Cleveland Public Theatre is excited to announce the recipients of two new artistic initiatives for Cuyahoga County artists that were announced earlier this year―The Individual Artist Fund and the Premiere Fellowship.Both awards are generously funded by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture in partnership with Assembly for the Arts .

The grantees were selected by accomplished artists and producers with ties to the theatre including India Nicole Burton, Eric Coble, Jaiie Dayo Aliya, David Hansen, Mindy Herman, and Sheffia Randall-Nickerson. 

“These amazing grants included significant unrestricted funds for artists as well as options for major project support. At CPT, we believe the field must continue to invent and innovate and that is why we focus on artists in our community who are truly moving the field forward!”― CPT Executive Artistic Director Raymond Bobgan  

The Individual Artist Fund  

The Individual Artist Fund provides a $5,000 award to three individuals who demonstrate artistic excellence and innovation. Not a project-based grant, the award is designed for interpretative artists working in various forms such as actors, dancers, and designers, or creating artists who are not seeking project support, or whose project may not be a good fit for CPT based on scope or other factors. 

Recipients include Melissa Ajayi, Molly Andrews-Hinders and Amy Schawbauer. 

 Melissa Ajayi is a performer, choreographer, and recreation therapist currently based in Cleveland. She has worked as an independent artist since 2009, dancing in work by multiple companies/artists in New York City, Lexington, KY, and Cleveland, OH including Kimberly Bartosik/Daela, Antaeus Dance, Travesty Dance Group, Marquez Dance Project, Emily Jeffries, Sarah Holmes-Villanueva, Leanne Schmidt and Company and Blackbird Dance Theatre. She has performed at CPT’s DanceWorks, Pandemonium, Cleveland Dance Festival, Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Maelstrom Collaborative Arts, and BorderLight Fringe Festival. Since the inception of Ajayi Dance in 2021, Melissa has created more than 10 original works including three self-produced evening-length site-specific immersive experiences as well as a commissioned work with composer and percussionist Luke Rinderknecht through No Exit New Music Ensemble. Additional works have been presented at CPT’s DanceWorks, Blackbird Dance Theatre, Tridea Dance, Maelstrom Collaborative Arts, Cleveland Dance Project Company Community Collab, BorderLight Fringe Festival, Ingenuity Fest, and MicroTheater CLE. Through Ajayi Dance, Melissa has collaborated with many area artists and organizations to achieve the mission of Ajayi Dance―to create dance that inspires connection to self, others, and the world around us. With a dedication to process and collaboration, she aims to foster contemporary dance opportunities in Cleveland and is working to make Cleveland a destination for dancers to thrive as individual artists. Along with fellow collaborators, Melissa conceived of, and facilitates inFORMal Fridays, an opportunity for dance artists to experiment and focus on process in a shared community space. She teaches a weekly contemporary class, organizes a weekly community class led by a rotation of local artists and has been a guest instructor at many area institutions including Cleveland State University, Cleveland School of the Arts, Dancing Wheels, The Movement Project, and Bard High School Early College. Melissa is a recipient of the 2023 Ohio Arts Council Artist Opportunity Award. 

Molly Andrews-Hinders is a songwriter, performance artist, and educator working at the intersection of healing, justice, and transmutation in Cleveland, Ohio. She is currently writing Velveteen, a new musical that will be featured at Playhouse Square as part of their Children’s Theatre Series in October 2024. Molly released her debut album Naked Dinner in May 2023, a self-produced recording under the stage name Creating Lewis. This project blends avant-pop, neo-soul, and musical theatre to investigate collective care, systems of power, and radical love. Molly is director and composer of Emergence, a “soul-stirring” musical that challenges our cognitive dissonance and invites our collective becoming. Emergence ensemble performed at Prop Thtr’s Rhinofest (Feb 2020), Cleveland Public Theatre’s Test Flight series (Mar 2019), and multiple music venues throughout Cleveland. Molly’s written music for shows performed at Cleveland Public Theatre, Near West Theatre, BorderLight Festival and Maelstrom Collaborative Arts. She currently serves as Education Content Creation Coordinator at Playhouse Square, writing and producing music and original work that is featured both digitally and onstage for audiences of up to 100,000 each year. 

Amy Schwabauer is an actor, playwright, and Toy Theater creator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work varies from the traditional, to the miniature, to the improvised. Her newest solo show, I Wear My Dead Sister’s Clothes, was performed in the 2024 BorderLight Fringe Festival to sold-out audiences. Her award-winning solo show This is Not About My Dead Dog was produced in the 2019 BorderLight Fringe Festival. In 2022, she had two shows at the BorderLight Fringe Festival:  Bell, Book, and Late Nite Drive Thru, co-created and performed with Carrie Williams originally produced at CPT’s Pandemonium 2021, and the Toy Theater production Coco and Gigi co-created and performed with Jill Levin. Coco and Gigi won the CAN Journal Best Visual Theater Award at the BorderLight Fringe Festival that year. Other credits include performing and co-creating Stage Frights (Imposters Theater 2023); performing an excerpt of her solo show,  I Wear My Dead Sister’s Clothes (Dobama Playwright’s Gym “Shorts” 2022); creating and performing her character “Madame Claire Voyant” (an improvised interactive performance at various events including Playhouse Square 2023); co-creating, performing and touring the Toy Theater production The Events of the Warren County Fair as Observed by a Young Astronaut with Mike Geither (2015-2018). In 2020, she created and performed in the Youtube series for kids Playing with a Purpose edited by Jasmine Golphin, produced by Lake Erie Ink with support from the Cleveland Foundation. She’s a member of the Dobama Playwright’s Gym and the Chicago Midwives Artist Collective. For more information about Amy and her various projects you can visit www.AmySchwabauer.com or follow her on instagram @InstaSchwabs. 

