Bedford-Stuyvesant Arts Nonprofit announces its 20th cohort of New York City-based POC Artists and Cultural Producers
BROOKLYN, NY – March 27, 2026, The Laundromat Project (The LP) is proud to announce its 20th annual Create Change Artist Development Program, welcoming 17 New York-based artists and cultural producers working in and with communities of color. Gathered around the theme Resonant Futures: Time as Echo, Memory, and Motion, this year’s cohort will explore time as a relational field where memory, ritual, cosmology, and imagination converge. Aligned with The Laundromat Project’s longstanding legacy of community-powered visioning and socially-engaged creative practices, this year’s cohort will receive both financial and professional support from a thoughtfully curated network of mentors, alumni, and community partners.
For the first time in the program’s history, Create Change Artists-in-Residence (AiRs) will embark on a 2-year residency program. Each AiR will receive a yearly honorarium of $20,000 and a yearly production budget of $10,000. Create Change Fellows will also receive a $1,500 stipend and production budget to support their artistic project during their 6-month fellowship. By expanding the program and providing all Create Change artists with the funds they need to further their social practice and professional development, The Laundromat Project renews its commitment to supporting participatory creative projects that activate neighbors as agents of their community’s future.
“Culture shapes how we understand ourselves, how we recognize one another’s humanity, and how we imagine what justice can look like in practice. When we invest in artists, we are investing in the conditions that make democratic life possible: the courage to imagine beyond what we are being told is inevitable.”
—Ayesha Williams, Executive Director, and Salvador Muñoz, Board Chair
“I’m deeply excited to welcome this cohort at a moment that calls for clarity, courage, and a refusal to accept any limitations placed on our communities and our imaginations. These projects feel like a powerful reflection of this 20th cohort because they don’t shy away from complexity, they push, question, and reimagine what is possible, honoring our 20-year legacy while insisting on a more just and self-determined future.”
—Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson, Director of Programs
As part of its artist development feature, the Create Change artist cohort will be paired with New York City community partners and long-time collaborators of The Laundromat Project. Community Partners for The Laundromat Project’s 2026 Create Change Fellowship will include Brooklyn Coop, Tranquility Farm, GrowHouse NYC, and Young Doctors Project. The selected community partners will be charged with guiding the artists in their respective exploration, while keeping them close to the community’s needs and priorities.
The 2026 Laundromat Project’s 20th Create Change Artist-in-Residence and Fellows will welcome 5 Artists-in-Residence and 12 Fellows, who, in addition to deepening their social practice, will join the Laundromat Project in setting the groundwork for the next 20 years. The LP’s 20th Create Change cohort invites not just the opportunity to celebrate the organization’s legacy, but to recommit to the vision that brought us here: fostering joy, connection, and meaningful change through the arts.
Learn more about 20 years of impact by visiting the LP’s 20th anniversary page!
ABOUT THE 2026 CREATE CHANGE ARTISTS
2026 Create Change Artists-in-Residence include:
SARA WASHINGTON GOGGIN
Quilts for Reproductive Justice: Community quilts for care, connection, and Black futures
Quilts for Reproductive Justice brings community members together to create quilts that honor Black people and support reproductive justice through mutual aid. Through cohort-based workshops, participants learn foundational quilting skills while engaging in facilitated conversations about community care and justice.
ROCHELLE KWAN
Chinatown Records Sonic Histories: Chinatown Records Radio & Sonic Histories Program
Chinatown Records Sonic Histories is a sonic oral history program and radio station activating an ever-growing community archive of 35+ music collections inherited from Manhattan Chinatown families & beyond.
ASMARA
Mapping Siwanoy Forest
Mapping Siwanoy Forest explores the relationship between land stewardship and art-making as life practices that make communities more resilient and whole. The project will be facilitated through Ujamaa Garden—a youth-centered space integrating agroecology with cultural wisdom to restore habitat and nurture the neighborhood through mutual care.
NAIMA RAMOS-CHAPMAN
In Place of Monuments: a communal workshop and devised theater series
The play, In Place of Monuments, will be devised through a series of gatherings and workshops within community. Inspired by Naima’s short experimental docu-narrative film of the same title, this play presents an emergent story that centers on two Afro-Caribbean childhood friends who seek, through remembering and reclamation, to saddle alongside a shared traumatic experience– a healing that can only be felt through compassion and a determination to resist the lessons the dominant social order seeks to teach.
