Announcing the Fall 2025 Development Fund Awardees
February 12, 2026 • 7 minute read
Kayla Farrish, Selah Hampton, Junyla Silmon, song tucker, Jailyn Phillips-Wiley, and Chanel Stone rehearsing MAJOR, 2025. Photo by Fabian Hammerl.
The National Performance Network (NPN) is pleased to award $105,000 and leverage $174,588 through the Fall 2025 Development Fund to further support 11 Creation Fund projects that advance racial and cultural justice.
The Development Fund is the second phase of NPN’s Creation & Development Fund (CDF) and assists in offsetting managerial, artistic, or technical needs when developing projects. These needs can include supporting technical residencies, deepening community engagement, relationship building, expanding storytelling, or studio time to prepare a project for travel.
NPN’s approach to artistic support is built on the notions of partnership and long-term relationship building. NPN actively strives to expand the capacities and connectivity of its constituents. The Development Fund is structured to maximize these goals. Artists can apply independently or as a team with a co-commissioning partner of their choosing, depending on the needs of the project.
“Often after a work premieres, it is very very difficult to find time, space, and financial support to take the work to the next level. We are often forced to simply repeat the premiere because there is no opportunity to learn from the first experience. This was a great chance for us to refine, and it led to a stronger work and more opportunities.”
The Creation and Development Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and the generosity of co-commissioners.
Fall 2025 Development Fund Recipients
Amy O’Neal
Co-commissioning partner: CAP UCLA (Los Angeles, CA)
In collaboration with co-commissioners, CAP UCLA, we will be doing a three day development residency in Los Angeles for Again, There Is No Other (The Remix). This residency will take place November 11-13 at The Nemoy to explore projection ideas with Meena Murugesan, test out the space for our engagement there in Fall 2026, and develop material with BGirl Rascal Randi (LA) and Nia Amina Minor (Seattle) for the premiere in March of 2026.
Ashli St. Armant
Co-commissioning partner: ArtPower at UC San Diego (San Diego, CA)
Ordinary Folks is a juke joint cabaret of Black folklore, reimagined through song. Set in a rural, early 20th century musical hall during the season’s worst tropical storm, playwright Ashli St. Armant draws from a range of material, from volumes of collected folklore and personal anecdotes to centuries-old court documents. Through a development workshop at ArtPower UCSD in San Diego this December, St. Armant seeks to devise a collaborative atmosphere among the players on stage and the audience, to fine tune the overarching narrative, and to discover captivating ways to bring the music and storytelling to life.
Berette S Macaulay / imagine evolve
UN-[TITLED] is a multisite socially engaged project that centers on the ways in which communities are displaced by gentrification. Conceived and organized by commissioning curator Berette S Macaulay, the first iteration of UN-[TITLED] took place in multiple different neighborhoods across Seattle, WA. Development Funds will support the project’s ongoing Oral History series and the publication of Si’ahl ATLAS, a walking guide of community and cultural memory in Seattle communities. A filmed version of the performance iteration of UN-[TITLED] is expected to be screened publicly later in 2026.
Carla Forte
Co-commissioning partner: Miami Light Project (Miami Shores, FL)
The Elephant is a dance feature film that explores the struggle for women’s rights through powerful imagery and ritualized movement. Inspired by the elephant, an enduring symbol of strength, wisdom, and resilience, the film weaves a narrative of survival, empowerment, and connection to nature. Development Funds will be used to support the choreographer and the dancers as they advance the next stage of The Elephant through intensive artistic and technical development: creating and refining the choreographic structure, rehearsing, engaging in movement research, undertaking specific physical preparation, and testing technical elements that directly shape the embodied language of the piece.
Dakota Camacho / Gi Matan Guma’
MALI’E’ • TÁTAOTAO is a multi-disciplinary ritual performance activation, a prayer for humans to awaken to our Unity with Creation. Seattle’s first language echoes across the concrete shoreline as Matao/CHamoru, Black, Latinx, and other displaced Natives form a sacred cypher where prophetic poets call-and-respond to each other through embodiment, rhyme, rhythm, and metaphors that root ourselves to home(lands) and to collective liberation. Together the voices weave Creation Stories; oral histories of dᶻidᶻəlalič (Seattle), both ancient and contemporary; and personal narratives of survivorship, struggle-forged hope, and unshakeable belonging. Development Funds support bringing together artists who would normally not be able to work together in community and collaboration to develop the work towards presentation at Friends of the Seattle Waterfront.
David Roussève / REALITY
Co-commissioning partner: Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA)
Celebrated dance-theater artist David Roussève’s Daddy AF is an intimate meditation on life’s purpose, created and performed by a queer African American man acutely aware of the finite time he has left on the planet. Like strands of DNA, it connects elements encoded in his body, including 600 years of genealogy, a roller coaster journey with HIV, and the shattering loss of a husband — while revisiting movement from 35 years of dance-making to explore the meaning of ‘virtuosity’ for a 64-year old body. Development Funds support a weeklong production residency, the critical final development phase for Daddy AF, ahead of a weeklong premier run at Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
Goat in the Road Productions
Co-commissioning partner: Junebug Productions (New Orleans, LA)
In November 2025 – February 2026, Goat in the Road will be engaged in an ongoing design workshop for Carlota, its new musical examining the life and descendants of Carlota Ruíz de González, a fictionalized version of a 19th-century Afro-Cuban revolutionary. The design workshop will be focused on bringing together music, set, props, choreography, and projection elements in order to best tell this story that jumps through multiple generations in two different languages.
Heather Raffo / Playwright / Cultural Leader
Co-commissioning partner: Carver Community Cultural Center (San Antonio, TX)
The Migration Play Cycle is a giant map of a play exploring migration and the global economy. With bespoke scenes written for locales across the globe, the Development Fund allows for workshopping newly researched/written scenes for San Antonio, alongside scenes written about locales globally, with the goal of creating a new dramaturgical map through the play itself.
Mary Prescott
Co-commissioning partner: Mabou Mines Development Foundation (New York, NY)
Mabou Mines will host Mary Prescott for workshopping and a public WIP showing of Ancestral Table. Mabou Mines will provide time and space in their theater and studio for development, as well as lighting/audio/stage management, production tech and front of house staff for a work in progress showing.
Ogemdi Ude
Co-commissioning partner: On the Boards (Seattle, WA)
MAJOR is a dance theater project exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. MAJOR’s Development Fund project will focus on holding rehearsals with local marching bands in order to integrate the bands into final performances. The project also includes a development residency with the dancers to finalize the work prior to touring performances.
Rodney Garza
Co-commissioning partner: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (San Antonio, TX)
The Development Funds will be leveraged for the artistic development of the work, including spending time in July and August to work on rewrites for the second draft and using Rodney Garza’s prop master skills to create the prototype of a mask needed for a special effect in the production. Finally, it supports the artist’s travel from Moreno Valley, CA, to San Antonio, TX, for a residency with Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.
