The Laundromat Project Announces 2025 Create Change Artists-in-Residence and Fellows


Bedford-Stuyvesant-Based Arts & Culture Nonprofit Will Award Up To $170,000 to Support Creative Projects Exploring Social Issues Impacting Communities of Color in New York City This Year. 

BROOKLYN, NY – The Laundromat Project (The LP) today announced its 19th cohort of artists and cultural producers chosen to participate in its 2025 Create Change Artist Development Program. Through the flagship Create Change program, The LP has invested over $2 million into artist-led, community-based projects that explore issues impacting communities of color in New York City and the specific challenges they face due to increasing gentrification, displacement, and cultural erasure. 

Guided by a 2025 theme of Black Quantum Futurism, the artists’ projects will seek to craft new tools and build new worlds that center liberation, imagination, and the radical possibilities of our communities. This pedagogical framework merges Afrocentric understandings of time, space, and reality with the urgency of revolutionary action. This theme is inspired by the visionary work of Moor Mother and Rasheedah Phillips, whose philosophy boldly reclaims time as a tool of liberation, subverting its historical use as an instrument of oppression. At its core, Black Quantum Futurism embraces cyclical, interactive notions rooted in African and diasporic traditions—where past, present, and future are intrinsically connected. According to The LP’s Program Director, Catherine Mbali-Johnson, “This philosophy calls us to not only imagine but to actively shape the futures we desire, collapsing the boundaries of space-time to manifest realities of equity, joy, and sovereignty for our communities.”

This year’s diverse group of 18 artists, who represent a wide range of artistic practices and mediums, are united by their commitment to social transformation through art. Each Create Change Artist-in-Residence, Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) Artist-in-Residence, and Fellow will receive an award ranging from $1,500 to $30,000, along with advising, mentorship, and peer-based support to help develop and implement their ideas in neighborhoods across any of the five boroughs of New York City. The 2025 Create Change cohort includes a wide range of projects addressing social issues such as food insecurity, incarceration, mental health and wellness, gentrification, and appropriation. 

“At The Laundromat Project, we recognize that artists and cultural producers are deeply embedded in the communities they serve. Their work is not just about creativity—it’s about connection, care, and co-creation. Through Create Change, we invest in their power to weave creativity into the fabric of community life—generating joy, fostering sustainability, and deepening our collective care. As we navigate ongoing challenges, it is critical that we nurture artists as collaborators and catalysts, ensuring they have the resources and support to imagine and create a more just and beautiful future with and for our communities.” — Ayesha Williams, Executive Director, The Laundromat Project.

During the program’s tenure, Create Change Artists-in-Residence and Fellows will participate in a series of educational workshops and individual and group coaching sessions focused on cultural organizing from The LP staff and celebrated practitioners in the field. Adhering to The LP’s pedagogical framework, artists-in-residence and fellows will work in collaboration with a community partner to develop art-driven, community-focused projects. Previous collaborators have included The Billie Holiday Theatre, Life Wellness, the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, Herbert Von King Park’s Cultural Arts Center, and the South Asian Youth Action Organization. 

“This year, our Create Change Fellows and AIRs step into a lineage of visionaries who refuse to be bound by linear time or oppressive systems,” remarked Catherine Mbali-Johnson. “Guided by our 2025 theme, ‘Black Quantum Futurism,’ they will craft new tools, new worlds—ones that center liberation, imagination, and the radical possibilities of our communities. As Audre Lorde reminds us, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.’ To truly transform the world, we must build anew—outside the confines of capitalism, beyond the limitations of the past, and into a future where we are free.”

Facilitators for The Laundromat Project’s 2025 Create Change Artist Development Program include Ebony Noelle Golden, Shawnee Benton Gibson, Kamau Ware, Amanda Boston, Urban Bush Women, and The Laundromat Project staff.

2025 Create Change Artists-in-Residence include: 

Keshad Adeniyi
The Story From Within
Multi-media artist Keshad Adeniyi will use poetry, painting, and rap to engage youth and adults impacted by America’s carceral apparatus. Adeniyi’s project will unite incarcerated youth and youth implicated in the criminal justice system to explore personal development, identity, and sociopolitical consciousness through visual art and poetic prose. 

