Earth Futures Fellowship
The Earth Futures Fellowship supports both emerging and established artists working in live arts, interactive experiences, and literary arts. Fellows receive awards of $5,000 for live arts and interactive experiences, and $1,500 for literary arts.The fellowship is an extension of Sidewalk Detroit’s Sidewalk Festival and Eco-Artist Residency. This fellowship supports artists working at the intersection of environmental justice, emergent strategies, and community-driven social infrastructure. This fellowship provides funding and mentorship for artists to develop projects that connect to community needs while reimaging fair, just, and utopian futures.
The fellowship is rooted in values of spatial equity, creative experimentation, and radical imagination. Spatial equity is about dismantling inequitable systems around us that limit us from enjoying access to public spaces and creating a strong and connected social infrastructure. Spatial Equity is about creating more just ways to make the spaces we operate in feel safe, protected, healing, and authentic. We emphasize spatial equity because that is a core value in the way Sidewalk Detroit relates to the work we do and how we move through space.
Earth Futures Fellows will support innovative strategies for environmental justice through public art, immersive installations, storytelling, writing, performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The fellows will act as a cohort and work alongside Sidewalk Detroit, in addition to a network of grassroots organizations and environmental advocates, while creating art that fosters collective action. This interdisciplinary fellowship builds upon Sidewalk Detroit’s commitment to supporting marginalized artists and creating supported and protected art that is a catalyst for equity, healing, and spatial futures.
Earth Future Fellows 2025
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Conversations With the Wind
An immersive installation inspired by Maple seeds' ability to “fly” due to their sacred geometry. Each kinetic copper sculpture will be suspended from a tree along Eliza Howell’s nature trails and spin utilizing the power of wind, generating sound.
Cyrah Dardas is a Queer, eco-romantic artist and care worker of the Persian diaspora living in Detroit /Waawiyaatanong, Anishinaabe territory. Dardas uses her art practice as a tool in remembering the lost relationships between humans and non-human beings by regulating and healing our collective nervous system and body to restore interdependency. Cyrah’s work is informed by their experience as a parent, her work in childcare, and in growing food, as a member of artist cooperatives and through their work with natural fibers, earth pigments, and botanical inks. Their practice is deeply rooted in ritualized art making, using the process as well as the work itself as a tool for grief composition, and collective healing. You can visit their website here.
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Eliza Howell: A Sensory Exploration of Place
A book arts project reminding and encouraging park visitors to discover and deepen their own personal connection with the land through poetry, prompts, stories, and illustration.
David McGuffie is an interdisciplinary artist based in Detroit, MI, whose practice centers on deepening community engagement with place. Working primarily with ink, his illustrations function as a lifelong process of reflection and documentation — tracing relationships between self, environment, and the spaces we inhabit. Rooted in close observation of the natural world and our entanglement within it, David’s work invites viewers to slow down, notice, and reconnect with place through line, texture, and narrative.You can visit their website here.
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Eliza Howell Park Soundmap
Through soundmapping, music, and shared memory, the Detroit Soundmap Collective builds a living archive in Eliza Howell Park that is guided by community voices, rooted in place, and designed as an open, evolving soundscape for future generations.
Billy Mark is a mystic performance poet and multidimensional songwriter who wades through the love of Christ flowing everywhere in the universe. He is an experimental artist whose work is rooted in the art of poetic freestyle. Based in poetry, his work extends to areas of music, theater, sculpture, movement and installation. You can visit his website here.
Na Bonsai is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist and musician with over a decade of experience in songwriting, live performance, graphic scoring, and sound art, combining independent releases and experimental projects.
Zekkereya El-magharbel is an Educator and Artist. Afro-futurism and visual/aural design are the tools they use to help themself and others.
Natalie Gallagher is a mother and defiant. Dancing, on the edge of the archive, where embodied histories linger and resist erasure. Her projects involve cartographies and storytelling through play and pedagogy.
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Rituals of the Wild
Imagine us outside, holding candles in a circle. A drum begins to beat. Songs rise. We sway, then move together—one rhythm, one body, one prayer. Rituals of the Wild is an ancestral portal of drum, dance, and story—a healing gathering rooted in spirit, land, and collective joy.
Imani Ma’at AknhmenRa Amen Taylor is a cultural guardian, artist-educator, and 2024 Kresge Arts Fellow whose work breathes at the crossroads of ancestral wisdom, rhythm, and resistance. As a traditional West African drum and dance practitioner, Imani weaves movement, ritual, and storytelling into immersive, intergenerational experiences rooted in cultural preservation, communal healing, and spiritual awakening. Through the language of the drum and the power of embodied prayer, Imani’s work reconnects Black communities to land, lineage, and liberation. Her practice transforms public and natural spaces into sacred sites of remembrance, where rhythm becomes medicine and dance becomes resistance. At the heart of her work is a commitment to spatial equity, environmental reverence, and radical imagination. You can visit her website here.
