The 2026 Albert M. Greenfield
Residency at FringeArts
In partnership with the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, FringeArts is proud to announce a new creative residency program: the Albert M. Greenfield Residency at FringeArts.
This program is for Philadelphia-based individual artists or collectives who are developing new work that pushes, redefines, or blurs artistic boundaries. Designed for artists at any point in their careers, the residency program will support three projects per year at any stage of development, from idea generation to final staging.
The three artists selected for this residency will receive residency funding, access to the FringeArts space to develop their work, mentorship opportunities from FringeArts staff and outside voices, and opportunities to connect and cross-pollinate with other artists from their residency cohort.
The inaugural year of the Albert M. Greenfield Residency at FringeArts will be supported by a grant from the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, which strengthens the fabric of life in the City of Philadelphia by empowering grantees in areas of arts and culture, education, human services, and civic initiatives.
MEET THE RESIDENTS
Brett Ashley Robinson
Brett Ashley Robinson is an actor/director/educator in Philadelphia. Following the lineage of adrienne maree brown and Audre Lorde, she believes that radical transformation happens by truly being present and available to the world around you. She is a PEW Fellow, Barrymore Award Winner, and a recipient of the PEN America/Jean Stein Oral History Grant for Re-Enactment. Robinson is also a company member of Applied Mechanics and a member of the Wilma Theater’s HotHouse.
Her GRAFA project, Leiomyoma, is a drag cabaret starring Leio, a pop-princess fibroid performing her final concert the night before her host’s myomectomy. Born of excess estrogen, Leio demands to know why she was put here, insisting on her feminist right to exist. If she wasn’t meant to be here, why did the doctors take so long to find her? Isn’t it her right to grow? To her host, she has given much: strength through pain, raw ambition, and confidence as her host steps further into self-actualization. All it costs is some blood, pain, and maybe her host’s life. Leio, is the subject and object of the failures of the medical field concerning Black women’s health. As Leio reckons with her death, we can imagine a better life for her host.
Michael J. Love
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist, scholar, and educator whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice to critically engage Black cultural pasts and “rhythm dreams” of futurity. Love’s work has been supported by the National Center for Choreography-Akron (OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and ARCOS Dance (Austin, TX). His scholarship has been published in b20: an online journal and Choreographic Practices.
With his latest work rhy/ntology, which will be developed through the GRAFA program, he remains committed to his positioning of rhythm as an embodied-intellectual method for researching Black cultural histories as he shifts his focus from working “with and through” rhythm to working “as,” or becoming, rhythm. During his residency, Love will continue to shape rhy/ntology to be a dynamic and synesthetic engagement with video, sound capturing, and live-composition technologies that allow a small ensemble of tap artists to arrange and play an original house music composition. Ultimately, rhy/ntology encompasses Love’s embodied, rhythm-based exploration of legacy, futurity, and labor in the name of liberation and pleasure. Love hopes to activate, honor, and perhaps contribute to Philadelphia’s rich history of tap dance through this project.
Anissa Weinraub & Chantelle Bateman
Anissa Weinraub & Chantelle Bateman are theater-makers, educators, media-makers and organizers living and working in Lenapehoking / Philadelphia. Their cultural work sits at the intersection of creativity, community-building, and political transformation. The pair are the founding members and co-artistic directors of Practice Space Collective, where they employ a cultural organizing strategy, using art to deepen community relationships and support social justice work.
Through the GRAFA program, they will develop Speculative Horizons: Philadelphia 2076. It is the next iteration of their collective’s working thesis – that storytelling and theater can be a literal Practice Space for experimenting and creating interventions that spark social, cultural and economic change. Their last project ended with the audience and performers taking a collective leap away from the death-making structures of today’s world and toward a yet-to-be-created world of equity, abundance and safety. This next project asks: Where exactly are we going? What might the next 100 years require? Weinraub & Bateman hope that the script they co-create as part of this project can serve as a blueprint to orient and anchor ongoing strategy within a larger shared vision for the future of Philadelphia devised by community leaders.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Stay tuned to updates on their works in process and opportunities for public showings.
SPONSORED BY
The Albert M. Greenfield Residency at FringeArts is made possible by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation.