chromatic black™, a collective of 10,000 + Black artists and activists dedicated to building cultural power and transformational justice through storytelling, announced today the winners of the 2022 Ida B. Wells Fund, a competition created to support Black creatives with an investment to develop new original works that disrupt the master narrative. The 20 finalists will receive access to master classes and guidance, and the five winners will receive $15,000 for film project development, in addition to mentorship, master classes, project scaffolding, and community engagement opportunities.
“We’re thrilled to announce the winners selected for the 2022 Ida B. Wells Fund,” said Abeni Bloodworth and Angela Harmon, co-founders of chromatic black. “As we move toward a more pluralistic society, the fund and the work it advances helps us collectively reclaim the truth of our past, make sense of our present, and unlock imagination about our collective future.”
Honorary Chairperson Paula J. Giddings said, “Journalist Ida B. Wells would be proud of the legacy, found in these films, that she helped to create: media images that carry a message of pride, resilience, and the fierce power of unhidden truths.”
Screenwriter and producer of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” Malcolm Spellman said, “This fund is an evolution of our growth and power as creatives to invest in stories that subvert the master narrative.”
The five winners and their projects include:
Clarke Phillips : Clarke Phillips received her BFA in Filmmaking from the North Carolina School of the Arts with a concentration in film directing. Clarke’s work is often inspired by past and present events involving non-white groups in America.
Sweet Pea
A middle-aged photographer is visited by a person from her past that awakens old memories.
Christine Swanson:Christine Swanson is a visionary filmmaker from Detroit.
Ava Cherry
A deep dive into the world of a trailblazer ahead of her time, a Black woman who was always a part of pop culture even if the world didn’t know her.
Bilal Motley:Bilial Motley is a writer, producer, actor, father and husband from Greater Philadelphia.
Midnight Oil
Located in an affluent, majority white county, Chester, PA is the home of an unprecedented cluster of industrial polluting facilities.
Cameron Carr :Cameron Carr is born and bred Harlemite, Filmmaker and Creative Producer based out of NYC.
Harlem Bebop
A conflicted, ambitious Black college senior attempts to navigate the postgrad corporate world as well as escape the looming shadow of his parent’s mistakes and the impact they played on his family.
Ladan Osman:Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Whiting Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. Ladan lives in New York.
Sam Takes Wing
This short film is an intimate, interview-based series of portraits that will show Sam’s path during and after American Idol.
The 20 finalists of the 2022 Ida B. Wells Fund include; David Fortune, Odu Adamu, E.G. Bailey and Sha Cage, Deante’ Gray, Anthony Jamari Thomas, Morgan Mathews, Justice Jamal Jones, Zenzele Ojore, Shahari Moore, Emilio Subia, DeShawn White, Amelia Carter, Nova Cypress Black, Leeya Jackson, Isaac Yowman, Charles Keyes, Kwakiutl L Dreher, Dwight Wilson II, Jessica Jones, and Chinwe Okorie.
Past winners of the 2021 Ida B. Wells Fund include Lamard W Cher-Aime’s ‘Captain Zero: The Animated Series’, which speaks to the importance of mental health awareness in the Black communities, Christine Swanson’s FANNIE, a Bronze Lens award-winning short film about civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, featuring Academy-award nominated actress, Aunjanue Ellis.
Ida B. Wells Fund honors the legacy of a trailblazing American investigative journalist who chronicled the horrific violence of lynching against African-Americans in the 19th and 20th century as well as debunked the narratives that fueled violence. The competition is administered by chromatic black™ and is designed as the beginning of a long-term partnership between chromatic black™, the artist-activist, and the broader chromatic black™ collective. The Fund provides up to $25,000 in project investment, supplemented by additional development services for original work.
chromatic black is a collective of 10, 000+ Black artists – activists across a spectrum of creative disciplines. Our vision is the reclamation of STORY as a public common and our mission is to disrupt the master narrative with good storytelling. We work across several platforms – art, education, film, television, live and digital entertainment – to bring about cultural change.