Each year, Roulette responds directly to artists’ needs for money, space, and support by awarding commissions, residencies, fellowships, and generous production stipends to extraordinary artists — cumulatively totaling over $2.2M and counting. For our 2024-2025 season, we are proud to present awards to a cohort of ten incredible and distinctive artists at various stages in their careers, who will be premiering new work or honing ongoing projects over the coming year.
Residencies
Leo Chang (he/him) is a Korean improviser, composer and performer. Born in Seoul, Leo lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai, until moving to the United States in 2011. His art is an act of home-making inspired by various musical and ideological movements that have sought to question power dynamics and imagine freedom within egalitarian possibilities. His primary methods are free improvisation, written text, graphical notation, and electronic processing. Leo’s projects have been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Korea Foundation, Roulette Intermedium, Arts for Art, Center for Performance Research, EMPAC at Rensselaer, and Chashama, among others. He holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Lester St. Louis is a NYC-born and based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator. Lester has worked in, performed and created in artistic environments in The United States, Canada, South America, Europe and China with groups and artists such as Dré Hočevar Trio, Jaimie Branch Fly or Die, Ensemble Adapter, TAK Ensemble and many more. As a composer, Lester has been commissioned by artists such as the JACK Quartet, Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw, RAGE THORMBONES, Lauren Cauley and others. In the near future Lester will be continuing to develop groups such as MADD (with Dré Hočevar and Leafar) as well as TRANSFER (with Jordan Balaber, Daniel Brew and Rocío Bolaños) along with many new ventures.
Nava Dunkelman is a percussionist and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY, and born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. Her musical approach is innovative and dynamic, combining virtuosity and intuition. Meticulous in an intrinsic way, she uses her distinctive sound palette to explore and give life to a vast spectrum of musical possibilities. Nava’s current projects are electro-percussion experimental noise duo IMA with Amma Ateria, and percussion duo NOMON with her sister Shayna Dunkelman. She has performed and collaborated with Angélica Negrón, Brandon Seabrook, Du Yun, ÉMU, Fred Frith, gabby fluke-mogul, Ikue Mori, John Zorn, Pauchi Sasaki, William Winant, and many others.
David Leon is a Miami-born saxophonist, woodwinds player, composer, and improviser living in Brooklyn, NY. His work is guided by a persistent search for vitality through autonomy, contradiction, hyperbole, and humor. Most recently, David was named a 2024 Music Composition Fellow by the CINTAS Foundation, an organization supporting Cubans in the arts.
David’s current projects include Bird’s Eye, a trio with Doyeon Kim and Lesley Mok that released an album on Pyroclastic Records in March 2024, and Locomotive, a double horns-guitars-percussion trio co-led alongside Adam O’Farrill.
His work has been recognized by The Jazz Gallery, New Music USA, Metropolis Ensemble, Detroit Composer’s Project, Compositum Musicae Novae, the National Youngarts Foundation, and the ASCAP Foundation.
Commissions
No Land is a poet and artist from NYC. Her work evokes a reverence for mystery in the forms of her paintings, drawings, photojournalistic works, films, & poet-performances with musicians. Her art & poetry books include: Authentic Artifice (Newest York Press, 2018) and The Velvet Wire, co-authored with Anne Waldman (Granary Books, 2024). She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Poetry Project, Giorno Poetry Systems (William Burroughs Bunker), Rewire Festival (Netherlands), Jazzfest Berlin, Tribes Gallery, Roulette, The Kennedy Center, with the Allen Ginsberg Estate, on the street corners of NYC & other venues. Her visual art & cinema works have appeared at Fotografiska Museum, LaMaMa Galleria, PhotoSaintGermain (Paris), Tribes Gallery, Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Naropa University & elsewhere. She works closely with her beloved collaborators: Anne Waldman, Luke Stewart, Oliver Ray, Daniel Carter & other special spirits.
Emilio Modeste is a saxophonist and composer from NYC. Best known for his time with trumpet great Wallace Roney, he currently tours with Stanley Clarke, Cindy Blackman Santana, and Dezron Douglas. Equally adept on tenor and soprano, Modeste’s singular shining tone and sense of melody creates a gravitational field that pulls in even the most reluctant of listeners. This quality can be heard on Dezron Douglas’ Atalaya, as well as in his feature on Stanley Clarke’s upcoming album, Last Train To Sanity. A student of the great drummer and producer Lenny White, Modeste explores endless styles of musical expression in his artistry.
