Stamps Alums Awarded Prestigious Kresge Artist Fellowship
We are thrilled to announce this year’s 2024 Kresge Arts Fellowship cohort in Live Arts, Film, and Music, which includes Stamps School alums Razi Jafri (MFA ‘22) and Katy Dresner (BFA ‘15).
Razi Jafri is a documentary filmmaker and producer. His work focuses on race, religion, immigration, democracy, and human rights. Razi’s films include “Hamtramck, USA,” which made its world première at the SXSW Film Festival (2020), “Ashura in Detroit,” which premiered at the Freep Film Festival (2021), and “Three Chaplains,” an ITVS grantee which is scheduled for a PBS national broadcast in November 2023. His projects have received support from the Ford Foundation, The Knight Foundation, The Doris Duke Foundation, ITVS (Independent Television Service), CAAM (Center for Asian American Media) The Kresge Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, ISF (Islamic Scholarship Fund) and more. Razi received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Salzburg Global Forum, the Knight-Sundance Fellowship in 2020, the Sundance Producing Lab+Fellowship in 2021 – 22, and the Kresge Artist Fellowship in 2022. Razi holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and an MFA from the University of Michigan.
Katy Dresner is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist in Detroit, MI. Since 2014, Katy has brought their non-linear, experimental storytelling style to a range of narrative and documentary short films, deftly navigating the roles of editor, director, art director, and production designer. Katy’s film work has been screened at numerous festivals and broadcast nationwide on PBS, and their new media and video installation art has been exhibited worldwide. Katy is a 2024 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow, a 2019 School for Poetic Computation Detroit alumni, and a 2018 Sundance New Frontiers Detroit Fellow.
The cohort features 17 Kresge Artist Fellows in Film & Music, 7 Kresge Artist Fellows in Live Arts, 7 Gilda Awards in Film & Music, and 3 Gilda Awards in Live Arts. Awards are proportionate to the number of applications received in each category. Beyond the monetary prize, Kresge Arts in Detroit provides fellows and Gilda Award recipients access to legal and accounting support, event and exhibition opportunities, and more. Fellows are also invited to participate in a film series highlighting Detroit artists.