Welcome Boston 2020 Artists!

We are thrilled to share our ten Boston-based artists selected to join this year’s Capacity-Building Program for our fourth year of partnership with the City of Boston and the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture!


Lyndsay Allyn Cox

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Lyndsay Allyn Cox is an artist, curator, and educator whose work centers around amplifying the voices and stories of black, African American, and other people of color, women, non-binary folx, and the LGBT+ community. As a performing artist, actor, and director, she has worked on new plays with Company One, SpeakEasy Stage, the Huntington Theatre Company, the Theater Offensive, and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. As a performing arts teaching artist, she introduces new perspectives to young people from middle to high school. As a curator, she facilitates interdisciplinary performing and visual arts events for underrepresented communities such as “#HellaBlack Mixtape” and “She Said… A Festival of Women’s Voices.” She plans to use her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant to get her freelance business, Curated in Color, off the ground.


Mel Isidor

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Mel Isidor is a designer, urban planner, and mixed-media artist based in Boston, MA. With a background bridging multiple disciplines, her work is grounded in exploring the intersectional complexities of cities, from physical materiality to the social dynamics of space and place. Currently Mel is pursuing her masters in city planning at MIT, where she is focusing her work around historical remembrance, spatial intervention, and equitable development. Mel’s passion lies in work that bridges multiple mediums and methodologies—including photography, ethnographic research, graphic design, mapping, and illustration. With her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, she’s developing a series of photo collages that highlight the dynamism of black urban space.



Simone John

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Simone John is a poet, artist, and facilitator. Her debut poetry collection, Testify (Octopus Books, 2017), experiments with documentary poetics to uplift stories of black people impacted by state sanctioned violence. The collection hinges on transcripts from the Trayvon Martin trial and Sandra Bland’s traffic stop. Simone received a poetry fellowship from the Mass Cultural Council in 2020. She is a member of UnBound Bodies, a QTBIPOC artist collective and multidisciplinary arts lab based in Boston. Along with her twin sister, Simone co-founded Hive Soul Yoga. Hive Soul Yoga is a community wellness business that creates affirming spaces to enhance collective healing for people of color. In addition to weekly POC yoga classes, Hive Soul offers wellness workshops, pop up markets, film screenings, and retreats. With the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, Simone will dig into the work of her second poetry collection and an accompanying art installation.


Mattia Maurée

Photo Credit: Ben Hejkal

Photo Credit: Ben Hejkal

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer focusing on film, chamber and large-form classical works, and twisted pop. Their scores in critically acclaimed short films have played in thirteen countries. Closer to home, they were a finalist in the Mass Cultural Council’s 2019 Artistic Fellowships Program in music composition, and have a poem installed in City Hall as part of the 2019-20 Mayor's Poetry Program. Mattia brings a background in classical performance to a wide range of collaborations, and recently started teaching at WholeTone Music Academy. They will use their Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant for musical equipment to support their freelance music career. 


Jenna Pollack

Credit: Tyler Mallory

Credit: Tyler Mallory

Now in her third year in Boston, Jenna Pollack works equally in the fields of dance, theatre, and STEM education. Her work prioritizes audience accessibility, and considers the performer’s vulnerability to be a main entry point into performances for viewers with a limited formalized dance vocabulary. She finds herself fascinated by the segmented ways people live their lives, whether it be through Netflix series, Instagram posts, or through the fragmentation of the body in modern medicine. From these episodic rhythms, Jenna draws her current dance work. With her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, Jenna is most looking forward to professional development opportunities to better meld the project-based world of performing arts into a more wholistic, strategic practice for her career.


Tara Sellios

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Tara Sellios uses large format photography to create painterly, dramatic still-lifes that are referential to art history, as well as life’s carnal nature in the face of fragility and impermanence. Her work is highly process-oriented and material-heavy; it begins with drawing and then moves into sculptural installations of insect and animal skeletons, this last often in collaboration with an articulator in Vietnam. The materials and arrangement contrast elegance and the grotesque. The photographs themselves are made using 8x10 film, which results in hyperreal, detailed images, even at mural size. Tara has exhibited throughout the Boston area, as well as in Texas and the Netherlands. Her most recent solo show opened at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. She will use her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant for materials and film for her next series of work.


Maria Servellón

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Maria Servellón is an award-winning filmmaker, multimedia artist, educator, and arts advocate with a focus on film, video art, and photography. Her work often explores the synesthetic relationship between art, music, and dance. Maria’s work has been exhibited and screened in Massachusetts, New York, California, Oregon, the UK, and Mexico. She released her most recent and successful short film, “Hyphen,” in 2018 and is currently in pre-production for her next film, “Phantasma.” Maria was named one of 2018's "Latinos 30 Under 30" by El Mundo Boston, a 2019 New England Film Star Award Finalist, and a 2020 fellow of the Creative Entrepreneur Fellowship from the Arts & Business Council of Boston. With her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, she will invest in new equipment upcoming film productions.


Dev Blair

Credit: Reid Simpson, Hear and There Photography

Credit: Reid Simpson, Hear and There Photography

Blending genres and art forms like the blend of Southeastern US cultures that made them, rapper, poet, and playwright Dev Blair aims to take up space with their rhymes and challenge the culture while doing so. Nashville born, Atlanta raised, Orlando grown, and Boston educated with ancestors in Louisiana, Dev is a queer/trans Creole witch and wordsmith who got into music through musical theatre, which led them to choir, acting, theatre school, and other art forms, including poetry. Poetry led to rap and the release of their debut album, Femmetasy. Dev can still be seen on Boston’s theatrical stages, but now desires to invest in their career as a mixed medium performer. Dev hopes the professional development opportunities with Assets for Artists will help them craft a transition plan and will use their Capacity-Building grant to invest in the self-publication of Jays and Jambalaya [working title], an original audio chapbook and Dev’s first own poetry collection.


Issaya Rouson

Photo Credit: Sunny HD Brinson

Photo Credit: Sunny HD Brinson

Issaya Rouson is a music producer, multi-instrumentalist and composer who creates music across genre lines that speaks to the soul, inspires victory, yet always maintains contact with its roots. Having grown up in Washington, D.C., he has a strong background in jazz and R&B performance and has worked with artists such as Kevin Mahogany, Craig Taborn, Mike Casey, and Lori Fulton. His music combines the instrumental influences of gospel and jazz with his own hip-hop and R&B production. With the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, Issaya intends to acquire video equipment to produce his own music videos, as well as those of other musical artists in the Boston area.


Lily Xie

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Lily Xie is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially engaged work explores radical imagination, reimagined histories, and other routes to collective resilience. Lily shares strategies adapted from her drawing and bookmaking practices as tools for community empowerment and justice. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence in Boston's Chinatown community as part of Residence Lab, a creative placemaking residency with the Asian Community Development Corporation and Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. She is part of New England Foundation for the Arts’ 2020 Creative City cohort for artists creating socially-engaged public art. With the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, she will develop financial strategies for her practice and use the funds to expand her stock of materials. 


Our 2020 programming in Massachusetts is possible because of our wonderful funders & partners, specifically the Barr FoundationMassachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, and The City of Boston.