Celebrating the Climate Woke: Create With Us Award Winners
The Center for Cultural Power and BLD PWR are excited to announce the winners of the Climate Woke: Create With Us (2024) award opportunity! The project aims to uplift climate intersectionality and inspire individuals and communities to feel confident in being a part of climate solutions. The selected proposals offer powerful creative storytelling that uplift the themes of our Climate Woke campaign: Land Back, Black Liberation x Climate Justice, Environmental Optimism, Climate Migration/Climate Gentrification, and Climate Change’s impact on Reproductive Freedom.
We offered a $5,000 award, for short-form digital content and one $10,000 award for a longer narrative film. Through a rigorous review panel supported by staff from The Center for Cultural Power and BLD PWR, we narrowed down incredible proposals and selected the three winners who have demonstrated impeccable past work in digital media and addressing social justice issues
Congratulations to the winners of Climate Woke: Create With Us, whose environmental justice projects uplift the stories of BIPOC communities actively transforming the future on the frontlines of climate change.
Winner of Short Form Digital Content: Lily Xie
Lily Xie (she/they)
Lily Xie is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-determination for communities of color. In collaboration with local residents and grassroots organizers, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The work they create together often takes shape in animation, print media, and video. Lily is an Artist-in-Residence for the City of Boston and a member of Creative Wildfire, a national cohort of artists building a just transition. For her work in collaboration with artists and community members, Lily has been awarded grants from New England Foundation for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, the Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture Transformative Public Art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Transmedia Storytelling Initiative. Lily’s work has been displayed at the Boston Center for the Arts, Pao Arts Center, Weisner Gallery, and Unbound Visual Arts.
About the Project:
Lily’s project will use experimental stop-motion techniques to animate the story of Movement Generation and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust returning 43 acres of land to Indigenous and Black stewardship in unceded Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area. These visuals will be accompanied by a spoken narrative about the story of the land and the capacity of land rematriation to heal and restore sacred relationships with earth and ecology, as communities work for a Just Transition from the extractive economy to life-affirming, regenerative economies.
This film seeks to capture the transformative power of Land Back and collective governance of resilient community spaces as vital root-cause solutions to the current ecological crisis, which includes pandemics, extreme climate events, multiple genocides, housing insecurity, further marginalization of queer and disabled folks, and more. The site-specific stop motion animation will bring to life the inherent joy, hope, and radical possibility that lives in the land, and help us imagine a more regenerative future.
Question: What inspired you to address the struggle for climate justice in your practice?
Lily: “Environmental justice is racial justice and economic justice. In my experience organizing with working-class, immigrants, and people of color, I have seen the urgent need to mitigate climate change, fortify ourselves against climate emergency, and build better environmental futures for all of us. Working-class BIPOC living in cities are already the most vulnerable to heat, flooding, and other extreme climate events because of historic injustices and resource extraction from these communities. Liberation for all of us involves co-creating a Just Transition.”
Question: What are you most looking forward to in being part of Climate Woke: Create With Us? Or What’s the most exciting part of this opportunity?
Lily: “I'm so grateful to this program for giving us a platform to elevate the amazing work of Movement Generation and Sogorea Te' Land Trust. I am excited to deepen our relationships, and to work on an experimental work where we are using stop motion in collaboration with the land.”
Winner of Narrative Film Content: Shenny De Los Angeles
Shenny De Los Angeles and Creative Producer, Amanda Morell
Shenny De Los Angeles (she/they) is a Dominican-American writer and filmmaker. Anchored in Black Caribbean folklore, her work excavates the beauty of being alive. Her docu-short, “the ritual to beauty,” is currently available to stream on The New Yorker. The film has gone on to be nominated by the British Film Institute, receive the Grand Jury Prize at SlamDance Film Festival, and receive the LOLA Award (highlighting the experience of the Afro Diaspora) at the Philadelphia Latinx Film Festival. Shenny has been a Playwright/Performance Artist in Residence at Harlem Stage, Mabou Mines Theatre, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She has also been commissioned by The Latinx Playwright Circle, Latina Magazine, and Ceremonia, to name a few. As a part of the 2023 Netflix and LALIFF Inclusion Fellowship, Shenny developed her narrative short film: sisters by water. Their current project, "looking for zora again", focuses on the state of Florida erasing Black & Brown writers from the cultural consciousness.
Amanda Morell (she/her) is a Bronx-native of Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage, stands as a luminary in the realm of independent filmmaking and editing, renowned for her ability to craft compelling narratives that seamlessly blend elements of nature and emotion. Since having completed the MadeinNY 2020 post-production industry training program, Morell has equipped herself with expertise in industry-standard software such as Avid and DaVinci Resolve, while also gaining invaluable insights into the intricacies of post-production workflows.
