Four Bay Area artists have been awarded grants of $100,000 each from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation as part of its 2025 Rainin Arts Fellowship.
This year’s fellows are Brenda Wong Aoki, Christy Chan, Kyle Casey Chu and Vanessa Sanchez. The unrestricted $100,000 grants are meant to be spent in whichever way each artist feel best supports their individual practices.
“I never would have dreamed of receiving a fellowship that comes with such robust support and with no conditions attached,” Chan told KQED Arts via email. “The Rainin Fellowship is an act of trust in art and also an act of trust in artists.”
Chan was awarded the foundation’s public space fellowship for her large-scale video installations and projections that are designed to challenge white supremacy and systemic inequality. In 2021, her Dear America series directly addressed anti-Asian hate with projections on high-rise buildings throughout the Bay, with messages in English and eight different Asian languages. More recently, Chan’s 2023 public art project Fainting Couch explored issues of power, fragility and class systems.
“In a time when the cultural power of artists and art orgs are being challenged by abuses of power in the government,” Chan said, “this fellowship guarantees my artistic freedom for a little while longer.”
Like Chan, theater fellow Aoki noted the impact of recent government cuts on her practice — and the relief the Rainin grant will provide her. Aoki is a performer, playwright and director whose productions blend Japanese legends, symphonic jazz and her family’s own long history in the Bay Area.
Aoki told KQED that First Voice, the arts organization she co-founded with her husband, jazz musician Mark Izu, “lost 75% of its funding under the new administration.” The financial hit represented an extra hard blow after losing Izu to cancer in January.
“I’m 72 years old,” Aoki said via email, “and yet this award feels like a luminous pearl, shining in the midst of darkness and chaos. It reminds me that I’m still here, still doing the work I was put on this planet to do. I am uplifted. I am grateful. And I promise to use this honor to nourish us all.”
This year’s film fellowship was awarded to writer, performer and filmmaker Kyle Casey Chu (a.k.a. Panda Dulce), who is one of the founding queens of the legendary Drag Queen Story Hour. (Chu successfully completed a reading to children at the San Lorenzo Public Library in 2022, despite a violent interruption by a group of Proud Boys.) Earlier this month, Chu released her debut novel, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, about a teenager in the South reckoning with their gender and sexuality after discovering the world of pageants.
“My work honors the diverse creative communities I came of age with in San Francisco,” Chu said in an email. “People who lovingly helped me crystallize my voice and vision as an artist — too many of which have already been displaced. This fellowship is helping me preserve these legacies and advance filmmaking itself towards a more inclusive, equitable future.”
Receiving the Rainin Foundation’s dance fellowship, choreographer Vanessa Sanchez is the founder of San Francisco’s La Mezcla dance company. The group uses a combination of tap dance and zapateado (rhythmic footwork from Mexico) to tell stories of Chicana history, culture and resistance. They usually do so while wearing distinctive zoot suits.
“It’s a really emotional experience for me continuing the legacy of resistance and survival that these women had to overcome,” Sanchez told KQED Arts in 2020, “and then being able to put that on a stage.”
Sanchez is also currently an artist-in-residence at Brava! For Women in the Arts.
