Back to Our Grants

Alisha Wormsley

Alisha B Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science and technology through the Black matriarchal lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression.
See Grants Received Since 2023
Image courtesy of Alisha B Wormsley.
Image courtesy of Alisha B Wormsley.

About the 2023 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant: This $50,000 grant supports Children of NAN: a Survival Guide, a film for future Black femmes. A process driven experimental film using a mobile handcrafted set, traveling to sacred US landscapes, documenting survival strategies of and for Black/Indigenous femmes.

"My goal is to travel to various matriarchal/femme activists, hood witches, healers, makers and liberators to perform one tutorial, lesson or story of their daily survival within the set I craft," says Wormsley. "My work explores Black matriarchal experiences through a physical and theoretical archive I call Children of NAN. The archive consists of photography, films, objects, and performances that I’ve made and collected. Fascinated by the spiritual potency of the object, the archive is a blend of rituals and the sacred, science and dreaming—an avowal that for the liberation of all, there must be a centering of Black womxn’s sovereignty. I am committed to making space (in all the ways we imagine 'space') for Black / Indigenous femmes."