California Arts Council 2026-27 Individual Artist Fellows

Region VII

Through regionally based Administering Organizations (AOs), the Individual Artists Fellowship (IAF) program uplifts and celebrates California artists across all disciplines and traditions, highlights their excellence and acknowledges their leadership in shaping traditional and contemporary cultures.

By providing unrestricted funding in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, the fellowship empowers artists at pivotal moments in their careers, enhancing their ability to contribute meaningfully to California’s diverse communities. Investing in individual artists and culture bearers through this program strengthens artistic expression, creative practice, and community collaboration statewide.

For the 2026-27 cycle, California Arts Council contracted with Arts Orange County (ArtsOC) as the lead Administering Organization in Region VII, comprised of the counties of Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino. ArtsOC joined with Riverside Arts Council (RAC) and Arts Connection, the Arts Council of San Bernardino County, to create a collaborative that served the diverse geographies and communities across Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Arts-Connection-Logo_2026
Riverside Arts Council_Logo_2026
AOC_Logo_LargerJPG

2026-27 Individual Artist Fellows

Awards have been made in the following categories: Emerging Artist Fellows - $5,000; Established Artist Fellows - $10,000; Legacy Artist Fellows - $50,000.

Artists were selected by peer review panels comprised of artists, arts administrators, arts educators, and arts funders assembled from the participating counties in the region. The application submission period opened April 2, 2026 and closed on May 15, 2026. Free technical assistance was provided to applicants. The review panels worked from May 20-June 19, 2026 to rate applications and determine the honorees.

Congratulations to All of the Honorees from Region VII!

