Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners of Fall Fellowships

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners of Fall Fellowships

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Ashia Ajani, Juliana Roth, and Austyn Gaffney as the winners of fellowships for fall residencies. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment. 

The two winners of the VIDA Fellowships are Ashia Ajani and Juliana Roth. Austyn Gaffney has won this fall’s Writers Coop Fellowship.

Ashia Ajani (they/she) is a Black storyteller and environmentalist hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains. Her work explores the layered relationship between the Black diaspora and Western environmental stewardship. They have been published in Sierra Magazine, Sage Magazine and Foglifter Press, among others. They are a 2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Finalist. She released her first chapbook, We Bleed Like Mango, in October 2017.

Juliana Roth‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in VIDA Review, Irish Pages, Reckoning, Yemassee, among other publications. She was twice nominated for the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology and was a 2019 Publishing Fellow with the Los Angeles Review of Books at the University of Southern California. Roth earned her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Camden. Her work as an artist has been supported by the Network of Ensemble Theaters, the Community of Writers, and Orion Magazine’s Environmental Writers Workshop. Screenplays by Juliana were selected for the Atlanta Film Festival, the Austin Revolution Film Festival, the Socially Relevant Film Festival, and the Lady Filmmakers’s Festival. She is the creator of the narrative web series, The University, which follows the bureaucratic failures of a university in the aftermath of a sexual assault on campus. Currently, she serves as Chief Storyteller for Edward Hopper Museum & Study Center and works on a variety of projects for Notch Theatre Company, Rivertown Film Society, and Leftfield Productions.

Based in Kentucky, Austyn Gaffney is a freelance journalist covering agriculture, energy, and climate change. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grist, The Guardian, High Country News, HuffPost, In These Times, onEarth, Sierra, Southerly, Vice, and more. She’s received support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, Kentucky Arts Council, PLAYA, Brush Creek Arts, and Writing by Writers, among others. 

Spring applications are now open! Find out more at our website.