Four Bay Area Artists Awarded $100,000 Rainin Grant

The Rainin Foundation has given four Bay Area creatives an unrestricted grant of $100,000 each through its Rainin Arts Fellowship, the organization announced this morning.

Public Space Fellow Cece Carpio is a visual artist who has worked as the galleries manager for the San Francisco Arts Commission and the public art advisor for the City of Oakland. Earlier this year, Carpio exhibited her work at SOMArts during her solo exhibition Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here. And her work with the Trust Your Struggle Collective has been spotted on walls all around the Bay Area, and throughout the world.

Dance Fellow Sarah Crowell, the artistic director at San Francisco’s Dance Mission Theater, is a decorated professional dancer. Crowell is the co-founder of the long-running Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, where she held numerous positions during her tenure. A 2016 inductee into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame and a four-time finalist for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education, Crowell is also the Belonging and Community Builder with Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute.

Theater Fellow Danny Duncan is widely regarded as a master artist and a living legend. He’s spent decades writing, producing, acting and educating people on the power of theater.

Duncan’s career began in the late ’60s on off-Broadway stages in New York. He has since served as artistic director for the Mayor’s Summer Youth Program in Bayview-Hunters Point, and has also worked with the arts education program United Projects and Oakland School for the Arts. At the turn of the millennium he began directing with the youth theater program SFArtsED Players. His work continues this fall with San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company (SFBATCO), which will stage his musical Every Saturday Night.

Film Fellow Cheryl Dunye is a renowned filmmaker and director. Known for her landmark 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, the first feature by a Black lesbian director, Dunye has also helmed numerous episodes of popular TV series, including Lovecraft Country, Queen Sugar and The Hunting Wives.

In a 2022 interview with KQED, Dunye, who was born in Liberia and raised in Philadelphia, discussed finding her home in the East Bay.

“Oakland is historically, one of the most powerful Black places and woman spaces and queer spaces in the world,” said Dunye, who founded Jingletown Films. “Oakland is where I want to be. I feel complete. I feel agency.”

In an announcement about this class of fellows, the sixth cohort of its kind, the Rainin Foundation said the grant seeks to alleviate financial instability facing the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem. This fellowship, the foundation’s publicist Rachel Roberts told KQED in an email, is a “signal that Bay Area artists are still being seen, supported and given the runway to lead future generations.”