Meet the 2024 fellowship cohort below!
About the fellowship:
All the Farm’s a Stage is a 4-month storytelling fellowship for QTBIPOC farmworkers culminating in a virtual performance + virtual multimedia exhibit. The cohort’s community and political representatives will be invited to this final performance. Each of the 11 farmworkers will create a project about their experiences working on farms, intersecting with various aspects of the Farm Bill (such as land access, worker safety and wellbeing, wages). Our hope is to influence the 2023/2024 Farm Bill with the voices of farmworkers and landless farmers. This fellowship also aims to build relationships among the accepted cohort of farmworkers and their communities.
Possible mediums include visual art, poetry, dance & movement, comedy, archival & interview projects, video & film, zines, land or ecological art, sound & music, and whatever else you can think of! Inspired by grassroots storytelling and participatory art making such as Theatre of the Oppressed and Bread & Puppet, NOF hopes this fellowship can be a space for farmworkers to feel empowered and share their embodied knowledge. NOF will provide educational sessions about the history of the farm bill and how it impacts farmworkers. We will collectively discuss how our stories and experiences relate to the farm bill. We will guide one another in shaping and sharing our stories, as well as bring in outside facilitators/educators/artists for additional support.
If you have fellowship questions, contact Mallika Singh, NOF Organizer, at mallika@notourfarm.org
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2024 All the Farm’s a Stage
Fellowship Cohort
Ceci Pineda (they/them) is a brown queer musician, ecosystem caretaker and facilitator. Ceci sows seeds and songs for Tlalli (earth, land, and soil), our more-than-human relationships, community liberation and dreaming of new relationships-based climate justice worlds. They dream to continue growing medicine and ancestral crops among queer, trans* and BIPOC community.
Cheyenne Najee (they/any) is a farmworker living and working in the southeast. They enjoy growing heritage crops and medicinal herbs making art around ancestral traditions and joy.
I’m Cly (she/they), and I’m currently living on Coast Salish land. My family is from Angono, Rizal, Philippines. I come from artists, fisherfolk and farmers. I’m a traveling farmer with the Rainier Beach Action Coalition (RBAC). I hop around and help out Black and Brown farmers in the area; so one day I’ll be helping a farmer build a hoop-house, and then the next day I’m at a different farm harvesting for the market. I’m a caregiver in many different ways and recently been passed down the title of family historian. I love to write, do film photography, and many other crafts with plants. That’s me, as of now. I’m constantly learning and constantly Changing!
Josué D. Vásquez is a Mén Diiste (Zapotec) community organizer & artist residing on Chumash Lands (Oxnard, CA). As an organizer and artist, they draw from their experiences in the diaspora of the indigenous migrant communities residing across the Central Coast.
Julia Rocha is a non-binary chicanx artist, educator and budding land steward. Raised in Tongva territory known as North East LA and based in Lenape land, known as Brooklyn NY, Julia works as an urban farmer at Bushwick Grows Community Farm, practicing regenerative agriculture to grow culturally relevant food and medicine for community. Julia, who performs under the stage name “Chispa,” makes music that is grounded in an ever-expanding exploration of their voice, a love of traditional and popular music from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as their own experience as a queer urban farmer remembering relationships of reciprocity with the land.
juju (They/Them/Nil) is an educator, farmer, rootworker, and intuitive artist from the Deep South. Raised on a lineage of land work, they are passionate about developing projects that bridge Black-centered decolonization methods and Indigenous-led climate knowledge. juju embraces traditional arts, storytelling, and medicines as a way of understanding their heritage and sharing global solidarity struggles across the Diaspora.
Kim Sheu – Kim is located in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently works for a food access and agriculture nonprofit. She serves as a member of her union bargaining committee.
Leila Rezvani – Leila is a queer/nonbinary Iranian-American farmer living on Pocomtuc and Nipmuc land in Chesterfield, Massachusetts. They co-manage Keshtyar Seed, a small-scale seed farm focusing on native plants and SWANA heritage crops, and have been a farmworker for about 10 years.
Miguel M. Morales grew up in Texas working as a migrant and seasonal farmworker. Selected as a finalist for the 2023-2026 Poet Laureate of Kansas, he is a two-time Lambda Literary Fellow and an alum of VONA/Voices and of the Macondo Writers Workshops.
Miguel’s work appears in the anthologies: Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland, Cuentos del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland, From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction, The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, in Duende Journal, Acentos Review, Green Mountains Review, Texas Poetry Review, Hawai’i Review, and World Literature Today, among others.
Miguel is the co-editor of Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando, Fat & Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, and of the Farmworker Portfolio in the latest issue of The Common Journal.
Miguel has earned several awards including the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Award. Follow Miguel as @TrustMiguel on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Richelle Acosta – I am a Filipinx farmer and creative currently living in Charleston, South Carolina. I have been involved in urban agriculture & education projects for the past 5 years, and I have recently begun working on a production farm this past season. I am passionate about culturally significant food and medicine, as crops and recipes are essential tools that can strongly carry on traditions, culture, and identities in the diaspora. As a queer farmer in the South, I find my place in this work through food, my relationship with the crops, and my family’s history. One of my favorite parts about farming is being able to share the produce with my family and hearing their stories of how they would eat the same things in the Philippines! I really enjoy cooking and also work part-time as a chef for a non-profit (and tackling all day cooking projects to share with my loved ones!).
Vania Galicia (she/her/they/them) is a 25 year old, brown, queer, UnDACAmented woman. She is an urban farmer, educator, youth facilitator and community organizer. Her family migrated to Willimantic when she was 3 years old, and she has resided there since. Throughout her life she has focused on advocating for immigrant’s rights and local food sovereignty. From 2020-23 Vania was the community farmer for Grow Windham, where she has had the opportunity to support local urban farming initiatives and mentor other local growers. Currently, she is the director of programs at Grow Windham.
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RSVP for event here
Final performance will include live Spanish interpretation and closed captioning.
Not Our Farm 