Meet The 2025 Artist Innovation Grantees
Meet The 2025 Artist Innovation Grantees
Broward Cultural Division’s Artist Innovation grant provides direct funds to professional and established artists of all disciplines for new and experimental art projects.
The program is designed to encourage risk-taking, exploration of artistic pursuits, career advancement, interactivity, and sustained commitment to artistic work.
Selected artists are required to produce an event that is free and accessible for the community. Learn more about the 2024 selected grant recipients and their projects below.
Awards are provided in partnership with the Community Foundation of Broward. To learn more about the Artist Innovation grant and the upcoming cycle application workshops and deadline, visit Broward.org/Arts/Funding.
Anthony Calix
Anthony Calix is a Director of Photography based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a dynamic portfolio spanning narrative, commercial, and music video projects. As a first-generation Haitian American, Anthony draws on his heritage to tell stories that explore culture, growth, and emotional depth, while also creating visually compelling work across diverse genres.
Moving Frames: A Haitian Renaissance
“Moving Frames: A Haitian Renaissance” is a visionary film screening hosted in Broward County, featuring Reright, a powerful film directed by Anthony Calix and Frantzy Moreau, alongside works by talented Haitian filmmakers in the diaspora. This event highlights the rich narratives and artistry emerging from Haitian culture, fostering pride, dialogue, and representation within the community. By bridging traditional storytelling with contemporary themes, it seeks to inspire cultural appreciation and celebrate the voices shaping the Haitian Renaissance.
Jen Clay
Jen Clay is a Broward-based artist specializing in sensory-inclusive textile art, blending quilting, animation, and projection to explore themes of fear, anxiety, and transformation. Represented by Emerson Dorsch Gallery, she has showcased work at institutions such as the Norton Museum of Art and Locust Projects.
Blasted Belonging
“Blasted Belonging” invites viewers into a stormy landscape of quilted textiles that can be touched and repositioned, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space.” This installation will function as a soft set design, allowing viewers to embody characters experiencing the unknown emanating from a well that mutates the surrounding flora into otherworldly forms. This exhibit will be showcased at the Girls’ Club Collection.
Donna Haynes
Donna Haynes is a South Florida-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores nostalgia and memory through altered objects and artifacts to create new narratives. With over 20 years of teaching experience, she has served as the Visual Art Curriculum Supervisor K-12 for Broward County Public Schools for the past decade. Dedicated to sustaining the arts, she advocates for robust arts programs, supporting educators and schools to maximize student access to arts education.
Pathways to Light – How Art Can Transform Grief
“Pathways to Light – How Art Can Transform Grief” is an initiative helping individuals process loss by transforming personal mementos into meaningful creations that honor loved ones and provide healing through creative expression. The works reflect shared human experiences, fostering connection and inviting viewers to reflect on their own memories.
Samuel Lopez De Victoria
Samuel Lopez De Victoria’s artistic practice centers on creating video games with interactive digital artwork infused with vibrant, neon aesthetics with soundscapes. Inspired by 90s South Florida, Samuel combines bold vector illustrations with innovative game technology to develop immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences that engage players in acts of thoughtfulness and empathy.
Platz
“Platz” is a video game art project with a peaceful narrative based on our far future, where natural plants have merged with digital computer code to create new sustainable forms of constructive power. Players are tasked with the job of a Scaper, an individual responsible for the growth and cultivation of these unique plants to hack into and repair the state of the world. Players will do this using a combination of gardening and ethical hacking tools while maintaining grow lights, music baths, code compressors, and more. Players can also alter their planted code to create new hybrids in their gardens.
Maria Magdalena Marcenaro
Maria Magdalena Marcenaro, also known as Magda Love, is a distinguished Argentinean visual artist and muralist based in the United States. Renowned for painting one of the largest murals in NYC, her captivating artwork celebrates the beauty of nature and the depth of the human experience. Marcenaro’s work has made a significant impact globally, collaborating with prestigious entities such as Google, Red Bull, W Hotels and Johnnie Walker, leaving an indelible mark on cityscapes worldwide.
