We’re thrilled to announce brontë velez as our inaugural SOURCE Studio Research & Development Fellow for 2025-26!
The R&D Fellowship supports artists in developing a bold and poetic project that catalyzes opportunities for connection and liberation. Over the course of a year, we work closely with the artist Fellow, providing thought partnership, administrative support, and a $25,000 grant to deepen and build a program of engagement that invites collaborators and the public to gather around the central questions of the project.
The R&D Fellowship is modeled after the collaborative, imaginative, and expansive explorations of our founder Mel Chin. We embrace process and meaningful collaboration–where each meeting, conversation, and all the left turns and moments of pause are integral parts of the artistic endeavor. The Fellow is awarded $15,000 in unrestricted funding, with $10,000 of additional funding for research, programs, and gatherings, as well as close thought partnership with the SOURCE Studio team, including Mel Chin.
Read more about brontë, below, and learn more about their project and practice in a new dispatch titled, slowing the shutter: 001.
brontë velez (they/elle) is a black-boricua transdisciplinary ritual artist, shepherd and cultural worker. their eco-social art praxis is an intergenerational prayer to resanctify labor with land through rebuking the hauntings slavery has had on our precious relations with earth-rooted ritual and craft. brontë’s ministry is committed to re-ecologizing the roots of pastoral care.
brontë serves as the artistic director for bakiné ritual arts studio (FKA Lead to Life) and adult programs director/educator for Weaving Earth’s ATTUNE program. brontë is co-conjuring an absurdist opera with esperanza spalding about a frequency that can disarm, and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of The School for Inclement Weather in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. brontë is currently an MDiv candidate at Duke Divinity.
slowing the shutter: 001
meditations on the theology of reception in art as social practice
This dispatch is an offering from bronte, as they reflect on their time with SOURCE and the questions they’ve been holding in their multifaceted practice.
there’s a pattern emerging through my time in fellowship with SOURCE this year that signals an ontological and theological shift in my artmaking from transmission to reception. Read more…
