Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Announce 2025 Environmental Art Grants Recipients

$521,125 Awarded to 29 Projects Led by Women-Identifying Artists in the United States and U.S. Territories.

Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists from the United States and U.S. territories. The AWAW EAG is made possible by Anonymous Was A Woman, with additional funding provided by individual donors.

In the 2025 cycle, the fourth year of the program, a total of $521,125 in grant funding was awarded to 29 projects that will focus on environmental issues and advocacy in locations including California, Guam, Hawai’i, Louisiana, Maine, México, New York, Nigeria, Senegal, South Korea, and Utah. The 29 projects were selected from 1,004 applications from artists who reside in the United States and U.S. Territories. 

The projects span a range of media and activations including:

• BEAM (Annie Chen, Zoe Lee, and Ellen Fritz)’s Tidelands 2100: Imagining Coastal Futures Beyond Displacement (Potter’s Pond, Rhode Island), an extended reality (XR) artwork that immerses audiences in a speculative climate future along Potter’s Pond, Rhode Island—a coastline projected to be underwater by century’s end. 
• Earth Rise Collective’s Earth Church (Vinton, Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana), a community-built sanctuary and resistance symbol sited near a contested pipeline. This living classroom combines bioconstruction workshops with storytelling circles, uniting frontline activist communities through shared hands-on creation. 
• Maryam Kazeem’s The Future Protest (Lagos, Nigeria) uses the generative capacity of protest as a “glitch” that can create an opening for the wider public to contemplate the Lagos Lagoon’s sonic histories. At the center of the project is a public installation on the lagoon, which invites passengers to sonically record their speculations about protest in the future. 
• Jemila MacEwan’s Dead Gods (New York, New York), a living monument that resurrects a primordial terrestrial giant—Prototaxites, a mysterious organism that once enabled the proliferation of life on Earth—with their living mushroom descendants. Edible and medicinal mushrooms will be ceremonially harvested and gifted to visitors.
• Virginia San Fratello’s Smoke Screen (California) will be a 3D printed artistic and architectural installation made of a custom bio-filament composed of California wildfire ash. The ash that will be used to create the Smoke Screen was collected from the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area of transition between unoccupied land and human development.
• Zahra Rasool and Ariel Ritchin’s Contamination (Hoosick Falls, New York), a feature-length documentary that explores one small town’s unlikely fight–and even more improbable victory–for clean water and environmental justice. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody is serving as the film’s executive producer.

The AWAW EAG program supports environmental art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. The intended impact of the project was an important factor in the selection process. The applications were reviewed by an esteemed panel comprising Rehema C. Barber, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Clarinda Mac Low, Executive Director, Culture Push, Inc. & Co-Director, Works on Water; Dakota Mace (Diné), artist; Mari Robles, CEO at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and Mary Ellen Strom, Professor of the Practice, Media Arts, SMFA-Tufts University, Boston, MA, U.S. Preliminary panelists, who participated in the first round of application review, included Nehprii Amenii, Kaitlin Bryson, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Michelle Glass, Susie Ibarra, Sarah Kavage, Adrienne Mackey, Susan Mayo, Jackie Fawn, Jan Mun, Rebekah Joy, Hye Yeon Nam, Júlia Pontés, Mika Rottenberg, Lauren Shapiro, and agustine zegers, all past recipients of the AWAW EAG.

Since 1996, AWAW has given $10 million in unrestricted grants to over 400 artists, honoring women-identifying artists over the age of 40. In 2022, AWAW contributed $250,000 for the inaugural year of the AWAW EAG. The $521,125 awarded through the AWAW EAG in 2025 demonstrates increased support for myriad artistic projects, led by women-identifying artists, addressing critical environmental issues across the United States and U.S. territories. The program has awarded $1,438,125 in total funding to 82 projects since 2022.