Branching Out
“Branching Out” is a large-scale public art tapestry mural celebrating native Florida plants and fauna, crafted from recycled fabrics. Marcenaro will work with South Plantation High School Magnet students to create the mural which will be displayed in various locations around Plantation and Broward County.
Daniel Marosi
Daniel Marosi is a resident artist at Studio 18 Art Complex and a recipient of multiple Broward County Cultural Division Grants. His interest in the intersection of language and visual art is reflected in multi-layered conceptual and material processes. Often influenced by Biblical proverbs and street art, Marosi’s compositions challenge conventional forms and invite deeper contemplation of the written word’s impact on our subconscious.
Earth Treasure
“Earth Treasure” features oversized letterforms made entirely of ice are placed on Fort Lauderdale Beach. As the ice melts over the course of a day, the words are absorbed into the ocean.
Stephanie McMillan
Stephanie McMillan lives and works in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she is a third-generation resident. After many years producing editorial cartoons, syndicated comic strips and graphic novels, she now focuses on visual art in various media depicting local plants and wildlife. Recent solo exhibitions include the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, FL and Flamingo Gardens in Davie, FL.
Our Loving World: A Celebration of South Florida’s Edible and Medicinal Plants
“Our Loving World: A Celebration of South Florida’s Edible and Medicinal Plants,” a collection of artworks in various media, will be exhibited, distributed as free “treasure hunt” prints, and incorporated into several public events with interactive elements such as garden tours, games, and coloring pages. The project’s intertwined components focus on care for land, getting to know plants who sustain us, community resilience, and respectful connection with and within the living world.
Kelcie McQuaid
Kelcie McQuaid is a South Florida-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of generational cycles, inherited narratives and collective cultural memory. Influenced by relationships from past to present, her art reflects how connections evolve, dissolve, or transcend over time. Using mediums like paint, fiber art, bio-art, and video installation, she captures the shifting perspectives that come with growth and age, creating intricate, tactile pieces that delve into the emotional textures of human relationships.
Lineage
“Lineage” is a multidisciplinary exhibition that explores the complex and often interwoven themes of generational trauma, familial habits, and the cultural legacies that shape identities. Incorporating a variety of mediums including bio-art, portrait drawing, fiber art, mixed media, kinetic sculpture, and video installation, it illuminates the complexities of family history and the inheritance of behaviors and memories. The exhibition will be on view at Bailey Contemporary Arts in Pompano Beach July 18 – September 14, 2025.
Katya Neptune
Katya Neptune is a Filipina diaspora (b.1976 Angeles City, Philippines) based in South Florida. Her interdisciplinary and socially engaged practice explores the intersections of spirituality, mental health, and cultural narratives. Neptune has exhibited her work in various public spaces, such as the Cornell and Coral Springs Museum of Art, and has received several awards
Chronicles of Visions: Lineage
“Chronicles of Visions: Lineage” explores the spiritual and ancestral connections that shape identity, weaving personal visions into a collective history. This body of work visualizes the intricate interplay of mind and spirit through abstract mapping, connecting the physical, emotional, and spiritual realms. “Lineage” creates a visual dialogue that bridges the inner and outer world by engaging with language, memory, and the unconscious. It invites viewers to reflect on the fluidity of these connections, offering a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationships that define our existence.
Samantha Salzinger
Samantha Salzinger is an artist, filmmaker, and educator who creates intricate handcrafted dioramas that transform into photographs and videos, exploring themes of consumerism, environmental degradation, and overconsumption.
Sugar Coated
“Sugar Coated” is a multidisciplinary project that uses handcrafted dioramas, photography, and video to delve into the seductive yet destructive nature of consumer culture. Blending whimsical, candy-coated landscapes with underlying themes of environmental and societal consequences, the work reveals the darker realities hidden behind overconsumption and advertising. Rooted in the traditions of Romantic landscape painting, it juxtaposes beauty and decay to provoke reflection on our habits and their impact on the planet.
