Artists + Practitioners + Organizations

Meet the artists, practitioners, and organizations! Far South/Border North awarded funding to support artists and cultural practitioners working in disciplines from performing arts, visual arts, music, film and media, and literature to multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms.

Far South/Border North Round I Grant Recipients

Our Round I grant recipients include about 60 artists and cultural practitioners from San Diego and Imperial counties. Round I grant recipients began developing their campaigns in June 2023, and are now implemented those campaigns through May 2024.

Juan Manuel Escalante

San Diego County

Juan Manuel Escalante is a designer and an artist working with computer code, modular synthesizers, and analog drawings. His work has been shown internationally and featured in major festivals and exhibitions, including Ars Electronica, Athens Digital Arts, OFFF, Mutek, Currents New Media, Binario, and Ceremonia, amongst others. He was a member of the National System of Art Creators (National Endowment for the Arts, MX) and received the Corwin Award (1st prize) for Electronic-Acoustic Composition in 2016. He has taught creative programming at the University of California Santa Barbara and various higher education institutions in Mexico, including the graduate program in Architecture (UNAM), where he founded and directed its Media Lab for eight years. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology (UCSB) and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Arts at California State University, Fullerton.

Yolanda Marie Franklin

San Diego County

Yolanda Marie Franklin is an award-winning actor, director, producer, and community leader, and appointed Artistic Director for Common Ground Theatre, resident theatre at the San Diego College of Continuing Education Educational Cultural Complex and Theatre-in-Residence at The La Jolla Playhouse for a second-year term. Some of her credits include Sense Of Love, The Cell Plays, Little Rock, Uplifting Black Voices Play Festival, Night Mother, The Ruby In Us, The Further Adventures of Hedder Gabler, Raisin In The Sun, The August Wilson Cycle, and The Sugar Witch.

Neil Kendricks

San Diego County

Neil Kendricks is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator. Kendricks earned a Master's in Television, Film, and New Media from San Diego State University in 2006. Kendricks launched his mixed-media "Strange Fruit" drawing series as a participant in the Art Produce Gallery's 2020 Artist-in-Residence program. The exhibition "Mirror, Mirror: Lights, Camera, Dreams!" at Bread and Salt Gallery showcased his short films and storyboards in 2021. Kendricks' exhibition "Temple of Story" which combined large-scale drawings with audio recordings of his short stories inspired by past, present, and future pandemics, was shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art 2021/2022.  His new experimental short film, "Book of Skin," will complete postproduction in 2023.

Johnny Bear Contreras

San Diego County

"From the ocean to the desert and everything in between" is how Johnny Bear Contreras answers the question of what influences his work. He works in the medium of sculpture, specializing in bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel and combining all three with resin. A critical component in his work is the representation of indigenous peoples within the arts industry, sharing that "our work is our belief system on display for the whole world to see."

MR Barnadas

San Diego County

MR Barnadas is an intercultural, interdisciplinary visual artist dedicated to the public sphere with an emphasis on site- and audience-specific participatory engagement. These artworks have been conducted in the form of murals, signage, performances, interventions, institutional critique, public events, and other collaborative gestures. Through collaboration with participants, nuanced perspectives are activated in the art production - ultimately to increase public discourse around representation.  She was born in Montreal to parents from Trinidad and Peru and grew up in the Southwest of the United States. She holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in Painting/Art & Technology; conducted Regional Studies in Mexican Art and Craft at the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla; holds an MFA in Visual Arts with a Public Culture focus from the University of California San Diego; and co-founded Collective Magpie, a shared practice dedicated to art in the public domain.

Carlos Uribe

Imperial County

Carlos Antonio Uribe is a 4th generation mariachi musician and director of Mariachi Acero Del Valle. He was born in Portland, Oregon, with roots in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He lives and works in Niland, California. He has performed with Mariachi Los Toros, Mariachi Espectacular, the 2022 Summit of the Americas, and Mariachi Acero.

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Far South/Border North Round II Grant Recipients

Our Round II grant recipients include 18 San Diego and Imperial County organizations. In fall 2023, they hired artists and cultural practitioners and began working alongside them to develop their campaigns, and implemented them through August 2024.

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