2026 Bed-Stuy Artists-in-Residence include:
SEKIYA DORSETT & OKEMA T. MOORE
I Love Bed-Stuy: The Public Memory and Storytelling Project
I Love Bed-Stuy is a community-rooted art practice that gathers film, public memory, and collective creativity into one living offering for the neighborhood. Emerging from Sekiya’s hybrid documentary I Love Bed-Stuy and the earlier Heroes Project, supported by The Laundromat Project’s Create & Connect initiative, this fellowship will allow the work to evolve from public installations into a deeper, participatory ecosystem of neighborhood storytelling and art-making. Sekiya and Okema are this year’s Bed-Stuy Artists-in-Residence.
2026 Create Change Fellows include:
SALLY CHEN is a NYC-based illustrator, muralist, and poet whose practice explores the quiet intimacies of daily life. Using free-flowing lines, vibrant color, glowing silhouettes, and fragments of verse, they capture fleeting moments of joy and sorrow that gesture toward hope and renewal.
TAJAH ELLIS is a bio-designer whose practice centers on regenerative material processes. Her work explores cycles of emergence and renewal, grounding ecological research in material transformation.
VIC LIU is an artist and writer whose work examines systems of power, incarceration, and resistance. Liu is the co-author and illustrator of The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Incarceration.
SHIREEN MATHEWS is a graphic designer working at the intersection of art and organizing to support housing justice, immigrant rights, gender justice, and youth empowerment.
NASRAH OMAR is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, XR, collage, and installation to explore how memory, ecology, and technology build collective spaces of care, rooted in South Asian diasporic experience, decolonial frameworks, and ancestral knowledge.
TOSIN OMOJOLA is a designer and writer exploring architecture, cities, and interiors. She has held design positions for UPenn’s Transdisciplinary Urbanism in Times of Precarity lecture series and PennPraxis’ Stinger Square Community Advocacy Plan and has designed for architecture firms in Philadelphia and New York.
REYNALDO PINIELLA is an actor, writer, activist, and educator from East New York, Brooklyn, whose work spans local and international theater organizations, multidisciplinary arts spaces, and performing arts programs, including Broadway, Hi-ARTS, and Abingdon Theatre Company, as well as TV credits on CBS, FX, and Amazon Prime.
SYLVIA RIVEROS explores social and climate justice through documentary photography, creative writing, illustration, and public art to center collective memory, ancestral knowledge, and community power as catalysts for cultural and environmental transformation.
CORALINA RODRIGUEZ MEYER is the founder of Mama Spa Botanica, a workshop that offers full-spectrum cultural care for survivors of conflicting man-made and climate crises. Workshops explore indigenous plantology wisdom through collaborative documentary sculpture, photography, and painting, preserving matriarchal sovereignty from archives to advocacy.
MARS SCOTT is a multidisciplinary artist whose work preserves the history and modernity of Blackness, queerness, and cultural visibility to examine how Black American queer identity, desire, and representation are monopolized and erased within systems of white supremacy, while celebrating Black resilience, prowess, and beauty.
AIDA SHERIF (FRONTYARD FM) is a DJ and founding member of grassroots music organization Frontyard FM, which hosts public concerts and dance parties, free political education events, and mutual-aid fundraisers to cultivate collective joy through music and foster community care and support local aid.
VALKYRIE YAO is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and producer, founder of ELSHERE and founding editor of STRATUM, working across live performance, installation, and moving image to develop rigorous environments where systems, language, and embodiment become material.
2026 Create Change Community partners include:
Brooklyn Coop
Tranquility Farm
GrowHouse NYC
Young Doctors Project
Explore the full roster of 2026 Create Change artists and learn more about the Create Change Residency and Fellowship.
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ABOUT THE LAUNDROMAT PROJECT:
The Laundromat Project is a Black-rooted and POC-led community-based arts organization dedicated to the advancement of artists and residents of New York City as change agents within their own communities. We envision a world in which artists and neighbors in communities of color work together to harness the power of creativity that has the ability to inspire and initiate meaningful change and that generates 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 $2M in nearly 320 multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary artists; nearly 180 innovative public art projects; and a creative community hub in Bed-Stuy, while engaging close to 50,000 New Yorkers across the city and beyond.