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 2025 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
A Fort Lauderdale-based director of photography, Anthony Calix creates visually compelling work across narrative, commercial, and music videos. As a first-generation Haitian American, his storytelling explores culture, growth, and emotion. His film Reright highlights Haitian narratives, fostering cultural pride and dialogue.
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, a Broward artist, combines quilting, animation, and projection to create sensory-inclusive textile art exploring fear and transformation. Her interactive installation Blasted Belonging reimagines Lovecraftian landscapes through touchable quilted textiles.
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, a South Florida artist and arts educator, explores nostalgia and memory through altered objects. Her initiative Pathways to Light transforms personal mementos into healing artworks, fostering connection and creative expression while honoring shared human experiences.
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 creates interactive digital art and video games inspired by 90s South Florida. His project Platz merges plants with digital code in a peaceful future narrative where players cultivate hybrid gardens to repair the world.
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 (Magda Love), an Argentinean muralist, celebrates nature and humanity through large-scale public art. Her tapestry mural Branching Out, crafted with students from recycled fabrics, highlights native Florida flora and fosters community collaboration.
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 blends language and visual art in conceptual works inspired by Biblical proverbs and street art. His installation Earth Treasure features ice letterforms melting into the ocean, symbolizing the ephemerality of words and nature’s cycles.
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 focuses on South Florida’s plants and wildlife through various media. Her project Our Loving World celebrates edible plants with interactive elements like garden tours and games, promoting community resilience and respectful connection with nature.
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 explores generational trauma and cultural memory through multidisciplinary art. Her exhibition Lineage, featuring bio-art, fiber art, and video installations, examines inherited narratives shaping identities over time. Opening this July at Bailey Contemporary Arts.
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
Filipina artist Katya Neptune explores spirituality, mental health, and identity through interdisciplinary work. Her project Chronicles of Visions: Lineage visualizes ancestral connections using abstract mapping to bridge physical, emotional, and spiritual realms.
Chronicles of Visions: Descendants
“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 creates dioramas transformed into photographs exploring consumerism’s impact on the environment. Her project Sugar Coated juxtaposes whimsical candy-like landscapes with themes of overconsumption’s darker
consequences to provoke reflection on societal habits.
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.
