Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming artists from the United States and U.S. territories. The AWAW EAG is made possible by Anonymous Was A Woman, with additional funding provided by individual donors.

In the 2026 cycle, the fifth year of the program, a total of $498,180 in grant funding was awarded to 27 projects that will focus on environmental issues and advocacy in locations including California, Guatemala, Iowa, New York, Nevada, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Wisconsin. The 27 projects were selected from 1,206 applications from artists who reside in the United States and U.S. Territories.

Emma Akmakdjian, Kelp Kulture, and the Santa Rosa Island Research Station’s The Marine Debris Waste Stream: Past and Present Fishing Practices of the Northern Channel Islands (The Northern Channel Islands, CA), an intensive beach cleanup on the Northern Channel Islands will take place in collaboration with the Santa Rosa Island Research Station (SRIRS) and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF). Before the clean-up, public conversations will be hosted through an online speaker series called “Kelp Kulture,” led by the lead artist and a graduate student in the Braybrook lab. The cohort of volunteers will hear from material researchers, indigenous communities, and fishers to understand the past and present fishing practices of the Channel Islands (the unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva). Discussions about materiality, tradition, and contemporary practices are essential for understanding the economy and culture of plastics to define and address this global crisis.

Reniqua Allen-Lamphere’s Infertile Ground (Jersey City, NJ), a film that tells three interconnected stories exploring the pain, frustration, and joy of Black families navigating the rocky path to parenthood while the air gets dirtier, the world warms up, and extreme weather becomes commonplace. From extreme heat in Miami to toxic air in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and unsafe water in Jackson, Mississippi, the film exposes how environmental racism is threatening Black fertility, pregnancy, and birth. More than just a climate film or reproductive justice narrative, Infertile Ground makes the vital connections between race, fertility and a climate crisis that few people are talking about.

Rachel Austin and Kaityn Rutledge’s Wiigwaasi-Jiimaan Gabeshiwim (Birch Bark Canoe camp) (Bemidji, Red Lake Nation, Leech Lake Nation, Minnesota), which will provide women with hands-on, traditional skills working with and harvesting natural materials to connect back to the land and waters. The multigenerational project aims to provide women (Ikwe waag) with opportunities to maintain a deep connection with the earth.

Alex J. Bledsoe’s OAKLEAD (Oakland, California), an investigative documentary film about three intergenerational women of color who become environmental justice leaders in Oakland, California, after a groundbreaking Reuters report finds 3,000 US communities with higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan. OAKLEAD follows Xóchitl, a lifelong environmental activist, who teaches middle schoolers about lead poisoning and environmental racism; her student, Sheila, who discovers her sister has been lead poisoned; and Alex, the filmmaker leading an investigative journey. Through chilling archival evidence and verité scenes from the ground, OAKLEAD uncovers the roots of the longest pediatric epidemic in US history, and honors the spirit of collective resistance in Oakland and beyond.

Maria Jose Calderon and Sur Territoria’s Defensor@s del Ngen Ko (Defenders of the Spirit of Water) (Curacautin, Wallmapu (Mapuche Territory), Chile), a free, community-based, and intercultural educational program developed over several years in collaboration with Mapuche children and communities in the Lafkenche and Pewenche territories of the Wallmapu. Through 10 monthly workshops, Mapuche girls, boys, and non-binary children from Curacautín and Temucuicui will become environmental storytellers and content creators—learning to use cameras and audio equipment, interview their elders, map their river basin, create soundscapes, and produce their own videos about the culture and ecosystems they are working to protect. The project is grounded in Mapuche cosmovision and the living relationship between community and territory.

Tamara Cedré’s No Puedo Ver El Fondo/I Can't See the Bottom (San Juan, Salinas, and Cabo Rojo Puerto Rico), a photographic counter-archive of Puerto Rico’s water crisis, revealing how colonialism (New Deal-era hydroelectric projects, fossil-fuel development, industrial pollution and tourism) has shaped waterways while centering community knowledge and resistance. The project engages communities in Puerto Rico living with the environmental consequences of water precarity including contaminated and diverted waterways that threaten public health and disrupt relationships to land and access to water. The counter-archive will culminate in community activations that bring the work back to the people—creating spaces for organizing around water governance and environmental justice.

Vivian M. Cook and The EcoTheatre Lab’s In Our Backyard: An Iowa Tour (Iowa) will bring three new environmental plays–written and produced by Iowa artists, set in Iowa, and focused on issues specific to Iowa–to communities across the state in Summer 2027.

Fawn Douglas’s Nuwu Um-buh-gah: Paiute Language Deck #2 (Las Vegas, Nevada; Nuwu lands), an artistic language revitalization project that will combine over 50 images with Southern Paiute (or Nuwu) language, environment, and cultural traditions in an educational flashcard deck. The images are tied to the lands, which Douglas will hike, camp, and walk with their relatives. The words, phrases, and concepts will come from consultations with elders and connecting with the land to learn what is most useful to pass down to future generations. Once created, Douglas will coordinate and hold educational classes in Southern Paiute tribal childhood development centers and speak at public educational sessions and events that invite participation from youth, families, and the wider community.