“We are living in a time of multiple crises—but must not be overwhelmed or paralyzed from taking action. Environmental action is more urgently needed than ever before, and artists have a powerful role to play in helping us see, feel, and respond to the crises around us,” said Susan Unterberg, founder of Anonymous Was A Woman. The 2025 AWAW Environmental Art Grants recipients are not only illuminating the profound challenges we face, but also imagining new paths of resilience, justice, and collective care. Their projects remind us that art can be both a call to action and a source of hope at a time when both are essential,” she added.

Said Michael Royce, CEO, NYFA: “With each passing year, we are seeing the adverse impact of climate change on communities–whether in small, incremental ways or in sudden, devastating ways. The 2025 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants recipients are helping people to better understand our varied cultural and environmental histories while envisioning pathways forward in the face of great environmental challenges. We’re grateful to them for their work, and to Anonymous Was A Woman for recognizing that artists are changemakers.”

Each of the selected projects will have a public engagement component which will be completed by August 2026. See below for more on each of the selected projects:

BEAM (Annie Chen, Zoe Lee, and Ellen Fritz)’s Tidelands 2100: Imagining Coastal Futures Beyond Displacement (Potter’s Pond, Rhode Island) is an extended reality (XR) artwork that immerses audiences in a speculative climate future along Potter’s Pond, Rhode Island—a coastline projected to be underwater by century’s end. Set in 2100, the piece merges NOAA flood projections, 3D ecological scans, field-recorded soundscapes, site-specific architecture, and oral histories to follow a day in the life of a coastal community that has reclaimed a landscape once abandoned after flooding, evacuation, and state withdrawal. The project offers a counter-imaginary to coastal displacement: a vision of climate resilience where our local communities with deep ties to the shore adapt—and even thrive—in the face of rising seas.

Heidi K. Brandow’s The Living Chart: Diné Knowledge for a Post-Extractive Future (Santa Fe, New Mexico) is an interdisciplinary project rooted in traditional Diné ecological knowledge, cultural memory, and land-based practices. Through community-engaged research, storytelling, and art, the project examines the environmental and spiritual impacts of extractive industries on Diné homelands. By weaving together ancestral knowledge and creative practice, it seeks to envision pathways toward ecological restoration, cultural resilience, and sustainable futures.

Charlotte Brathwaite’s Forgotten Paradise: The Meeting (Popenguine-Ndayane, Senegal) will transform wearable sculptures into five billboard artworks unveiled through community rituals of witness and care in Popenguine-Ndayane, a Senegalese fishing village on the frontline of displacement and ecological threat. Brathwaite will team up with visual artist Malick Welli and designer Jah Gal Doulsy to create the work in collaboration with local women land protectors, youth, elders, and activists. The project also launches Malidoma Popenguine, a cultural residency co-founded by Brathwaite and Welli, rooted in local creativity and international exchange.

Chantal Calato’s PLAY (Niagara County, New York), set in the home of the infamous toxic waste site Love Canal, transforms discarded plastic toys into an exuberant fleet of gigantic sculptures that aim to make participants laugh while saving hundreds of cubic meters of toys from local landfills. At a critical moment when challenges about our environment’s future often feel overwhelming, PLAY is a reminder that we are innovators.

Erika Cohn (Director/Producer) and Nicole Docta (Producer)’s film This Was The Place (Salt Lake City, Utah) is a coming-of-age story that follows Utah youth activists who are determined to be the first to save Great Salt Lake (GSL), the Western Hemisphere’s largest saline lake. They turn their fears of a world without GSL into fuel for action, staging visions of their own apocalyptic futures. Blurring documentary and fiction, the film becomes a cinematic protest that asks: Are they rehearsing for what’s coming, or fighting to rewrite it?

Herban Cura’s Plants to the People (Hudson Valley, New York and NYC) book will be a celebration of mutual aid and a blueprint for future organizing. Healing justice herb and ecology school Herban Cura’s goal is to create a dynamic and artful guide that can be shared with bookstores across the country—as well as a handout for free to the “Plants to the People” participants whose enduring engagement and generous knowledge-sharing has sharpened their commitment to liberatory practices for healing herbal justice.

