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.

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.

Cat Chiu Phillips

San Diego County

Cat Chiu Phillips creates installation work in public spaces, often using traditional handicraft methods, including crochet, weaving, and embroidery. She often uses discarded materials, including plastic and electronic waste, to create large-scale installations and public art projects.  Growing up in Manila, she was inspired by resilience through tragedy and a sense of resourcefulness. Phillips has received numerous national public art commissions and artwork in the Civic Art Collection of the City of San Diego and Redmond (WA) and has been awarded the California Arts Council's Established Artist Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts.  She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Science in Special Education.  She has been an educator in public schools for over 23 years, a Filipino-Chinese American, adjunct professor, public artist, USMC veteran wife, and mother.

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.

Isaac Artenstein

San Diego County

Isaac Artenstein is a filmmaker and educator who grew up in Tijuana and Chula Vista, studied at the University of California Los Angeles, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts. He founded Cinewest to create documentaries and indie features focusing on the border and Latin America, such as "Break of Dawn," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Artenstein produced the comedy "A Day Without a Mexican" and created internationally distributed documentaries such as "Ballad of an Unsung Hero" and "The Hidden Jews of the Southwest." A founding member of the Border Arts Workshop, he produced and directed "Border Brujo" and "Christmas at the Reservation" with performance artists Guillermo Gómez Peña and James Luna. His recent "The Journeys of Harry Crosby" premiered on PBS and Canal 22 (Mexico's Cultural TV). He's currently producing "Border Noir" about crime fiction writers in the region and teaching film at the University of California San Diego.

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.

Ciara Dominique Gutierrez

San Diego County

Ciara Dominique is a multi-disciplinary artist but a storyteller at her core. Wearing many hats as an award-winning documentarian, published author, working producer, and festival DJ, she aims to revolutionize the conventional pathways of artistic practice and success. With a heightened focus on community engagement and tangible results, she works primarily with under-represented and under-funded communities to make joy, art, and understanding accessible.

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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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