Korina Emmerich’s Material Lineages (New York, New York), a project that transforms textile offcuts from a decade of Emmerich’s previous collections into new materials and sculptural garments, exploring repair, material memory, environmental responsibility, and the full life cycle of what we make. Material Language asks what can happen when we stop making more and begin caring for, repairing, and reimagining what we already have.

Tirtza Even’s Disturbed (New Mexico, Louisiana, Alaska, Maine, Wyoming, California, Hawaii), a series of seven multichannel installations that explores—through subtle computer-interventions and a polyphony of testimonies—the emotional impact of climate change on individual lives. Together, the multi-state locations depict the intersection of different aspects of climate change (e.g. water scarcity, rising sea-levels, fires) with class, industry pollution, and racial segregation. The testimonies uncover a wide range of emotions, whose nuance and breadth offer insight into a deeply human dimension of climate change.

Amanda María Forastieri’s Laboratorio Textil Comunitario (LATECO | Caguas, Puerto Rico), a community-based textile arts center that combines textile recycling, ancestral fiber practices, and collective production. Through workshops, artist residencies, and collaborative production, the LATECO reconnects community members with Caribbean and Puerto Rican textile traditions such as weaving, natural dyeing, and garment repair, creating a localized system of material reuse, education, and cultural preservation. The project supports local artists, neighbors, and marginalized communities including unhoused individuals, by providing free access to tools, knowledge, and space. By combining textile practices within ecological and social systems, the Laboratorio fosters material sovereignty, environmental awareness, and community resilience.

Schessa Garbutt’s California Blues: Eco-Cultural Histories & Futures (Los Angeles, California), a series of free public events that travels across the state's nine major ecosystems to encode ecological data, history, and spiritual practices into quilts that honor climate grief. The events engage families with artmaking, ecological education, and BIPOC eco-histories to transmute climate grief and promote stewardship through re-connection to nature. Past work has focused on California's coastal and urban ecosystems; the next phase will focus on wetlands, deserts, oak woodlands, and agricultural microbiomes

Tova Katzman’s Mr. Brown's Garden (Panama City, Panama), an audiovisual narrative project documenting a medicinal garden situated at the edge of the Panama Canal. The project, which began in 2017, considers the intersection of daily life, ancestral memory, ecological resistance, and the legacy of American infrastructural power in the former Panama Canal Zone. It will culminate with the production and dissemination of a photo book and transnational book launch and film screening.

Tannis Kowalchuk, Artistic Director of Farm Arts Collective’s Dream on the Farm (Willow Wisp Organic Farm in Damascus, Pennsylvania), a site specific eco-theater performance presented promenade-style across a 25-acre organic vegetable farm in rural Pennsylvania. Now in its 8th year, Farm Arts Collective Artistic Director Tannis Kowalchuk conceives of and directs one new play annually in collaboration with a local ensemble of theatre artists, writers, musicians, and farmers. Dream on the Farm attracts hundreds of spectators each summer to walk the farmland and witness live original eco-theater that speaks our relationship to each other and the earth. Seeing work about climate change and environmental responsibility on a farm that feeds thousands of people each week is a poignant reminder of what we all risk to lose.

Ifrah Mansour’s living history inside the Aqal (Minnesota), a nomadic dome created by Mansour and community members that sits at the intersection of vernacular architecture, ecological design, and ancestral textile knowledge. A Somali cultural heirloom and refugee survival tool, the Aqal becomes a vessel for living history bringing storytelling, music, spirituality, ecological knowledge. Inside, audiences will encounter filmed conversations between diverse Minnesota community leaders alongside creative expressions including Qur’an recitation, storytelling, and other artistic practices. Through film and public presentations, the project will create a living archive of Minnesota resilience.

Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden (Erie Canal Corridor, New York State; Medina, New York to the Bronx, New York City), a floating food forest on a barge, creating a public commons for free harvesting, ecological learning, and gathering traveling along New York State’s Erie Canal. Building on Swale, a floating food forest that helped catalyze NYC Parks’ first public Foodway, Floating Garden will connect rural and urban waterfront communities while asking how public space might better support food sovereignty, climate resilience, and shared stewardship.

Grace McNally (Director and Producer)’s Listening to Whales (United States, Nova Scotia, Argentina, and the World's Oceans) a film about accidental scientist Katy Payne and a young Navy engineer Chris Clark, who became two of the first people to hear whales sing. When the Navy's sonar is blamed for killing whales, Katy decries their hubris while Chris defends the research in a fight that climbs to the Supreme Court. Over 50 years, they remain bound by what they heard, but divided by what to do about it. Told entirely through archival footage, Listening to Whales is a story of discovery, and what confronts us when we listen.

MitiMeth x Sara Bologna’s Ọ̀sà Eko Tuntun (New Lagos Lagoon | Ibadan, Oyo State, and Lagos, Nigeria), a collection of light objects inspired by the endangered aquatic species of the Lagos Lagoon, threatened by the infestation of water hyacinth, an invasive plant endangering life underwater and the livelihoods of the local population. The collection speaks to the entanglement of people, species, practices and places, inviting audiences to honor relational ecosystems, reimagine life with water, and re-enchant the lagoon.

