15 YEARS, 15 ARTISTS, $15,000
Since our founding, we’ve been dedicated to cultivating creativity, supporting artists, and strengthening the cultural fabric of our city. To celebrate our 15th anniversary, we are deepening that commitment by awarding 15 project-based grants, ranging up to $2,500, to artists across a variety of mediums. These grants support new, original work that contributes to the artistic and spiritual vitality of Dallas.
This anniversary initiative reflects our core belief: the flourishing of artists leads to the flourishing of communities. We are so excited to amplify the bold ideas, thoughtful stories, and transformative work by these local creators!
We want to give a special thank you to our grant jurors who volunteered their time to thoughtfully review and help select our grant recipients.
J. Damany Daniel
Dawna Hamm-Walsh
Bonnie Shaw
Our Fifteen artists and their work will be featured throughout the year at various events such as Art House Sessions, Anniversary Showcase, and more. We hope that you’ll join us as we celebrate 15 years of supporting the arts in Dallas—and the artists who make it home.
FIFTEEN GRANT Recipients
McKinney based artist, Angela C Pitts uses photography and textiles to tell circular stories of vulnerability and grief. Angela's art and process is shaped by her studies of fine art at Baylor University and UNT where she earned her BFA and MFA in photography. She has served as an adjunct professor at Dallas Baptist University for 13 years, and Collin College in Plano currently. Angela loves people and hearing their stories. Angela works with fabric, image transfers and alternative processes with photography to tell stories through her pieces.
She finds value in the printed images, antique quilts, and simple needle and thread. She believes there is power in starting meaningful conversations about our need to live authentic lives in community with one another.
Anna Joy Williamson - Dance Film
Anna Joy Williamson is a dancer, educator, and choreographer trained in Ballet, Modern, Jazz, and Bollywood. A graduate of Anderson University, she has been teaching since 2017, bringing rigor and genuine care to developing the next generation of dancers.
Her choreographic work is driven by faith — as a follower of Jesus, she creates pieces that explore spiritual realities, inviting both performer and audience into something beyond technique.
Eboni Johnson-Kaba - Documentary Film
Eboni Johnson-Kaba is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist who believes in the power of story, community, and collaboration to inspire change and challenge ignorance. Rooted in the traditions of Black southern storytelling, her work blends documentary film, oral history, and emerging media to uplift underrepresented narratives. She was named a 2024 Rising Star in Public Media by Current magazine, a 2023 PGA Creates Nonfiction Fellow, and serves as the Talent Development Manager for Black Public Media.
Elijah Nelson - Music/Composition
Elijah Nelson is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and music educator in DFW who has worked in the local music industry for over 15 years. With range of skills in playing instruments like guitar, electric & double bass, piano, ukulele, mandolin & cello, he has explored many styles of music. After finishing studies at Dallas Baptist University in Music Business, Guitar & Recording, Elijah has taught private music lessons and has worked with a range of local artists in both the stage and studio. With a desire to always learn. create and challenge himself, he is always looking to discover new music & art to experience and find collaborators across many various creative mediums.
Emily Morris explores how strong light sources transform the appearance of her subjects. She paints figures, landscapes, and dramatic seascapes in a traditional style inspired by the masters of the Renaissance. Her practice is grounded in classical academic training. Working with oil paint, she builds up many layers in a technique called glazing and scumbling to achieve a sense of luminosity. She lives and works in Dallas.
Juba - Trauma Informed, Community-Engaged Visual Art
Juba is a Dallas-based visual artist and social work leader committed to exploring resilience, identity, and healing through creative expression. A self-taught artist working in acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and mixed media, he often integrates fragments of his personal child welfare records into his work — reclaiming documents once tied to trauma and reshaping them into narrative and meaning.
His art is grounded in his lived experience in foster care. He examines themes of adversity, forgiveness, mental health, and growth, layering abstraction with story to create space for reflection and dialogue. Drawn to the tension between vulnerability and strength, he invites viewers to consider how hardship can refine rather than define us.
In his professional role as a Supervisor at Dallas CASA, Juba advocates for children in foster care and speaks nationally on creativity, education, and resilience. He believes art is more than expression — it is a catalyst for awareness, connection, and transformation.
Jenny Ayers - Singer/Songwriter
Music is a deeply personal experience for Jenny Ayers. She writes songs to capture moments of wrestling, praying, and journeying with God. You might hear sounds of indie folk, alt rock, and dream pop, but the undercurrent is a landscape of inner healing and a deep desire to anchor her identity in God's love and forgiveness.
How does an artist make work and raise a family, partner with a spouse, and lead worship or record music? Layer it all in a crock pot to simmer and see what happens. Jenny and her husband have had the honor of working with some amazing people in and outside the church, doing what they love as a husband/wife duo and as a family.
You find Jenny at the beginning of a new season. Visit jennyayers.com for updates on new releases.
