Photo by Emily Cai.

Photo by Maiya Jannah

Tiffany Mi MFA'25 and Maiya Jannah Ramsaroop '25 are this year's recipients of The David Dornstein ’85 Artist Grant that will help fund their respective creative projects.

Providence, R.I. [Brown University], April 11, 2025

Brown Arts Institute (BAI), part of the Perelman Arts District, announces the David Dornstein ’85 Artist Grant recipients. Tiffany Mi MFA'25 and Maiya Jannah Ramsaroop '25 were selected to receive funding to support their proposed projects.

The David Dornstein ’85 Artist Grant was established to honor the creative legacy of David Dornstein ’85. The program is designed to create new energy and life around the arts at Brown University that will carry over each year by providing resources for exceptional and unique projects that serve as a “next step” for graduating seniors or graduate students. The award scope includes original artistic projects or creative research that would benefit from extended time or extended opportunity for travel, project design, or costs or experiences.

Tiffany Mi MFA'25 (she/her) is a poet, hybrid writer, and educator interested in collective memory and the archive. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest and Nimrod International Journal; and she is the recipient of the Mark Baumer Prize for Language Art, John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing. A Kundiman South Regional Co-Chair, she hails from Texas and currently lives in Providence on Narragansett land, where she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Mi’s project, Collage, is a site of collaboration and community, that grounds Mi's two-pronged project: 1) a book-length assemblage of writings engaging with her family archives, and; 2) a community arts+writing workshop series in collaboration with D.C.-based artist shurjo mukhi, culminating in a Personal/Oral Histories Card Deck—an interactive keepsake made with, by, and for participants. With its fragmented, hybrid, layered, and intertextual nature, the collage form resists hegemonic historical narratives; creates space for multiple voices to exist and interact; and produces dynamic understandings of the legacies from which we emerge and toward which we are constantly arriving.

Maiya Jannah Ramsaroop '25 (she/her) is a writer, director, actor, and producer, whose work endeavors to shed light on the intersection between identity and the intimate experiences of being alive. At Brown, she is pursuing honors degrees in both Modern Culture & Media and Literary Arts, and for the third year in a row, Maiya is serving as the Festival Director of the Ivy Film Festival—the largest student-run film festival in the world—where she works to nurture the next generation of film professionals and build inclusive pathways into the industry. She is a recent alum of the Television Academy Internship Program, where she received the opportunity to work with ABC Signature Studios as a Production Admin/Post-Production Intern, and later went on to represent the Bob Bennett Future Leadership Program as a trophy presenter at the 76th Primetime Emmys. She is passionate about opening up the entertainment industry to new perspectives, and is very excited to share Elegy, and the women it honors, with the world.

Ramsaroop’s project, Elegy is a feature-length narrative drama film that details the interior lives of intergenerational Caribbean women. Traversing across time in Queens, New York, from the 80s to modern day, the film pays homage to the vibrant, gritty Guyanese community that lives right off the A train stop at Lefferts Boulevard and Liberty Avenue. The film explores the necessity of female relationships within historically marginalized communities, and celebrates the spaces women carve for one another. It grapples with themes of maturation, sacrifice, agency, and grief - uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, and friends that feel like sisters, discover and rediscover one another, as time fluctuates between them.

About Brown Arts Institute (BAI)
Brown Arts Institute, part of the Perelman Arts District, is a university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community. Through year-round programming, research-focused courses, initiatives, collaborations, and partnerships, along with rigorous artistic and academic programs, BAI commissions and presents new work on campus, across Providence, Rhode Island, and beyond, from students, faculty, and on-campus arts groups, as well as in collaboration with forward-focused visiting artists and other performing arts organizations. 

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For more information, please contact:
Peter Chenot
Director of Marketing and Communications
Brown Arts Institute | Brown University
peter_chenot@brown.edu | 401-863-9940