ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ARTIVIST FELLOWS 2024 Projects

WARD 5 COHORT

CLEAN AIR

Multidisciplinary Artist, Leonina Arismendi (formerly known as Yanina Angelini) is a Queer, Uruguayan born multidisciplinary artist, activist and award winning writer.  Leonina’s work exists at the intersections of food justice, art, activism, environmentalism, and popular education. They are known to be very blunt, mostly driven by the urgent nature of the causes they advocate for.  Reverend Arismendi Zarkovic (they/them) is an outspoken immigrant justice advocate and member of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Prophetic Council.

WARD 5 COHORT

CLEAN AIR

Lynda is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice encompassing time-based media, installations, and sculptures created from found and fabricated objects that reflect the often unseen or ignored beauty of our world. Lynda's artistic practice explores the integration of the natural and digital worlds, and employs contemporary computer aided design tools paired with the traditional conceptual techniques of drawing, painting, sewing, photography, and hand fabrication. Her work asserts the craft-based primacy of the handmade, grounding itself in the modern world of technology.

WARD 7 COHORT

CLEAN WATER

Billy Friebele is an interdisciplinary artist working in the Washington, DC region. His work examines the relationship between humans and the environment – especially along the Anacostia River. Billy was a Hamiltonian Artist fellow and one of the first makers-in-residence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. He has exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Katzen Center for the Arts, and the Kreeger Museum among other venues nationally and internationally. Billy Friebele is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Loyola University Maryland.

WARD 7 COHORT

CLEAN WATER

Noël Kassewitz (b.1990, Miami) has been exploring the topic of climate change, particularly rising sea levels and other inundation events, since 2015. Drawing upon her ocean-based upbringing and background in art conservation, her practice examines how a painter adapts to the continuous threat of obsolescence in a rapidly changing cultural and environmental landscape. Kassewitz has given an artist talk at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, is a three-time recipient of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities’ Visual Artist Fellowship Grant, and her work is held in both private and public art collections.

WARD 7 COHORT

CLEAN WATER

Sherri Lumpkin (Sherriness), Doll-maker and the Founder/Director of the Ragbaby Exchange (RBE) a doll-making workshop that builds self-esteem in women and children in 2009.  She has conducted workshops in museums like the Phillips Collection, DC, and The African American Museum, Philadelphia and traveled to South America including Cuba, Colombia, and Panama to facilitate workshops. A few of her awards include Contours ArteCalle Residency (University of Minnesota) in Havana, Cuba 2024, and the Prince Georges Arts & Humanities Artist in Residence 2019-2022.

WARD 8 COHORT

EQUITY IN FOOD SYSTEMS

Jaren Hill Lockridge is a community storyteller and memory keeper that uses food and water (access) as entry points to community and cultural wellness. Like many Washingtonians, her southern roots run strong as a descendant of people who grew crops and tilled the soil. Jaren holds a Bachelor’s degree from Middle TN State University while currently pursuing an advanced degree in urban sustainability at the University of The District of Columbia. An avid tree hugger and proud mother of three, Jaren is also the chair of the Ward 8 Health Council. 

WARD 8 COHORT

EQUITY IN FOOD SYSTEMS

Socially engaged artist and curator Mēlani N. Douglass is the founder of the award-winning Family Arts Museum. Mēlani’s art and life practice is rooted in rituals of healing informed by ancestral technology and communal connections. Mēlani was recently named Wherewithal Grantee by the Washington Project for the Arts, HumanitiesDC fellow, East of the River Artist in Residence and a Roots to Sky Fellow as a part of the Humanities in Place initiative of the Mellon Foundation. Her work has been highlighted by the New York Times, Atlas Obsucura, Artnet, Shondaland and BmoreArt. 

WARD 8 COHORT

EQUITY IN FOOD SYSTEMS

Murat Cem Mengüç (he/him) is an artist, writer and historian whose work appeared in numeorus solo shows, group exhibitions and publications. He is the founder of Studio Teleocene which is dedicated to the study of art and environment and a member of the Cultivate Projects, a platform for a contemporary redefinition of landscape. He lives and grows food in North Potomac, Maryland, at the intersection of the Potomac River and the Seneca Trail, the ancestral home of the Piscataway Indian confederacy.