Orange County Individual Artist Fellows

    Jose Hernandez (Legacy) - Jose Hernandez is a sixth-generation Mariachi musician, composer and arranger who founded Mariachi Sol de Mexico and Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles. Beyond performing, he established the Mexican Heritage Society and leads the future of the genre as Musical Director for the Mariachi Nationals
    Alicia Rojas (Legacy) - Alicia Rojas is an interdisciplinary artist, Culture Producer and Director of the Santa Ana Community Artist Coalition. Her work explores migration, ecological justice, and the relationship between people, land, and memory. Working across installation, performance, and public art, she creates immersive projects centered on storytelling, interspecies collaboration, ancestral knowledge, and collective practices.
    Lisa Alvarez (Established) - Lisa Alvarez is a creative artist whose primary form of expression is literary (prose, poetry and drama;) but she also creates multi-media works of visual art and have a history of performance art in curated and public spaces.
    Brian Dehn (Established) - Dr. Brian Dehn is a choral conductor, vocal artist, and educator whose work centers on building excellent, accessible choral communities throughout Southern California, particularly in Orange County, through performance, mentorship, sacred and concert music, and the development of singers across generations.
    Tara Ghassemieh (Established) - Tara Ghassemieh is an Iranian-American principal ballerina, choreographer, and director working in ballet and film, whose practice centers on Persian and diasporic communities, underserved audiences, and artists across Southern California and globally, including dancers in Iran where dance is illegal.
    Sakina Ibrahim (Established) - Sakina Ibrahim is an award-nominated multidisciplinary artist working across dance, choreography, storytelling, and media, creating transformative, community-centered arts experiences for youth, emerging artists, and underserved communities across Orange County and Los Angeles.
    Dimple Malhotra (Established) - Dimple Kaur is a Bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer, and solo performance artist whose methodology, Applied Natya Therapy, bridges traditional dance and clinical psychology for communities and audiences across Southern California, also providing culturally relevant healing to survivors of trauma within the South Asian and Asian Pacific diaspora.
    Carla Roque (Established) - Carla Roque is an Orange County mural artist with 25 years of experience. Her work is focused on public works of art with an emphasis in community engagement. Carla’s work evokes childhood wonder through imagery and color. She believes that public art forges human connection, builds community and manifests hope.
    Yoliztli Flores (Emerging) - Yoliztli Flores is a Spanish-language theatre artist bringing theatre to Latinx communities in Orange County.
    Xue Han (Emerging) - Xue (Snow) Han is a Chinese classical and ethnic dance choreographer, performer, and educator who works with multicultural communities, youth dancers, and Chinese American communities through theatrical productions, cultural festivals, and arts education initiatives across Southern California.
    Sarah Johnston (Emerging) - Sarah Johnston is Artistic Director and lead choreographer of Showtime Contemporary Ballet of Santa Ana.
    Alisa Khodos (Emerging) - Alisa Khodos is a Russian-American musician, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher whose practice explores intercultural co-creation and plurality within identity and music.
    Kacie Lyn Martinez (Emerging) - Kacie Lyn Martinez is a mixed media artist and facilitator reminding people they are artists too. She does this through participatory installations and workshops in non-traditional arts spaces that encourage interpersonal connection and creative confidence. She also does this in her conceptual visual practice which explores inner landscapes through vulnerability.
    Salina Mendoza (Emerging) - Salina Angelique Mendoza (SAM), OC Laureate (2019), is a Mexican and Taíno American abstract geometric and installation artist and the founder of Artist Safespaces, a nonprofit fighting for market-rate artist pay, ending exposure-based labor, with a long-term vision of art parks in every US city.
    Boróka Nagy (Emerging) - Boróka Nagy is a choreographer and immersive dance artist creating participatory works that engage diverse communities across Southern California, using movement as a tool for connection, dialogue, and collective reflection on identity, belonging, and shared human experience.
    Sarah Ngô (Emerging) - Sarah Ngô is a first-generation Vietnamese American writer, director, actor, filmmaker and podcaster who comes from a very long line of gossipers. Their work captures stories of loss, identity, and, ultimately, human resilience interwoven with magic, cultural tales, and humor. They are passionate about creating space for underrepresented voices in the AAPI community through film and TV.
    Lauren Nicole (Emerging) - Lauren Nicole (LN) is a disabled, Neurodivergent, Native, Orange County-based artist, focusing on painting and beadwork. As a visual artist, accessibility is at the forefront of their work. Their solo shows are known for including multi-sensory elements with descriptive aids woven into the storytelling.
    Namrata Poddar (Emerging) - Namrata Poddar is a first-generation South Asian American literary artist and arts educator. Their fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, literary criticism, and community-engaged teaching explore migration, motherhood, social justice, decolonial storytelling, and collective healing across Southern Californian, South Asian diasporic, and global communities of color.
    Michael Tran (Emerging) - Michael Tran is a Vietnamese American artist and sculptor who works with installation and found materials, focusing on the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon and exploring themes of memory, mental health, and everyday practices through container gardens.
    Dorothy Xiao (Emerging) - Dorothy Xiao is a first generation Chinese American filmmaker with a degree in Psychology. Named after her parents’ immigration lawyer, Dorothy creates scripted narrative films inspired by the diverse immigrant communities she grew up around in the San Gabriel Valley. With her work, Dorothy aims to uplift and empower underrepresented voices for a more compassionate world.