Elias Stemeseder is a pianist, keyboard instrumentalist, electronic musician and composer with an interest in synthesizing musical thought, discipline and tools from diverse time periods and geographic origins to create original sonic ordering principles. Performing on historic and contemporary (keyboard-) instruments, Stemeseder is part of the ensembles Stemeseder-Lillinger, Neon Dilemma, WRENS and the Elias Stemeseder Trio. He also works alongside luminaries such as Anna Webber, Adam O’Farrill, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Thomas Morgan and Peter Evans, performs as a soloist, and is a recording artist for Intakt Records.
Dreamcrusher is a New York City-based musician and artist, who describes their work as ‘nihilist queer revolt musik.’ Dreamcrusher’s work is at once personal and abstract, revealing and antagonistic; performances and recordings shift between genres while subjecting the characteristic elements—melodies, beats, instrumentation—to distortion until the point of transformation. Dreamcrusher has released dozens of recordings with labels such as PTP, Fire Talk, and Corpus, as well as on Bandcamp and other online platforms. Dreamcrusher is also a member of the duo Centennial Gardens with King Vision Ultra.
Dance Awards
Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith are New York-based feminist artists whose partnership spans the last two decades. Their collaboration deconstructs neoliberal images of female objectification and presents new versions, coming from the potentiality of movement to express inner landscape.
Their most recent works include Durational Duet (Invisible Dog 2024, to be archived in The New York Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Division), Zero Station (River-to-River 2023 and New York Live Arts 2024), (gloria rehearsal (excerpt)) LIVE (Jane Hotel 2022), gloria rehearsal (excerpt) (Baryshnikov Arts Center 2022), Gloria (Abrons Arts Center 2021, NYLA 2022).
Residencies/Awards: 2023/2024 LMCC Extended Life Award, 2021/2022 Artists in Residence Movement Research, 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship Finalists, 2020/2021 Jerome Foundation AIRSpace Residency Abrons Art Center, 2019 FCA Emergency Grant, 2019 BACSpace Residency Baryshnikov Art Center, 2018 Family Residency Mt. Tremper Arts, 2018 Bessie Schonberg Fellows The Yard, 2018 DiP Artists Gibney, Featured in The New York Times “Best Dance of 2017”, 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance (Molly Lieber), 2016 LMCC Process Space, 2013 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award Nomination Emerging Choreographer, 2013 NYFA Fellow Finalist Award. of the Mertz Gilmore Late Stage Production Stipend.
Get tickets to their new work, Prairie Dawn, premiering at Roulette, Nov 14-16.
NYSCA Commission
Sylvie Courvoisier is a Brooklyn-based pianist and composer. Along with interpreting the music of composers from Stravinsky to John Zorn, she leads a forward-minded jazz trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen and her new sextet CHIMAERA feat Wadada Leo Smith and Christian Fennesz. She has also pursued ear-opening collaborations with such avant-jazz luminaries as Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, John Zorn, Ned Rothenberg, Ellery Eskelin, Susie Ibarra, Fred Frith, Mark Feldman and Mary Halvorson.
Get tickets for her commission on Oct 23: Poppy Seeds, a new quartet with former Awarded Artist Patricia Brennan, Dan Weiss, Thomas Morgan, and Cory Smythe.
Established in 1983 with first-time support from the Jerome Foundation, Roulette’s Awarded Artists Programs are generously supported by The Jerome Foundation, The New York Community Trust, The New York State Council on the Arts, The Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Awarded Artists are selected through a nomination process with support from Roulette’s Artistic Advisory Council. Nominators are chosen by Roulette’s Artistic Director each year to be representative of the multiplicity of styles, genres, and identities of artists that have presented work on Roulette’s stage since the organization’s founding. Panelists are artists at varying stages in their careers who are deeply familiar with the field and Roulette’s creative community—and as artists, they are uniquely sympathetic to the difficulties that emerging artists face. The panelists for this year’s commissions and residencies included Selwa Abt, Anna Webber, Shahzad Ismaily, and Kassa Overall.