Earth Rise Collective’s Earth Church (Vinton, Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana) is a community-built sanctuary and resistance symbol sited near a contested pipeline. Constructed from regional clay, straw, Spanish moss, and site-harvested wood, its honeycomb-inspired earthen forms demonstrate sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based construction materials. This living classroom combines bioconstruction workshops with storytelling circles, uniting frontline activist communities through shared hands-on creation. 

DeepTime Collective (Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer)’s When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube (Washington State) is a multi-year, radically collaborative, socially engaged public artwork that DeepTime Collective have been developing in partnership with students, teachers, and staff at a PreK-12 public school in rural Eastern Washington. The artwork will be realized through large-scale wall drawings, digitally-printed photographs, ceramic sculptures, and more in the form of a river that winds throughout the entire indoor and outdoor school campus. The Touchet River, the river which flows through the school’s campus, is their primary site for artistic and scientific inquiry.

Susie Ganch’s Radical Jewelry Makeover: Lending Library (Virtual) is part of Radical Jewelry Makeover (RJM), Ethical Metalsmiths’ international traveling community mining project that links recycling and reuse with the creation of innovative jewelry. RJM’s Lending Library (RJM-LL) aims to shift audience habits away from over-consumptive exclusive private ownership towards (re)investment in shared communal jewelry through easier and more equitable access to sustainable ecosystems of reuse. RJM-LL will launch with an exhibition opening in Fall 2026, presented in partnership with NYC’s Museum of Arts and Design. 

Madeline Gunderson’s documentary film Untitled Monarch Butterfly Project (Estado de México, México) portrays the relationship between butterflies and humans through the perspective of a volunteer environmental defender in Mexico State. The film profiles his personal drive to protect the monarchs, despite financial challenges and violent threats. In many indigenous teachings, the monarch butterfly’s arrival in Mexico—which coincides with the Day of the Dead—represents the souls of returned ancestors making their annual visit to Earth. By protecting these fluttering insects, one can also be seen as gently tending to the ancestors’ souls.

Maria Hernandez May’s Follow the Water (Barrigada, Guam) is a 25-minute short documentary-in-production that dives into Indigenous land rights, water security, historical contamination, and contemporary community organizing across Guam, a US colony without democratic representation. It tells the uncomfortable story of how US democratic deficiencies and Indigenous connections to land manifest into everyday experiences such as toxic drinking water, high rates of specific cancers, and denial of access to ancestral lands. 

Tomiko Jones’s These Grand Places (Madison, Wisconsin) is a photography-based project that explores public land and national identity, sparked by a 2017 list of federally protected sites at risk of deregulation. Traveling in a solar-powered mobile research studio, Jones documents landscapes and communities through exhibitions, workshops, and fieldwork, asking urgent questions about stewardship, access, and belonging. The project’s next phase brings the work back to the places where it was created, engaging dialogue through images, stories, and public events.

Maryam Kazeem’s The Future Protest (Lagos, Nigeria) uses the generative capacity of protest as a “glitch” that can create an opening for the wider public to contemplate the Lagos Lagoon’s sonic histories. The project explores the Lagoon’s ecology through a phonocenic lens and asks how the Lagoon hears and what the effects of this hearing are. At the center of the project is a public installation on the lagoon that invites passengers to sonically record their speculations about protest in the future. These recordings will be transcribed in real-time by a sculptural device which powers a trash collection wheel in the water. The exercise contemplates words as energy, illuminating language as a doing, narrative as public space, and ultimately explores the act of archiving as technology.

Leilehua Lanzilotti’s Moananuiākea (San Francisco, California) is a new work for string quartet celebrating Polynesian wayfinding and the 50th Anniversary of the Hōkūleʻa’s first voyage to Tahiti. This historical voyage marked the first time in more than 600 years that a Polynesian voyaging canoe sailed from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti using traditional non-instrument navigation, the ancestral art of wayfinding that had been lost in Hawaiʻi for hundreds of years. Performances of the work will be supplemented by community activations and educational resources around the subject of Polynesian Voyaging.

