Dr. Doris Derby Awards
Dr Doris Derby, Activist, Photographer, Artist, Professor at University of Illinois, 2019. Photo by Abigail Bobrow. Read a beautiful article by Abigail about Dr. D here.
The Namesake
Dr. Doris Derby (November 11, 1939 – March 28, 2022) was an artist, activist and educator who worked in the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama alongside Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Dorothy Height, Dr. Dorothy Cotton, Dr. Septima Clark, Senator Julian Bond, Congressman John Lewis, Mayor Andrew Young, Reverend Hosea Williams, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others. Dr. Derby was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. She was the founding director of the African-American Student Services and Programs at Georgia State University as well as an adjunct associate professor of cultural anthropology. Dr. Derby was a photographer, painter, dancer, author, and filmmaker. Learn more about her here.
Dashboard worked with Dr. Derby beginning in 2015. We presented her photographs from the Civil Rights Movement (1963-72) at our galleries in Atlanta as well as the Atlanta Airport where 1.6 million people experienced them. We’re forever inspired by Dr. Derby’s mission and spirit, and celebrate her as the namesake of this program.
The Program
Historically, Black artists have received disproportionately less access and funding in the art industry. As we stand in solidarity with the fight against white supremacy, the Dr. Doris Derby Awards acknowledge a commitment to Black artists to provide financial resources and tailored professional support to grow individual practices.
In 2011, DASH received a gift of $10,000, out of the blue, no-strings-attached. It was the first time we’d seen funds like that and it became a big turning point for us. Our whole practice shifted - we started paying artists a fair wage and invested in equipment for better shows. In addition to cash, the funder also gave us access. They connected us to peers around the country who helped us think about new programming and business strategies. Eventually, we started paying ourselves. That gift was the first time we realized we MIGHT be able to do this work full time, for a long time. It was a vote of confidence, it encouraged us to keep going and to keep making art.
Initially, we announced the program would be a single $10,000 gift to one artist a year. But at the request of Dr. Derby (who obviously knows what she’s talking about), we expanded the program into 3 separate awards to reflect the variety of media Dashboard presents and locations we serve. Each year we’ll select 3 artists to receive a financial award of $10,000, $3,000 or $2,000 + a tailored plan for sustained professional support during the award year.
The program is open to all Black artists of any medium living in the United States. Potential artists are nominated by DASH, Dr. Doris Derby alumni and national partners, and the final selection is made by the Dashboard Team, Board Members and a rotating panel.
2023 Award Recipients
LEELEE JAMES
Boulder, CO
LeeLee James is channeling her engineering education, dance training, and resourcefulness through queer, femme, and Black identities into a wild and wonderful expression of her STEAM art through her YouTube series Twirling Tech Goddess. As a computer science major at the University of Colorado Boulder, James believes that greater access to technological information, skills, and experiences for those who have been historically marginalized is of the utmost importance in creat- ing an equitable future for all. She is also the proud Mother of the Colorado Chapter of the pioneering and iconic Royal House of LaBeija, and hopes to stimulate greater interest in STEM to the QTBIPOC folks within the ballroom community. Learn more through her channel, youtube.com/@TwirlingTechGoddess and/or support her work through her patreon at patreon.com/TwirlingTechGoddess.
Photo credit: LeeLee James by Drummond West
RORY SCOTT
Detroit, MI
Rory Scott is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work utilizes animation, extended-reality (AR & VR) along with handcrafted means to create emotive environments & reimagined life.
Since 2010, her primary focus has been on her ongoing project Impermanence—which serves as both her life practice and visual body of work.
Impermanence as a practice, is an ongoing reflection and confrontation with the passage of time. An exercise of letting go and learning to use time as an agent of change, by creating deliberate & consistent patterns to achieve desired results.
As a body of work, Impermanence embodies these ideas through the use of visual patterns & the creation of worlds that reflect the inner universe of memory, thought & mind. While also examining the origins of thought, belief and the perception of reality, through the use of dreamlike imagery and augmented worlds.
These ideas in conjunction with Scott’s interest in futurism/technology and its relationship with humanity, form the foundation of her work.
“If nothing else, I hope that my work opens up more minds to the true collective nature of reality. That the lives we live and the world we experience, are a mirror reflection of the patterns of our inner dialogue & thoughts. When you change your thoughts, you change your behaviors & actions and when you change your actions you change yourself, when you change yourself, you change your community & humanity in turn.”
Photo credit: “MixedRealityLandscape” by Rory Scott
BLOO WOODS
Atlanta, GA
Bloo Woods is a 3D artist and animator who brings powerful visual concepts to life. With his extensive motion design experience, his unique artistic eye allows him to create captivating, emotive imagery paired with intricate and multi-layered visual effects. His work stands out due to his expertise in leveraging various forms of technology, his ambition to experiment, and his enthusiastic appreciation for Afro-futurism and the feminine form. From his base of operations in beautiful Atlanta, Georgia Bloo Woods constantly strives to push the boundaries of visual creation and impact through innovative, affluent content.
