2025-2026 Crossroads Fellows Grant Recipients
February 21, 2025
The Crossroads Project is pleased to announce the recipients of grants in the fourth round of funding of Crossroads Fellows. Representing scholarly, artistic, activist, and religious communities, the new fellows’ projects take a variety of forms, including photography, digital mapping, digital preservation, oral history, musical composition, and short story. Their work explores Black religious experiences in a broad geographic range across a variety of religious traditions. Crossroads Fellows’ work will be presented on SPIRIT HOUSE, joining the dynamic and original projects from earlier cohorts of Crossroads Fellows.
We are grateful for the wisdom and advice of Leslie D. Callahan, Judith Casselberry, Brie Loskota, Peter Manseau, Elizabeth Pérez, and Kayla Renée Wheeler in the capacity as members of the Crossroads Project Advisory Board.
This grant program is made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University.
Arts Fellows
- Sheriden Booker, D’Zeklèr é Difé: A Priestess In An Order So Venerable and Advantageous As The Order of Voudous
- Vanessa Charlot, Sanctuaries of the Spirit: Black Churches in Mississippi
- Yvonne Chireau, Holy Heroes and Graphic Voodoo: A Digital Archive of Black Religion and Comics
- Sharbreon S. Plummer and Lance L. Smith, Requiem for Black Survival
Community Stories Fellows
- Martina Ahlert and Lior Zisman Zalis, Years of Life: Trajectories of People and Enchanted Spirits in an Afro-Brazilian Religion
- Shantel George, Casting Kola on New Ground: Towards a Cultural Biography of an African Seed
- Hess Love, Eroding Gods: Shifts in AfroChesapeake Place-Based Spirituality Due to Climate Change
- Samiha Rahman, Spiritual Strivings for Liberation: The History of the Black American Tijani Sufi Community
Research Fellows
- Justine M. Bakker, Experimenting with De Laurence: Black Occult Praxis in the 20th Century
- Marya McQuirter, William F. Fonvielle and Techno-Religious Melodrama circa 1902
- Eziaku Nwokocha, When Divinities Collide: Religious Perspectives of Black queer women in Haitian Vodou and U.S Hoodoo
Deanna Witkowski, Jazz in the Pews: Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Bonnemère, and The Community of St. Thomas the Apostle