and spreadsheets, she designed the program as a way to practice building the world we want together: collaborative, human-centered, flexible, and rooted in care.
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Aricka Foreman
Aricka Foreman (she/they) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist in Chicago. A decades long advocate in arts and cultural spaces, their work continues to ground and value people-centered world building rooted in care, communal knowledge and futurity.
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AyLaina "AnaLyraSis" Thornton
AyLaina "AnaLyraSis" Thornton (she/her) is a writer, spoken word artist, activist, and returning citizen, born and raised in Detroit. After recently having her case expunged from her record after over 20 years of fighting an unjust conviction, she now works to interrupt criminalization and reduce recidivism rates for others. She was a selection committee member for this Residency in 2022, and is honored to return and grateful to share space with such beautiful souls. She found inspiration in the diverse and rich proposals made by submitting artists and is excited to see their completed projects, while remaining an open door for collaboration and support along the way.
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Michelle Daniel Jones
Michelle Daniel Jonesis an organizer, artist, and scholar in Indiana. She received her PhD from New York University, where her dissertation focused on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people, and she helps with the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. Michelle is the Director of Archives at the Correctional Association of New York and Executive Director of Constructing Our Future, a housing organization created by incarcerated women in Indiana.
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Abigail Cook
Abigail Cook (she/her) is a formerly incarcerated sculptor and writer in Atlanta, Georgia. She was an artist in the 2022 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency program and created an installation of a life-size jail cell to bridge the gap between currently incarcerated students and non-incarcerated students in universities across Georgia. She is excited to support young artists in this year's residency program.
“What Confines You” by Abigail Cook
“I appreciate art for many reasons. Art can encourage dissent and we need more of that in our current moment. Art is important not just because it makes us think and feel differently (which is critical), but also because it helps to disrupt patterns and old ways of thinking. Artists have the power to ask, ‘Why can’t we do it this way?’ ‘Why don’t we try this?’ and ‘Why is that not possible?’ These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked now as we organize to defeat fascism.”
—Mariame Kaba in Prisons, Prose, and Protest