Catie Newell’s TREE SPACE (Detroit, MI), a dense forest and nursery planted inside the roofless walls of a century-old sawmill. Two small enclosures within the mill's walls will house a working greenhouse—propagating native Michigan saplings for free distribution to city residents—and a contemplative room among young trees. Anchored by an enormous existing leaning elm and wrapped in a facade of vertical steel, wood, and mirror that optically multiplies the trees inside, the project offers both quiet and a practical, ongoing source of trees in a city where they are steadily disappearing.

Ka Oskar Ly with Moving Mountains and RedGreen Rivers’s Ancestral Futures: A HMong Hemp Field is a Movement (Dane County, Wisconsin, on Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) ancestral land), an eco-queer-feminist self and land-relation reclamation, invoking ancestral memory through one acre of hemp and indigo tended on Ho-Chunk land. It recognizes the nearly 400,000 HMong Americans who are severed from cultural knowledge by ongoing, intergenerational displacement. Led by master artisan Li Yang of social enterprise Red Green Rivers, alongside youths, elders, and a queer feminist artist cohort, the project plants seeds in community, ceremony, and song.

Cinthya Santos Briones’s Migrant Herbalism (New York, NY), an artistic and community-based project examining how Latin American migration to New York transforms and reactivates ethnobotanical knowledge surrounding medicinal plants. Through oral histories, ethnographic research, community workshops, and cameraless photographic processes, the project documents healing and spiritual practices carried across generations and geographies. It considers traditional herbalism as a living archive of biocultural memory and an infrastructure of care within migrant communities navigating displacement and unequal access to healthcare. The project will culminate in a multilingual herbal book of academic texts, poetry, medicinal recipes, a glossary of terms, and a cartography of migrant herbs and plants.

Shamira’s We Wear the Sun: An Okra Material Ecology (Indianapolis, Indiana), a multimedia project that centers okra as a complete material system—food, bast fiber, natural pigment, biomass, ash—transforming plant-embodied knowledge carried through diaspora into infrastructure. It traces the plant’s full lifecycle from cultivation sites to architectural surfaces.The work recovers and formalizes knowledge that traveled through land-based practices, enslavement, and forced migration, embedding that inheritance permanently into the built environment.

Rachel Shuman (Co-Director) and David Sampliner (Co-Director)’s Snow Globe (Beacon, New York), a film that searches for the snowy winters of Sampliner’s childhood after he experiences his hometown’s first snowless winter. Along the way he meets artists, scientists, and people whose lives depend on snow—revealing its hidden wonders and helping him imagine its future. What begins as one person’s reckoning with winter’s disappearance expands into a global portrait of adaptation and resilience.

Ani Simon-Kennedy’s The Forest School (Dja Faunal Reserve, Cameroon), a polyphonic documentary through the eyes of Baka youth and their elders as they chart a collective path toward saving the Congo Basin rainforest. Traditionally hunter-gatherer peoples of the Congo Basin, the Baka carry generations of ecological knowledge rooted in a deep relationship with the forest. Through youth voices, elders’ songs, scientific inquiry, and mythic storytelling, the film explores how ancestral knowledge and contemporary science can meet, learn from one another, and help protect the forest they share.

Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga’s From Repair to Resale in Nairobi (Nairobi, Kenya), which transforms reclaimed clothing (mitumba) and sheet metal (mabati) into wall reliefs with Nairobi women artisans. The wall reliefs carry co-authored messages inspired by khanga, a Kenyan women-centered textile tradition, positioning repair as environmental knowledge, creative intelligence, and a response to global textile waste. The project reactivates women-led repair knowledge in Nairobi, where global used-clothing flows have displaced repair practices and interrupted intergenerational knowledge. The works anchor public dialogue, repair workshops, and participatory message-making on women’s labor, material stewardship, and environmental accountability.

Maia Wikler (Director) and Cecilia Brown and Audrey Popa (Co-Producers)’s Wild East (Romania, Sweden, Austria), a short documentary film about Romanian environmentalist Gabi Paun and his meticulous and increasingly dangerous investigation into exposing IKEA's destruction of ancient forests. The access Wild East achieves is remarkable, placing Paun's personal risk and resilience at the center of a story with much wider ecological stakes. After multiple attempts on his life, he is forced to flee his home, yet remains immovable in his commitment. The film is an urgent, gripping portrait of one person's fight against powerful corporate interests.

Veronica Wood’s Land of Four Suns (Chaquijya, Guatemala), a feature documentary film that follows a Mayan farming family in Guatemala–one of the world’s centers of maize diversity–as they face extreme weather swings amid great personal loss. The film is structured around the life cycle of the maize, as the Consigua family grapples with increasingly unpredictable seasons and parched soil. Kan, the youngest daughter, is at the heart of the story–searching for her own way forward after her mother’s sudden passing.