Briana Calderón:
Rehabilitating Community Fridges
Briana Calderón works with community fridges in Brooklyn to address their needs by bringing the community together to paint, clean, and stock fridges on the sidewalks.

Dahkil Hausif:
Dark Room Diaspora
Dahkil Hausif utilizes 40K+ photos from photographer Russell Frederick to create an image-generating program representing Black and Brown individuals and capturing the humanity within the Bed-Stuy community.

Leslie Mejia:
Healing Grounds: The Bronx in Color

Leslie Mejia invites the community to reimagine the “healing journey” through Art, Play, and Joy as a “Wellness Playground,” destigmatizing mental health by providing a wellness toolbox. 

2025 Create Change Bed-Stuy Artists-in-Residence include:

Zakiya Collier
Collective Remembrance
Zakiya Collier’s Collective Remembrance is an archival project that stewards the legacy of Black Brooklyn by fostering relationships between community elders and local Black archivists to preserve the histories of Central Brooklyn and its Black communities.

2025 Create Change Fellows include: 

Adriel Michelle Barnett is a photo-based artist exploring identity, heritage, mythology, and belonging within the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Nic Black founded @queerbk, creating safe, inclusive spaces for Brooklyn’s LGBTQ+ community through dynamic events and strategic partnerships.

Ching-I Chang is a Dance/dream conceptual maker, curator, performer, and listener. She started the Inter-grant Festival, celebrating the voices of international artists who have navigated the US immigration process.  Her works have been shown in Yuz Museum, Queens Museum, the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and more. 

Nzingha Hazelton is an artist who creates work centered on social justice, water-based healing through soak circles, and community building.

Anurima Kumar combines art forms like natural dying, anti-colonial color theory, and political mural & poster painting to facilitate workshops with working-class, youth, queer, incarcerated, and houseless organizations.

Keya Kuruvilla is an artist who uses oil paint, linocut, and pencil to produce art that promotes dignity and humanity. 

Choya Mayon is an organizer, disc jockey, and graphic designer who produces sonic soundscapes and visual expressions that spark community jubilation, particularly for Black and gender-expansive individuals.

Maleek Rae is a queer multidisciplinary artist from Detroit who brings a unique blend of talents as a rapper, writer, actor, and producer to various mediums, including stage performances, national commercials, and video games. 

Margo Rosales is a cultural organizer with Malaya, NY, who uses community-based art to resist the escalating military, political, economic, and climate crises that impact Filipinos globally.

Kelsea Suarez is a justice-driven  Filipino American artist who creates community murals and supports landback victories and was once an internationally competitive figure skater for the Philippines.

Jason Wang is a playwright aiming to bring their play “STUY OR DIE” to Flushing and other local NYC venues

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is a writer, educator, and cultural curator merging the built environment, contemporary Black art, and social movement history. 

For more information about The Laundromat Project, visit laundromatproject.org. 

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ABOUT THE LAUNDROMAT PROJECT: 

The Laundromat Project is a Black-rooted and POC-led community-based arts organization dedicated to advancing artists and residents of New York City as change agents within their communities. We envision a world in which artists and neighbors in communities of color work together to harness the power of creativity that can inspire and initiate meaningful change and generate long-lasting impact. We make sustained investments in growing a community of multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary artists and neighbors committed to societal change by supporting their artmaking, community building, and leadership development. 

Since 2005, The Laundromat Project has directly invested over $2 million in more than 300 multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary artists; supported over 180 innovative public art projects; and established a creative community hub in Bed-Stuy. Through this work, we have engaged more than 50,000 New Yorkers across the city and beyond. The idea of a laundromat as a primary place for engagement has expanded over time. It now serves as a metaphor for a variety of community settings in which artists and neighbors transform their lives and surroundings. Our programming has evolved to take place in community gardens, public plazas, libraries, sidewalks, local cultural organizations, and other places where people gather.