Sujin Lim’s The Land, Dark and Muddy (Yeongheung Island, South Korea) is an ongoing project that memorializes the vanishing tidelands of Yeongheung Island, the artist’s father’s hometown. The project unveils how industrial development, including tide embankments and power plants, transformed the island and changed local livelihoods dependent on mudflats. It combines on-site landscape painting performances based on Lim’s father’s memories and large-scale paintings using island mud as pigment. It extends to building a temporary museum for collaborative artmaking that preserves the lost landscape through collective memories and stories. 

Jemila MacEwan’s Dead Gods (New York, New York) is a living monument that resurrects a primordial terrestrial giant—Prototaxites, a mysterious organism that once enabled the proliferation of life on Earth—with their living mushroom descendants. Each sculptural installation is grown entirely from mycelium, invoking the scale and presence of Prototaxites (which could grow to 30 feet tall) while collaborating with its closest contemporary relatives: fungi. These living sculptures increase in scale and species complexity with each iteration. Edible and medicinal mushrooms will be ceremonially harvested and gifted to visitors.

Jennifer Neptune (Penobscot Nation Museum Director) with Erin Hutton (Erin Hutton Projects)’s We Have Stories to Tell: Reclaiming the Penobscot Nation Museum as a Site of Cultural Continuance (Penobscot Nation Museum, Indian Island, Maine) is a collaborative, community-led effort to preserve, interpret, and share Penobscot cultural knowledge through the expanded Penobscot Nation Museum. Together, Neptune and Hutton are working with community members, elders, and artists to develop new exhibits, educational programs, and interpretive materials that honor the ecological, cultural, and historical continuance of the Penobscot Nation in a way that blends traditional knowledge with innovative design. 

Natalia Neuhaus’s Greetings from Niagara (Niagara Falls, New York) raises the visibility of Niagara Falls, NY, and a radioactive legacy from decades of uranium processing for the Manhattan Project and Cold War weapons programs that lingers in the soil, water, and the health of its residents. The project confronts this buried history through photography and archival research, and seeks to transform awareness into action through direct engagement with residents, traveling exhibitions, and community programs in libraries and art centers across the region.

Margaret Pearce, in collaboration with Prairie Island THPO and Ho-Chunk Nation Cultural Resources and The Anderson Center’s Mississippi Dialogues (Mississippi River) is a cartographic intervention to Indigenize public dialogue about the Mississippi River through a series of public art panels installed in parks along the River. It will elevate Indigenous experiences and knowledge of the river, particularly regarding flooding, through map panels expressing Dakota and Hoocąk narratives about the River. The panels will be fabricated, carved, and illustrated by Tribal citizens, and installed with free public programming.

Emily Raboteau’s Voices from the Cross-Bronx Expressway (Bronx, New York) is a book-length essay amplifying the perspectives of local activists doing what they can to combat the The Cross-Bronx Expressway’s toxic harm for the sake of generations to come. In addition to historically displacing residents, separating communities, and abetting segregation, it is one of the most congested interstates in the nation with some of the highest rates of traffic and collisions. The neighborhoods surrounding the corridor suffer not only some of the worst health issues in the city, but the highest rates of asthma in the country. This work will examine what it means to survive environmental racism and to struggle against it.

Tiare Ribeaux’s film Akakū – The Dreamer Awakens – Ola Hawai’i i ka Wai (Honolulu, Hawai’i) blends magical realism with restoration work in Hawai‘i to tell the story of the return of waters, ancestral practices, and community initiatives to heal the land. Akakū tells the story of historic diversions of water (for profit, plantations, and development) and the return of water sources to their natural flows, especially in the more developed districts tied to creation stories, epic mo‘olelo (traditional stories), and wahi pana (sacred sites). 

