Anarchist Media Grant
Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant
Read about the recipients of the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant below and in the 2024 press release.
The 2023-2024 grant cycle is now closed.
The Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant was created in memory of Jen Angel, the social justice activist, baker, writer, and co-founder of Agency who died on February 9, 2023 as a result of an apparent robbery-assault in Oakland, California.
Agency created the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant program to help fuel the types of projects that Jen created throughout her life–projects that reflect the spirit of grassroots and do-it-yourself action she worked so hard to sustain. The core tenets of anarchism that underscored Jen’s life and work—autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action—are all amplified by the independent media projects funded by this grant program.
Alongside Agency, the grant program in Angel’s honor is co-hosted by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Applications for the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant are accepted through the institute’s long-running grant program, which has supported hundreds of anarchist writing projects for over the past quarter-century.
Read Remembering Jen Angel to learn more about Jen’s legacy, and the press release announcing the inaugural Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant recipients here.
2024 Recipients
Colin Ward Audio Documentary
Project Description
Colin Ward was far from the stereotype of the black-masked, bomb-throwing anarchist, and yet until his death in 2010 he was the foremost British writer – and one of the greatest thinkers – in what remains a misunderstood philosophic tradition, one that has a profound relevance for us today. His greatest belief was in people; freedom is a social activity, he held, always rooted in the local and the everyday. This audio documentary celebrates Ward’s life and work, marking the centenary of his birth.
Bio
Patrick Bernard is an audio producer based in Norwich, UK. He has worked for several years at Resonance FM, a community arts radio station based in London, and has produced documentaries on a wide range of subjects, from the German writer W. G. Sebald and the Yiddish poet Avram Stencl to the role of translation in the French Revolution. His first feature for the BBC, “Learning from the Great Tide,” about the North Sea Flood of 1953, was broadcast in January 2023.
Web-Based Resources for Anarchist Initiatives
Project Description
This project involves developing a web-based platform for anarchist initiatives seeking to promote their work and connect with one another, including a podcast hosting service. The AFCC aims to provide a resource for content production for public education, including the new “Reading Theory” podcast, along with online resources for anarchists and social media content.
Bio
The AFCC (Anarchist Federation of Cyber Communes) is an international effort to link existing and new organizations that operate according to anarchist principles. Our mission is to facilitate the creation and growth of active communities, to amplify anarchist voices, and to occupy the web with an anarchist presence.
Total Liberation Animated Video
Project Description
When we say we want total liberation, what do we mean? What are the possible pitfalls, and how can we articulate and practice liberation in our own lives, in solidarity with others? This animated essay will explore the philosophical, practical, and imaginative questions posed by opposition to all forms of oppression and the dream of liberation for everyone.
Bio
just wondering… is a small, autonomous collective that creates critical and speculative animated essays. Productions often explore anti-speciesism, posthumanism, and social and environmental justice. The collective consists of Aron Nor, independent researcher and self-taught filmmaker-artivist; Mina Mimosa, visual artist and illustrator; and M. Martelli, writer and scholar-activist.
Black Anarchism Oral Histories
Project Description
Huey Hewitt’s project is part of his dissertation work at Harvard University on the history of Black anarchism. In narrating the intersection of the life stories, historical context, and theoretical contributions of a cluster of key figures in the Black anarchist tradition, Huey draws on oral history interviews with black anti-state radicals as well as other movement activists who have been inspired by their ideas. Clips from some of the interviews will be shared via YouTube and other social media as a public history component of the project.
Bio
Huey Hewitt is a multi-disciplinary historian of Black life and Black politics. He is currently completing his doctorate at Harvard University in the Department of African and African American Studies. When he is not reading, writing, or organizing, Huey enjoys meditating, lifting weights, and playing in a queer basketball league.
2023 Recipients
Elements of Mutual Aid Docuseries
Project Description
“The Elements of Mutual Aid” is an independent, four-part docuseries (currently mid-production) that explores the origins, structures, healing ways, and logistics of anti-authoritarian mutual aid across North America. Each chapter is based on one the four elements – fire, earth, water, and air – and introduces a unique cast of grassroots activists that each tackle oppression in their communities.
Bio
Payton (he/they) and Leah (they/them) are anarchist filmmakers who have both spent the last decade organizing on the ground in their communities. Payton’s from Michigan and has focused on anti-fascist organizing, agit-prop production, and popular education. Leah’s from Texas has organized disaster response and recovery, worked in solidarity with Oaxacan indigenous anarchists and migrants, and documented lessons learned along the way. Both are first-time filmmakers who are excited to co-produce media that helps explain how anti-authoritarian values can be put to practice.
Occupy Sandy Documentary
Project Description
“Occupy Sandy: A Decade’s Retrospective on Mutual Aid” documents Occupy Sandy, an anarchistic mutual aid disaster relief effort that delivered millions of dollars in relief to more than a dozen neighborhoods and mobilized at least 60,000 volunteers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Combining collective oral history practice and documentary film, the project explores how Occupy Sandy’s work embodies a prefigurative anarchist project. Occupy Sandy: A Decade’s Retrospective on Mutual Aid hopes to provide communities with education and inspiration for non-hierarchical post-disaster mutual aid organizing.
Bio
Micaela Suminski is a service worker, union organizer, and documentary filmmaker from the Philadelphia area, now living in Brooklyn, NY. Centering on forms of collective resistance, Suminski’s documentary projects have explored topics including gig economy food delivery workers, university student strikes, tenant organizing, post-disaster mutual aid, and personal loss.
Undoing Rigid Radicalism Podcast
Project Description
Based on the book Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, Pamela Carmona and Alf Bojórquez present the podcast “Undoing Rigid Radicalism.” This podcast in Spanish explores how concepts like paranoia, purity, guilt, and punishment affect social movements in Latin America and how we can build a joyful militancy.”
Bio
Alf Bojorquéz: (she/her): Musician and writer. She has embarked on extensive tours of experimental music, hardcore punk, and improvisation, playing percussion and conducting workshops on fiction, art, and critical theory in Mexico and the United States. Her first novel, “Pepitas de calabaza,” was published by Fondo Blanco, and her second book, “No existe dique capaz de contener al océano furioso,” a personal essay on political philosophy, will soon be released by Heredad Publishing.
Pamela Carmona: (she/her): Sound, self-management, and social justice. Promotes self-management through sociocracy at Sociocracy For All. Radio and Podcast host and producer.
Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention Podcast
Project Description
The history of the San Francisco Bay Area-based collective known as Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention is the subject of a new seven-part podcast series utilizing archival testimonies, sound images, and interviews with remaining members of the group that has fought for justice since the 1970s. The collective has focused organizing efforts on issues including the continuing housing crisis in the Bay Area. Based on a writing project supported by IAS in 2016.
Bio
Toshio Meronek produces Sad Francisco, a podcast about neoliberal nightmares. Their book ‘Miss Major Speaks’ was published in 2023 by Verso.
