How Art Inspires Change: A Check-In with 2023 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants Recipients

With the launch of the 2025 grant cycle, we spotlight projects that have impacted communities across the US.

The Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program is now open for its fourth cycle, with opportunities for women-identifying artists to receive up to $20,000 to support their environmental art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement.

AWAW EAG projects not only point at problems, but aim to engage an environmental issue at some scale. The intended impact of the project is an important factor in the selection process. All selected projects must benefit the public in some way by organizing a public engagement within the grant term; it must be free to attend, open to the general public, and must add value to the public sphere.

Here, we check in with a few of the 2023 AWAW EAG recipients to learn more about their work and how they engaged local communities in activities that inspired learning, sharing, and empowerment.

Alisha B Wormsley; Children of NAN: a Survival Guide;Pittsburgh, PA

Image: From the open-to-the-public filming at the African Healing Garden in Pittsburgh, PA, where lifetime Pittsburgh resident Betty Lane (center) was honored, Photo Courtesy of Alisha B Wormsley

Children of NAN: a Survival Guide is a film for future Black femmes that spans Black womxn’s relationship to craft, land/space, and spirit. It will feature a series of performed tutorials, rituals, survival strategies on various landscapes staged in a mobile set handcrafted by Wormsley. 

The set is mobile not just for convenience but as a signifier of our migrant relationship to land and landscape. Ancestrally adapting to weather, plant-life, water, and resources in every part of this country and beyond.

Since receiving the AWAW EAG, Wormsley has held events including a big, open-to-the-public filming at the African Healing Garden in Pittsburgh. The event honored activist and lifetime Pittsburgh resident Betty Lane, who started the Living Waters of Larimer, a group of water stewards for the neighborhood of Larimer, which has experienced flooding issues. Lane has been buying plots of land in Larimer for 30 years, making affordable housing and community gardens. Her most beloved garden is the African Healing Garden, a place for her community to heal and survive the violence and gentrification happening there.

In addition to the Pittsburgh events, Wormsley has traveled to film at other locations across the United States where Black femmes are connecting to the land and acting as stewards in many different ways.

The 2025 cycle of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants program is open now through 5:00 PM ET Tuesday, April 15. Find out about additional awards and grants here. Sign up for our free bi-weekly newsletter to receive announcements about future NYFA events and programs.