LaRissa Rogers’s subterranean convergence (Los Angeles, California) is a sculptural installation and performance inspired by the transcontinental railroad that connected the U.S. South and West. It will be staged in a park in LA’s Chinatown that is sited on the former Southern Pacific River Station which was once the gateway for new migrants during the Reconstruction era. The project will investigate how liberation has been conceptualized—and where it might still be—via cast objects from the American colonial period until the present day that will be placed within a sculptural representation of “unearthed” train tracks. Here, the train acts as a vessel and metaphor to explore public and private memory while archiving the cyclical movements of people and goods across generations and geographies.

Cara Romero’s Cultural Transmission Through Stories: When Animals Were People (Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Chemehuevi Indian Reservation, California), will see the artist facilitating community arts workshops with Chemehuevi youth and culture bearers. Participants will craft masks and props using traditional ecological materials and learn intergenerational stories, working together in their homelands. The final documentation will include 20 silver gelatin photographs and a short art film capturing this embodied knowledge preservation process.

Virginia San Fratello’s Smoke Screen (California) will be a 3D printed artistic and architectural installation made of a custom bio-filament composed of California wildfire ash. The ash that will be used to create the Smoke Screen was collected from the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area of transition between unoccupied land and human development. As population growth continues, and people move into the WUI, the increase in wildfires will mean an increase in severe wildfire risk in these zones. The project raises questions including: Could we rebuild using the ashes from the wildfires themselves? What artifacts can help us remember what we have lost? How can materials that are a product of destruction become materials for construction?

Nina Sarnelle’s Breath Work (Los Angeles, California) film will bring 13 untrained community members aged 11-65 together to make an experimental opera using their breath as a medium for resistance to Los Angeles’ oil refineries and shipping ports. Shots of locations with oil refineries and one of the largest ports in the world are woven together with cast and crew’s stories of environmental racism in Long Beach, California. The aim of the film is to tour as a tool for local environmental justice organizing.

Theresa Secord’s Weaving a Legacy Through Climate Change (Farmington, Maine) will experiment with new fibers/materials to continue weaving through the climate change-related loss of the traditional ash wood. The weaving material used by the Penobscot Nation artist in her ancestral basketry practice is endangered due to the climate change-induced introduction of the emerald ash borer beetle in Maine. The intergenerational transfer of this knowledge will continue as she shares with her apprentices and in public presentations of the works she creates.

Supermrin’s FIELD [autoimmune] (Brooklyn, New York, and Cincinnati, Ohio) is a cross-disciplinary exploration of wild and genetically-modified grasses, culminating in an exhibition, artist book, and hands-on community science workshops. Supermrin’s ongoing project, FIELD, uses the unique bioplastic she synthesizes from grasses as both material and metaphor, revealing how capitalist and colonial systems reshape landscapes and ecologies. Working in collaboration with Genspace, a community biology lab in Brooklyn, she is furthering research into the bioplastic’s composition through experimental, ecologically responsible production methodologies. In 2026, her solo exhibition, FIELD [autoimmune], curated by Michael Goodson at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati, will feature a suite of immersive sculptures accompanied by public programs that invite audiences to engage directly with community science.

Xochipilli Collective’s Milpa Movil (Houston, Texas – Harris County) is a solar-powered mobile art installation and Indigenous artist residency that transforms a repurposed RV into a living space for cultural exchange, ceremony, and ecological teaching. Through workshops, storytelling, and public events, it will foster intergenerational learning, cultural revitalization, and environmental awareness.

Zahra Rasool and Ariel Ritchin’s feature-length documentary film Contamination (Hoosick Falls, New York) explores one small town’s unlikely fight–and even more improbable victory–for clean water and environmental justice. When his father dies of a rare kidney cancer, Michael Hickey makes a chilling discovery: the water in the town of Hoosick Falls is contaminated with staggering levels of a cancer-causing “forever chemical.” Across town, Emily Marpe learns that the factory next door is poisoning her young children. Led by Michael and Emily, the people of Hoosick Falls fight back, embarking on a high-stakes battle against some of the world’s most powerful corporations. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody is serving as the film’s executive producer.

Find out about additional awards and grants here. Sign up for our free bi-weekly newsletter to receive announcements about future NYFA events and programs.