Central to Morell's cinematic endeavors are the profound themes she explores, particularly the cyclical nature of memory and its enduring impact on individuals. Her distinctive storytelling has garnered widespread acclaim and support from esteemed institutions and festivals, including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, BRIC, Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival, LALIFF Fellowship Inclusion Program of 2023, GLAAD and Blackstar Film Festival 2024.
Her latest project, "Colors We Made," stands as a testament to her creative vision and narrative prowess. As the sole writer of this short film, Morell has garnered recognition from esteemed platforms such as the Shorty Awards' "Elevate Creators Fund 2023" and CoverFly's "Screencraft Film Fund 2023,'' where it has been shortlisted and selected as a second-round contender. Most recently the film has been commissioned and awarded by the Bronx Council of the Arts 2024 to create a community engagement event centering the film's theme on Maternal Mortality.
About the Project:
For Create with Us, Amanda and Shenny will create a poetic meditative film titled “Hija de Florinda” centered around land restoration and the intrinsic connection between protecting the land and protecting our children. In this story, we follow the journey of Young Naomi in Everglades, Florida. She learns from her grandmother, Florinda, about the ancestral practices of caring for the land and nurturing grief in the face of environmental challenges. As the story unfolds, we grow to understand Florinda’s ancestral teachings of controlled fires and the importance of embracing fire rather than suppressing it. As the prescribed burns ignite from Florinda’s hands, an archival portal is birthed. Blending elements of the supernatural with historical footage detailing real-life Dominican Farmer and Abolitionist Mama Tingo, we discover that Florinda is a descendant of Mama Tingo. Ultimately, Florinda is taken by the wildfire she had spent years warning outsiders about, forcing young Naomi into displacement. Years later, Naomi returns to her grandmother’s land as an adult, committed to restoring the life that once was here and always belonged to her family.
Question: What inspired you to address the struggle for climate justice in your practice?
Shenny: “Moving back to my hometown in Central Florida inspired me to address climate justice in my work. Florida is such a complicated beauty. I’ve built relationships with tender people surviving violent environments. I’ve witnessed injustice force people into activism and the only way to tend to that grief was by deepening their relationship to the land/to the soil. Currently, Ron DeSantis just signed a bill erasing even the language to call in Climate Change. This joke that Florida may be underwater soon is becoming more and more real as extreme floods hit South Florida. This is the time to reflect on what we’re seeing especially because there’s such a misunderstanding of the South with Black and Brown people’s relationship to this land. Despite what folks say, Florida has such a beautiful ecosystem and it’s our birthright to live here. Connecting with more farmers, activists, documentarians, and locals, has deeply inspired me to listen to Mother Nature- to advocate for her rights, to dream deeper for the South, and to create through my work the version of Florida I know is possible.”
Amanda: “Growing up in poverty really broke my heart open to the reality that many of us are systematically oppressed. Addressing the struggle for climate justice is deeply interconnected with principles of fighting the injustices in our own communities as well as educating others on our experience. I feel like for me, film is a space where I am able to share my experience in a way that is rooted in deep healing and uplifting the people.”
Question: Who are your favorite revolutionary/activist artists and storytellers?
Shenny: “There are so many revolutionary activist artists and storytellers that move me. I have to call in Mama Tingo first and foremost as her story is not the beginning of the revolution but it affirms protecting your community by fighting for the land you own is not a new concept. Especially for Black farmers across the diaspora whose committed activism cost them their lives. Mama Tingo should have been able to finish out her life tending to her land but in a public protest of her murder in 1974, The Dominican government was forced to return the land to over 300 impoverished farmers. Calling in our message for this film, there is an intrinsic connection between protecting the land and protecting our children, I think of Mama Tingo and the legacy she left for the future generations of farmers and their families. I also think about Zora Neale Hurston who so fearlessly wrote and documented exactly what she was seeing in her community. When I think of how one can show the beauty of Florida, I see Zora. No matter what the critiques were about her work or even gossip about her personality, she stood ten toes down in her art because even if outsiders didn’t understand- she confidently trusted herself to write about her community while honoring the sacredness of their voices. A truthteller forreal. Last but not least, Ntozake Shange. I am a daughter of Ntozake. She taught me poetry. She showed me the power of the tongue. of testimony. of living. of Surviving. Flaw and all. Womanhood. Loving. at all costs. to be in the body. Wild Woman. Free. to find your voice and sing what’s living inside of you. “
Amanda: “Oh, I know this is not going to be a top pick for everyone, but I love Tupac (haha). He was just so real about his endured experience and shared his voice in the best way he knew how. He was relatable but also spoke so loud on injustices the people were and have always been facing. He was poetic in his delivery but was also so grounded in who he was. I always respected him as a man, as an artist and as an activist.”
Learn more about Shenny and Amanda’s work at https://www.shennydelosangeles.com/ and https://www.iiritufilms.com/.
View all of our Climate Woke films by visiting our YouTube channel, or on our website ClimateWoke. Earth.
