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Welcome to our “Sunday Spotlight” series, where we recognize many of the incredible artists who have been awarded by the Princess Grace Foundation-USA.
In honor of Earth Day, we are highlighting some of the many voices of Princess Grace Award winners using their platforms to reflect on the planet’s ecological perils, raise awareness, and envision a more sustainable future. These artists – theatermakers, filmmakers, and writers – are shedding light on the dangers of climate change, how environmental justice is social justice, and compelling us to take urgent climate action. Art is an essential tool to raise awareness in the fight against global climate change, and we are proud of the many Princess Grace Award winners using their artistic voices to become climate activists.
Inspired by Hurricane Sandy’s impact on New York City, Sarah Cameron Sunde (Theater 2005) created 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 – present), a series of nine site-specific performances and video art works in bodies of water around the world. Over 12-13 hours, Sunde stands in a tidal area for a full cycle and invites the public to participate. Each work consists of a live performance, a time-lapse video, a long-form cinematic video artwork, and varied ephemera from a specific location. Upcoming performances include Te Manukanukatanga ō Hoturoa in Aotearoa-New Zealand and New York Estuary in New York City. Sunde draws from her background as a theater-maker, director, and translator to create work that engages with the public and combines performance and video. In addition to 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, Sunde is a co-founder of Works on Water, an organization dedicated to exploring water in the urban environment through educational programs and art installations.
Erika Dickerson-Despenza (Playwriting 2019)
is a Blk feminist poet-playwright, cultural worker, educator, and grassroots organizer from Chicago, Illinois. Dickerson-Despenza’s work encompasses Afrosurrealism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination, land legacies, and
environmental anti-Black racism. Her work centers on climate-induced and state-sanctioned water vulnerabilities and displacement in the cities of New Orleans, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; and Flint, Michigan. In 2021, her play about three generations of Black women in Flint, Michigan, cullud wattah, ran at The Public and received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Erika is currently developing a 10-play Katrina Cycle, focused on the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, and its state-sanctioned man-made disaster.
Ashley Siana (Film 2019) utilizes the medium of film to create and tell stories that advocate for a healthier relationship between society and natural ecosystems and amplify environmental issues. Siana has created and edited films for National Geographic Society, Yellowstone National Park, Ocean Exploration Trust, and the Smithsonian Institute. Ashley currently co-runs Morel Media, a documentary production company based in Bozeman, Montana, specializing in films about the natural world. Her films include Maldivian Tuna Fishing (2019), which follows a Maldivian tuna fisherman who employs the traditional and sustainable method for fishing skipjack and yellowfin tuna, highlighting the hardships that accompany this method and the declining resource at the hands of climate change induced rising sea levels; The Gilded Trap (2021), the story of a young Maine lobster fisherman and a marine biologist in the Gulf of Maine and the ecological changes that take place due to climate change; and The Voice of a River (2018), depicting the ecology and identity of the Yellowstone River.
Director and producer Sergio M. Rapu (Film 2013) is the only Rapa Nui working in production in an English-speaking country. For the past 15 years, he has worked on documentaries that have aired on National Geographic, History Channel, Travel Channel, and NOVA. In his film Eating Up Easter (2018), Rapu explores the economic
boon as tourists flock to see the iconic statues of Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Told as a story passed down to his newborn son, Rapu talks to four islanders to reveal the reality of modern life and the steps they are taking to preserve their culture and environment: a local ecologist who is tackling the increased trash and waves of plastic washing up on the shore, two musicians attempting to build a music school to help retain cultural practices and strengthen community, and his own father, formerly the island’s first native Governor, about balancing traditions and real estate development.
Sci-fi nonfiction filmmaker Isabelle Carbonell (Film 2019) creates cinematic experiences that explore climate change, the slow violence of environmental disaster, bodies of water, and interspecies relationships. Carbonell’s filmography includes When Monsters Walked the Earth (2021), which frames industrial monoculture and interspecies through the plantationocene; A Mirror of the Cosmos (2021), how the Mar Menor lagoon, once considered a utopian paradise, went to the brink of extinction and beyond; The Mississippi Multiverse (2020), analyzing environmental disasters in the great river that has a history of plantations to petrochemicals, including the “cancer alley” where local communities have exponentially high rates of cancer; and The Blessed Assurance (2018), the lives of fisherman now reeling in jellyfish in the water where shrimp once flourished.
You can learn more about the steps you can take to address climate change by visiting Foundation Prince Albert II de Monaco and NASA’s Global Climate Change.
Love Sunday Spotlights? Read more here.
Interested in learning more about all of our award winners? Visit us at www.pgfusa.org/award-winners
Featured Image: 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea is a series of performance works and video works created by Sarah Cameron Sunde
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