Photo credit: “Interlude” by Bloo Woods.
2022 Award Recipients
NASTASSJA E. SWIFT
Virginia
Nastassja Swift is a multi-disciplinary artist holding a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Summer 2021 Artist in Residence with SPACES in Cleveland, where her community parade and exhibition received support from the Ohio Arts Council. In 2019, her short film, and collaborative performance, “Remembering Her Homecoming,” premiered at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival, and screened at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. She is the recipient of a Virginia Commission of the Arts Fellowship in Craft for the 2020 cycle, and the Black Box Press Foundation, 2021 Art as Activism Grant. She has work that is permanently displayed at The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia and her newly quilted body of work “Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice” is currently on view at the Galveston Arts Center in Texas. Her work has been acquired into the Grace Linton Battle Memorial Fund for the Arts Collection, as well as the Quirk Hotel in Charlottesville. Her work has been included in the Berlin publication - SomeMagazine, RVA Magazine, RHome Magazine and the Stranger, a Seattle publication. She has participated in several national and international residencies and exhibitions, including her solo exhibit in Doha, Qatar in 2016, Virginia MoCA, The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Michigan, and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and MASS MoCA.
Nastassja Swift is currently living and working in Virginia.
Photo credit: “blue/Black/baby smiles,
singin’ to an old river -
we hear you coming.”
Photo by Amber Ford
JALEN AMIR
Atlanta, GA
Working primarily in photography and sculpture, Jalen Amir is a 21 year old multi-disciplinary visual artist set on capturing surreal depictions of blackness, exploring themes concerning reality and structure. To imply simulation, Amir’s work features lots of negative space and poetic scenes reminiscent of plays, likening models to actors or toys. The goal is to emphasize how constructed reality is, ultimately shaped by slavery and an extensive timeline of Black exploitation.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Jalen Amir
APRIL BANKS
Los Angeles, CA
April Banks is an artist, educated as an architect with a creative career that straddles visual art, social practice and exhibition design. Her art practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experiences.
April’s recent work time travels through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning systems. She is interested in amplifying lesser known stories, challenging the gaze, and giving narrative to the erased and intentionally forgotten.
April is the producer of Tea Afar, a nomadic storytelling experience, launched in 2016. For over a decade she made art that raised awareness and pointed to the global disparity in food security, farmer's rights and fair trade. Tea Afar was conceived as a salve—bringing us together across borders—for the divisiveness and exploitation that is propagated by a global trade economy and discriminatory travel bans.
Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Ethiopia. In February 2021 she completed her first permanent public art sculpture “A Resurrection in Four Stanzas” in Santa Monica, CA. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections.
April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999. She lives in Los Angeles.
Photo credit: “A Resurrection in Four Stanzas” Santa Monica, CA 2021 by April Banks. Photo by Leroy Hamilton.
2021 Award Recipients
NYUGEN E. SMITH
Jersey City, NJ
Nyugen E. Smith (he/him) is a first-generation Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Through performance, found object sculpture, mixed media drawing, painting, video, photo and writing, Smith deepens his knowledge of historical and present-day conditions of Black African descendants in the diaspora. Trauma, spiritual practices, language, violence, memory, architecture, landscape and climate change are primary concerns in his practice. He holds a BA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Photo credit: Bundlehouse: FS Mini No.2, Mixed media and found object sculpture, 31" X 18.5" X 18.5" (2019). Courtesy of the artist
TIA BLAKE (MISS HE)
Atlanta, GA
Tia Blake, aka Miss He (they/she) in the local Atlanta and Athens, GA drag scene, is a non-binary femme performer who explores ideas of femininity through fashion aesthetics of the 80's and 90's, cartoons and anime while also focusing on social justice in the communities they occupy. When you see Miss He perform, you can expect looks, twirls, bops, and a good ass time!
Photo credit: Miss He, Courtesy of the artist
LAJUNÉ MCMILLIAN
New York, NY
LaJuné (they/them) is a New Media Artist, Maker, and Creative Technologist living in New York. They are dedicated to making art abstracted from their personal experiences. They have created pieces that integrate performance, virtual reality, and physical computing to question our current use of technology and forms of communication. Their art is part of their research centered around creating Technology and Mediums that are inherently intersectional allowing communities that have ignored to have a space to be recognized, loved, accepted and heard. Most of their work is about interconnection, and experiencing life beyond the material world. They have had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, MakerFaire, National Sawdust, Liberty Science Center, Chelsea Film Festival, Creative Tech Week and Weird Reality. They are also the Lead Character Animator for NeuroSpeculative Afrofeminism which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and is currently touring at festivals including SXSW and Tribeca Film Festival.
Photo credit: Black Movement Project, courtesy of the artist
Year End Review
$45,000
No-strings-attached funding awarded to artists.
$204,950
Exhibition & project development, production and execution.
180+
Hours of professional, production, & project support.
This programs was supported in part by the City of Atlanta Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs.