Riverside County Individual Artist Fellows

    Loriann Hernandez (Legacy) - Loriann Hernandez, also known as Elle Seven, is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and access architect practicing public installation, movement activation, drawing, painting, and collage with a focus on Indigenous-led stewardship to serve marginalized youth, street-level cultural networks, and Tribal communities across Southern California.
    Allyson Allen (Established) - Allyson Allen is an African American Culture Bearer, mixed media textile, doll, and book artist whose regional communities in southern California include Ontario, Laguna Beach, Temecula, and Santa Ana. Their work is also exhibited nationally.
    Patrick Barwinski (Established) - Patrick Barwinski is a public artist and muralist creating bold, large-scale murals that transform overlooked spaces into vibrant, community-driven environments, working with cities and organizations to inspire connection, cultural pride, and positive social impact across Southern California.
    Maryam Crogman (Established) - Dr. Maryam Trebeau is a multicultural Painter and Muralist who works in service to youth, private clients and city governments.
    Cherie Hill (Established) - Cherie Hill is an interdisciplinary dance artist, choreographer, and educator working with community-based healing arts practices in culturally diverse communities, exploring human expression and its conveyance through the body, in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery.
    Andrea Lopez (Established) - Andrea Lopez is a multimedia artist who specializes in murals, oil painting and illustration. She is an active member of her community who is dedicated to sharing her creativity with others. She believes in embodying the changes she wishes to see in the world by creating purposeful art for communities that are affected by a myriad of social issues.
    Alejandro Mirandé (Established) - Alejandro "Mano" Mirandé is an Artist in Residency for the City of Riverside through the Riverside Arts Council specializing in community-based public murals.
    Juan Navarro (Established) - Juan Navarro is a muralist based in Riverside, California.
    Carlos Puma (Established) - Carlos Puma is a visual storyteller who uses black-and-white photography to document and preserve the rich culture and history of the Inland Empire’s diverse communities.
    Matthew Balane (Emerging) - Matt Balane is a Filipino American author, hip-hop artist, spoken word poet, and motivational speaker from Menifee who uses intentional storytelling and poetic lyricism to transform themes of mental health, resilience, identity, and human fragility into purposeful art while elevating BIPOC voices and advocating for AAPI communities.
    James Coats (Emerging) - James Coats is an award winning author, poet and educator serving the Inland Empire and beyond by helping the next generation of writers find their voice, publish their manuscripts, and create positive change in the world through their art.
    Caroline Espinoza (Emerging) - Caroline "Caro" Espinoza is a Flamenco guitarist dedicated to deepening her practice in the art form of Flamenco while continuing to develop her voice within culture and humanity throughout her hometowns of Orange County and Riverside, as well as globally influencing women based communities through her social media.
    Lenore Hamel (Emerging) - Lenore Hamel creates mixed media works, ceramics, paintings, and photography. They currently teach art to high school students while continuing to actively practice and exhibit art throughout Riverside County. Their work has been featured in galleries across Southern California and explores themes of community, memory, cultural identity, belonging and nature through fantasy and realism.
    Wendi Johnson (Emerging) - Wendi Johnson is a theatre artist who works with Full Circle Players and teaches at Henry J. Kaiser High School.
    Isabella Madrigal (Emerging) - Isabella Dionne Madrigal (enrolled Cahuilla, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent) is a playwright and filmmaker working primarily with Native communities in Riverside/San Bernardino. Her work explores embodied memory, ancestral wisdom, and healing, emphasizing Indigenous futurisms and matrilineal strength as survivance.
    Sophia Madrigal (Emerging) - Sophia Madrigal is a Cahuilla and Anishinaabe storyteller (writer/actress/director), whose performance and community work seeks to uplift Indigenous narratives, center cultural revitalization efforts, and raise awareness for Indigenous issues The primary communities she works with are tribal peoples in Southern California and Riverside county.
    Denise Silva (Emerging) - Denise Silva is an indigenous femme artist, curator + storyteller working in the Inland Empire; creating safe spaces in community, exploring higher states of being through a matriarchal lens, ancestral healing + memory, using art as a portal. They are intentional about building creative frameworks to heal and uplift the culture by centering women's interior lives + innerspaces.
    Sarah Wilson (Emerging) - Sarah Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist working across theater, filmmaking, and fine art with creative, educational, and community-based collaborators in California and internationally, including Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Greece, and France.
    STUDIO X (Emerging) - X is a multidisciplinary artist, specializing in new media, architecture, and earthwork installation. X’s practice is a rigorous exercise in algorithmic sovereignty, often in collaboration with Indigenous and Pacific Islander diasporic communities. X explores the built environment as a site-specific ontology shaped by memory, deep time, and embodied experience.

