Justin Sears is a dancer and the CEO and Creative Director of Phoenix Rising Dance Company and Studios. Informed by ballet, jazz, and hip-hop dance traditions, he uses movement as a conduit to expression and healing. Justin’s project Echoes of Light fuses dance and dialogue to explore the personal journeys of those affected by mental health crises and substance use disorders in order to raise awareness, break stigma, and inspire change. Through this project, Justin challenges himself by creating work centering a story that is personal and highly stigmatized, especially as a Black gay man. He hopes that through his vulnerability, others will feel inspired to address mental health challenges in our community with transparency, empathy, and in solidarity.

Forward Motion is a contemporary chamber ensemble that performs music blending newly composed classical music styles with a pop-adjacent aesthetic. Their project What Remains is a multi-sensory performance experience that combines an original silent short film, produced by Katelyn Calhoun, with a live musical score staged at a drive-in theater. The film and score are a contemplative reminder that we are surrounded by wonders of the natural world, wonders worth exploring. Stunning visuals fused with adventurous music thread together a story of nature’s beauty and our place in it. The ensemble takes on several creative challenges through this project, including exchanging their usual improvisational approach for the structured and demanding process of composing alongside the creation of an original film, and staging the performance in a drive-in setting with technical and environmental complexities.

Landon Caldwell’s creative practice examines environment, faith, myth, and community through sound composition, installation, and collaborative performance. He uses sound as a sculptural and narrative medium to create immersive experiences that provoke reflection and transformation. In collaboration with musician and composer Rob Funkhouser, Landon will stage a chamber-scale, site-adaptable operetta inspired by the Welsh myth of Myrddin, the historical source of Arthurian Merlin. The myth is reimagined through a Midwestern lens, exploring madness, prophecy, and ecology, and leveraging voice, electronics, and instrumentation to tell a fragmented story of exile and revelation in a collapsing world. By tackling his first operetta, Landon boldly embraces the technical challenge of staging a complex musical and theatrical work outside of his usual medium, a step that’s catapulted the careers of many renowned composers.

Zola Lamothe works at the intersection of art and activism, using set photography to resurrect our shared history and educate communities in relevant, accessible, and impactful ways. Embracing the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa, her work revisits the past to inform and better our future. Zola’s photography project highlights how modern reality mirrors the height of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in America. She draws connections between the past and present by situating a figure in a KKK mask at various institutions that historically have been, and continue to be, sites of white supremacist oppression, including in government, education, and religious institutions. She hopes to expand viewers’ understanding of how the Klan was able to amass power in both covert and overt ways. Given the sensitivity of the subject matter and the current political climate, Zola assumes significant personal, financial, and political risk by courageously critiquing civic institutions on which artists and cultural workers often depend for professional opportunity and support.

Kaila Austin is a social practice artist, recovering neighborhood histories through public art and archival practices. In 2019, she founded Rogue Preservation Services, a historic consulting organization working with historically African American communities to mobilize their histories and save their ancestral spaces through art. Kaila was invited (or voluntold, as she’d say) by her community to transform amber stained glass windows from one of Indianapolis’ oldest churches, South Calvary Baptist, into a public art lantern sculpture that can illuminate the community’s meditation garden and commemorate 150 years of self-reliance and communal care in Fletcher Bottom. Never having worked in sculpture, and with limited experience in public art, Kaila will leverage the Creative Risk Fund to learn a new medium and honor the wishes of her community’s elders, delivering a public artwork they can take great pride in.  

Corey Ewing uses poetry and photography to critique his lived experience in America, the pervasive influence of fiction, and the realities of the military-industrial complex. Through the intersection of these mediums, he explores how we joyfully occupy space, and how space occupies us. Corey’s project How Like Us merges environmental critique, poetry, and organic material experimentation to explore themes of ecological consumption, impermanence, and the gutting of the arts. A series of original poems will be drafted on leaf paper with organic ink and exposed to natural elements, exploring the tension between preservation and decay as seen through ephemeral expression. His experiment with organic mediums relinquishes the creative process to several unpredictable natural elements that can dramatically alter the desired outcome. The project embraces the uncertainty inherent in natural processes, making his reflection on consumption and decay both a thematic and aesthetic exploration.  

Omar Rashan is a multidisciplinary neuro-artist who combines visual art, environment, and immersive technology to create artistic experiences where creativity is both felt and seen. His practice centers accessibility and the ways mixed media, tactile surfaces, and augmented reality can bridge the gap between art and audience. Omar’s project Braille + AR: A New Language of Art is a multi-sensory art installation designed for and in collaboration with the blind and visually impaired community. Across 10-15 small to medium mixed media works on canvas and wood, each will offer a layered sensory journey combining tactile textures, Braille text, and augmented reality. Although with deep experience in AR and artmaking, combining all the desired elements into cohesive works that are both functional and visually compelling presents a unique challenge. A challenge, once overcome, Omar believes can set a new standard for accessibility-focused, multi-sensory artmaking.  

Carlos Sosa, Jr. is a professional designer with an expansive portfolio across communications, brand development, and artmaking in paint, sculpture, and digital illustration. Through his work, he explores complexity, tradition, and the everyday poetry of visual life. Carlos’ project Arrested Discouragement: Expressions of the DiaspoRican Resistance is a multi-month creative intervention that blends typography, public art, and communal education. Inspired by urban graffiti, Carlos produced and adhered giant typographic stickers to structures featuring charged, colloquial “Spanglish” phrases that confront colonial legacies, celebrate resistance, and reclaim narrative agency. Across Indianapolis, Puerto Rico, and other US cities, he aims to build a cross-regional creative network that sparks dialogue, pride, and critical reflection. Through Arrested Discouragement, Carlos departs from commissioned work to pursue an unsanctioned public intervention that takes a bold stance on Puerto Rican sovereignty and invites a dialogue on colonialism, identity, and community resistance.