Jose Angel Hernandez - 3D Mixed Media
Jose Angel Hernandez was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Northeast. During a 45-year career in the automotive industry, he began his artistic journey in 2000 as a self-taught artist, initially painting figurative work that explored life's complexities, love, and social and political concerns. In 2014, a chance find at an antique shop — a rusty cow bell — transformed his practice and defined who he is today: a 3D Mixed Media Artist whose mission is to create work that is interactive, playful, and evokes conversation.
That mission led Hernandez to painting animals in a zoomorphic style, abstract portraits, and conceptual art exploring the yin/yang effect of beliefs and external forces. An active member of local artist communities, he began curating cultural multi-arts exhibitions in 2022, including a grant-funded exhibition with the City of Lewisville. Throughout it all, one constant has been his commitment to human values and to visually expressing the truthful social and political realities of our time.
Joseph Neville - Singer/Songwriter
Joseph Neville is a Fort Worth–based singer-songwriter whose work has been featured on CBS Texas, West Fort Worth Magazine, and Amplify 817 by the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation. He was recently voted Readers’ Choice for Best Musician in Fort Worth by Fort Worth Magazine, sold out Rose Chapel in Fort Worth, and opened for platinum selling artist Howie Day.
After leaving a career as a choir and music teacher, Joseph spent 18 months traveling across North America without a permanent address, performing everywhere from Mexico to Nova Scotia. That journey became a personal pilgrimage deepening his faith, refining his voice, and reshaping how he writes about life, love, and redemption.
Joseph serves in music at his local church, and while his songs carry quiet threads of faith and hope, he most often performs in bars and restaurants believing those are the spaces he is called to be. His latest album, Memory Box, is available on all streaming platforms.
Kristen Cochran is a Dallas-based artist whose multidisciplinary work explores labor, time, and human resilience through sculpture, print, and installation. Her practice reflects on the humor and hardship embedded in daily work and the search for meaning within material existence. Cochran holds an MFA from Southern Methodist University and teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Nasher Sculpture Center, Artpace San Antonio, LONDON Fix and the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY.
Her recent projects examine performance, productivity, and rest as intertwined acts of care and survival.
Molly Kennedy - Public Art/Photography
Molly Kennedy is a multidisciplinary artist working in voice, visual, imagination, and delight. A self-described celebrant of play, her practice is guided by the belief that something does not have to be productive to hold value, and that delight, amusement, curiosity, and being are valuable in themselves.
She moves through the world noticing. Shapes and forms in unexpected places. The feel of a springy plant or a textured wall. A phrase that catches sideways. The oddness hiding in the ordinary. She's drawn to new experiences, to conversation off-script, to small acts of silliness. At times her practice moves outward — intentional projects created for public engagement, each an invitation in its own form.
In her everyday, Molly seeks to stay open and engaged — a posture rooted in prayer, creative exploration, and making space for others to imagine and notice the world differently.
Ade Dina - Narrative Short Film
Ade Dina is a Nigerian-American filmmaker based in Dallas, Texas. Ade focuses on making films that speak to the ethos of those who seek the human experience with black leads in the forefront. Ade founded Oba Productions and utilizes the agency to create in-house films and commercials for various brands and clients
Parker Smith - Children’s Book & Music
Parker Smith is a Dallas-based entrepreneur and dad who created Beginner's Apprenticeship while raising his three children alongside his wife Brady. Born out of the chaos of family life, the project began as a simple desire to bring their kids into prayer time — and their prayers into story time.
Beginner's Apprenticeship creates paired books and music that adapt classical Christian prayer rhythms for households with young children, inspired by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
Rebekah Jordan - Narrative Short Film
Rebekah Grey is a Dallas native and has been making films locally for nine years. She is deeply curious about humans and God, and in her work, she explores the relational dynamics between the two. Beauty is something she absorbs with every fiber of her being, and cameras help a lot.
Sarah Galaro & Lizzie Combs - Interdisciplinary Performance
Sisters Sarah and Lizzie are Dallas-based writers and creatives. In addition to being involved in Art House Dallas as an Awaken Creativity group lead, Sarah regularly participates in short fiction competitions and poetry workshops. From 2019-2021, she served as Vice Chair on the board of Christos Collective, a Denver ministry supporting Christian artists.
Since graduating from Furman University with a Bachelor's in Theatre Arts, Lizzie has had several short plays featured in festivals, including two IMPRINT Theatreworks' First Impressions festivals and the Hear Me Out New American Monologue Festival, where she was awarded third place, receiving the honor from celebrated writer Kia Cothran. In 2022, Lizzie was selected to join Second Thought Theatre's Thought Process playwright cohort.
Sarah and Lizzie created a workshop, “Short & Sweet: Crafting Micro-Stories for Brands” for the Highland Park Literary Festival. In the session, they challenge high school students to use short-form storytelling techniques in advertising and brand-building. February 2026 was their fourth year presenting at HP LitFest.
In 2023, Sarah and Lizzie founded Tabletop Marketing, bringing their storytelling expertise to mission-driven organizations.