San Bernardino County Individual Artist Fellows

    Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja (Legacy) - Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja is a multidisciplinary artist working across mixed media, installation, and social practice, centering cultural memory and identity while advancing community-engaged projects with women and underrepresented communities throughout the Inland Empire.
    Cindy Bernard (Established) - Cindy Bernard is a post-conceptual artist, activist and writer. After inheriting her grandparents' home in Twentynine Palms in 2020, she relocated from Los Angeles to the Morongo Basin, where she maintains her studio and encourages civic engagement via writing for the Desert Trumpet local news publication.
    Cesar Garcia (Established) - Cesar Gracia is a printmaker specialized on traditional relief techniques such as woodcut and linocut, constantly promoting them through teaching to preserve their practices. His work portrays and interacts with underrepresented communities from the Inland Empire, especially immigrant ones, visualizing and lifting their voices.
    Vanessa Gomez (Established) - Vanessa Gomez is an artist from the Mojave Desert of the Victor Valley who works on a diverse range of projects from acrylic murals to digital works including animation.
    Duan Kellum (Established) - Duan Kellum defines themself as an (EdArTivist) Educator, Artist and Activist; who is a screen printer, painter and sculpture working primarily with low income, LGBTQI, immigrant and POC communities in the Inland Empire.
    Alejandro Man One Poli Jr (Established) - Alejandro Poli Jr. (“Man One”) is a multidisciplinary graffiti artist, muralist, fine artist, and curator who works primarily with urban communities, youth, cultural institutions, and public spaces throughout Southern California and beyond.
    Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs (Established) - Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and the leader of High Desert Choir: an all-ages, no-audition, drop-in singing group that centers local queer, low-income, parent, and rural communities of San Bernardino’s Morongo Basin.
    Heidi Schwegler (Established) - Heidi Schwegler is a sculptor working across glass, metal, and digital fabrication, partnering with rural and underrepresented communities in the high desert to expand access to material-based art practices and explore relationships between people and the objects they live with.
    Danielle Giudici Wallis (Established) - Danielle Giudici Wallis is a visual artist and arts leader whose practice spans community-based, socially engaged art, sculpture, and photography with an environmental focus. She works in and with rural and underserved communities in the Inland Empire and Hi-Desert regions of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.
    Brandon Allen (Emerging) - Brandon Christopher Allen is a poet, spoken word artist, author, and educator working with underserved youth, marginalized families, and communities of faith across the Inland Empire to build language for mental and emotional wellness through performance, published work, and classroom curriculum.
    Anthony McCann (Emerging) - Anthony McCann is a critically acclaimed poet and non-fiction writer working with environmental scientists, activists, artists, and community leaders in the Mojave Desert.
    Candace E Pearson (Emerging) - Candace Pearson is a poet and poetry citizen who lives in Crestline, CA, a small, rural community in the San Bernardino Mountains, where she has made it her mission to instill poetry as part of the cultural landscape, organizing free public readings, pop-ups, classes and more.
    Isabel Quintero-Flores (Emerging) - Isabel Quintero is a writer of books for children and young adults and a part-time program coordinator for a local literary arts non-profit where she works developing literary programming for the diverse communities that exist in the Inland Empire, especially the Latine community, mothers, children, and youth.
    Elaine Talamaivao (Emerging) - Elaine Talamaivao is a Polynesian dancer, educator, and culture bearer practicing Samoan siva, Hawaiian hula, Tahitian ʻori, Kapa Haka, Hip Hop fusion, and Pacific language instruction with the Pacific Islander diaspora of the Inland Empire and broader Southern California.
    Zebulon Zang (Emerging) - Zebulon Zang is an artist working across expanded photography, sculpture, textiles, and socially engaged research, whose practice and public work engage students, emerging artists, and broader communities across Southern California through education, mentorship, exhibition-making, ecological inquiry, and collaborative projects addressing labor, technology, environment, and access.