Artists + Practitioners + Organizations

Meet the artists, practitioners, and organizations! Far South/Border North awarded funding to support artists and cultural practitioners working in disciplines from performing arts, visual arts, music, film and media, and literature to multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms.

Far South/Border North Round I Grant Recipients

Our Round I grant recipients include about 60 artists and cultural practitioners from San Diego and Imperial counties. Round I grant recipients began developing their campaigns in June 2023, and are now implemented those campaigns through May 2024.

Kendrick "Mr. Lyrical Groove" Dial

San Diego County

Kendrick Dial, also known as Mr. Lyrical Groove, is a renaissance man with a mission to blend mental health and social justice art. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Africana Studies/Psychology from San Diego State University and a Master's in Social Work from the University of South California. Dial is an accomplished spoken word artist who published his first poetry book, Da JOYNT, in 2005. He has worked with the poetry collective Collective Purpose for over ten years, hosting one of Southern California's highest-attended open mic events, ELEVATED. He has collaborated with several arts-based organizations to perform and produce shows that inspire, challenge, educate, and entertain, including BkSoul, Playwrights Project, and Ira Aldridge Theatre. He is also a teaching artist with the Old Globe and recently completed a veteran playwriting workshop with the La Jolla Playhouse, where he is working on his two-person production.

Zaquia Mahler Salinas

San Diego County

Zaquia Mahler Salinas is a dance artist invested in movement-art as an act of reclamation and world-building. She has worked with many organizations in San Diego in various artistic, administrative, and teaching capacities. Zaquia has had the opportunity to engage dance communities worldwide, including a 2019 residency in Bethlehem, Palestine, focusing on dance as a form of cultural, embodied resistance. In 2018, she founded DISCO RIOT, a nonprofit movement-arts organization that supports local dance and provides creative possibilities for advancing the scene in San Diego. Zaquia is a lifelong learner and holds a bachelor's in Dance with honors from the University of California Santa Barbara (2011), a Master's in Dance: Creative Practice with honors from Saint Mary's College of California (2017), a certificate in Nonprofit Management from the University of San Diego (2021), and a California Single Subject Teaching Credential for Dance (2022).

Ramel Wallace

San Diego County

Ramel Wallace is a multi-dispensary artist working at the intersection of creativity, community, and technology. He is the Senior Community Manager at BAM, a public relations and marketing firm for venture-backed companies. Wallace is responsible for researching, developing, and managing BAM events with key internal and external stakeholders. He has been a recording artist for over fifteen years, leading him to host CreativeMornings/SanDiego and become a San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art board member. Before BAM, Wallace was the CEO and Founder of thChrch and continues to live at the intersection of art, tech, and creativity. His roots in Hip Hop have allowed him to turn his ability to control a crowd into an ability to run an organization and lead a community. He is currently the CEO of The Holyfield, an organization that focuses on creativity and identity.

Johnnierenee Nelson

San Diego County

Award-winning poet and playwright Johnnierenee Nia Nelson, aka the Kwanzaa Poet, has written and published six books of poetry. Ms. Nelson is a poet/teacher with California Poets in the Schools and San Diego's Border Voices Project and a performance poet who has presented readings and workshops from Cairo, Egypt, to Vancouver, British Columbia. She also appeared in the Emmy-Award-winning documentary "Lighting the Way." In 2017, Nelson received a Fellowship from the Livingkindness Foundation to attend the International Women Writers Guild's 40th Annual Summer Conference in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She serves as the San Diego County Area Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools and as Poet Laureate of the World Beat Cultural Center in San Diego's Balboa Park.

Neil Kendricks

San Diego County

Neil Kendricks is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator. Kendricks earned a Master's in Television, Film, and New Media from San Diego State University in 2006. Kendricks launched his mixed-media "Strange Fruit" drawing series as a participant in the Art Produce Gallery's 2020 Artist-in-Residence program. The exhibition "Mirror, Mirror: Lights, Camera, Dreams!" at Bread and Salt Gallery showcased his short films and storyboards in 2021. Kendricks' exhibition "Temple of Story" which combined large-scale drawings with audio recordings of his short stories inspired by past, present, and future pandemics, was shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art 2021/2022.  His new experimental short film, "Book of Skin," will complete postproduction in 2023.

Alicia Siu

San Diego County

Alicia María Siu’s art centers on revitalizing a Mesoamerican mural tradition and recovering historical memory through art. As a first-generation refugee from the political violence of Central America, Siu came to the U.S. in 1998 at the tender age of 15, eventually earning a master's degree in Native American Studies from the University of California Davis. Her love for her own Mayan/Nahua-Pipil culture and awareness of Colonialism's political reality inspired Siu to advocate for Indigenous and environmental rights. Her art highlights Indigenous and marginalized peoples' ongoing struggle for respect, dignity, and sovereignty while celebrating a spirit of resiliency, healing, and hope.

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Far South/Border North Round II Grant Recipients

Our Round II grant recipients include 18 San Diego and Imperial County organizations. In fall 2023, they hired artists and cultural practitioners and began working alongside them to develop their campaigns, and implemented them through August 2024.

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