The Premiere Fellowship  

The Premiere Fellowship grants four artists with a $10,000 award for the development of an original performance project. Funding covers producorial management, production, rehearsal/performance space, marketing, front of house support etc.  

Premiere Fellowship recipients include Ray Caspio, CHIMI, Fatima Matar and Robin VanLear. 

Ray Caspio is a performance and conceptual artist primarily creating intimate performance installations. Their work responds to the aggression and division of sociopolitical narratives artificially dividing the individual from themself and a collective well-being. Ray’s gesture is to reach the collective soul in an act of emotional healing to help free ourselves and embrace our common humanity. Caspio’s work ranges from confessional to camp and has been performed at The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Theater Ninjas (Associate Artistic Director 2012-2015), BorderLight Fringe, 78th Street Studios, Cleveland Public Theatre’s Pandemonium, and Playhouse Square. Ray performed in contemporary plays and served as a performer-creator in numerous devised works. They appeared on Best of Theatre lists for Scene Magazine (2014 & 2017) and WCPN/ NPR’s The Sound of Applause (2014, for the conception and performance of the immersive cabaret exploration of gender, sexuality, and marriage equality, TingleTangle), with Scene profiling them as “The Thespian” of 2014. Caspio studies Michael Chekhov’s psychophysical performance technique through MICHA and The Michael Chekhov School. Ray founded Michael Chekhov Center Cleveland to share Chekhov’s principles with Northeast Ohio artists. They have also trained in Bouffon, Eccentric Performance, Alba Method, and at Second City Chicago. Caspio has taught for CMA, Baldwin Wallace, Playhouse Square, Dobama, Cleveland Play House Theatre Academy, Ohio City Theatre Project, and MetroHealth Arts in Medicine. An illustration graduate, Ray’s drawings and paintings are in private collections in North America, Australia, and Europe. Select exhibitions have been with Maria Neil Art Project, Artists Archives, Yards Projects, LGBT Center of Cleveland, and The Tom of Finland Foundation. Ray received a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, a Playhouse Square LAUNCH Residency, and a 2022 Satellite Fund grant administered by SPACES and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, for THE WALL, co-produced with Ohio City Theatre Project. 

CHIMI is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work challenges cultural boundaries using mediums such as sound, visual art, performance art and installation. She aims her gaze at the cosmos, in search of the soul’s purpose here on earth. Her independently released debut E.P; NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/4.25, expanded her music career with collaborations alongside Mourning [A] BLKstar, Lonnie Holley, Moor Mother, and Glory Fires.  

Her nomadic approach to visual art (mixed media, photography, set design, directing) have opened an array of opportunities to share her work at Rooms To Let, Black Arts Showcase, SHEART. 

Fatima Matar is an award-winning artist, writer, and a poet. She sought asylum in the United States in 2018 after facing persecution and prosecution for her political and social activism, in her country Kuwait. She now lives in the Cleveland-area with her daughter Jori and their cat Ty. Amongst others, Fatima’s writing has appeared in: Oyster River Pages, and Scene. Her performance poetry show Lies About Love debuted at Blank Canvas Theater in 2023. Her performance poetry show Poems of An Angry Feminist will be part of the BorderLight Festival in July 2024. Fatima won The Urgent Art Fund through SPACES in 2023, and Ohio’s Individual Excellence Award for writing in 2024.  

Robin VanLear For the past 30+ years, as founder and director of Parade the Circle, Robin’s job and her art were intertwined. As director of Parade the Circle, Robin’s work centered around artistic collaboration, innovation, community engagement and the challenge of raising the bar when it came to community-based art. Even before creating the Department of Community Arts for the Cleveland Museum of Art, interaction was an essential component of all aspects of her art. Her research process necessitates interaction with a wide range of technicians, scholars, trades and businesspeople. The creation of the work is most often collaborative, integrating artists from a variety of media; and interaction is vital to the Jinal presentation of her work. Her earlier sculptures frequently involved viewer manipulation. As she moved into designing masks, costumes, puppets and installations for performance-based work, her goal has been not just to present a piece, but to draw the audience into the piece through the staging, the location and frequently a hands-on interactive component. In 1978 when Robin founded Art Acts, her performance art Company, including anyone interested in the performances has been a mandate for her. She finds that collaboration between both professional artists and community members brings a wider perspective to the creation and performance of the work. Her wish is for beautiful, stimulating and thought-provoking work to be presented in the public sphere in venues accessible to all our citizenry regardless of age, education, economics or mobility. Robin makes art of the highest quality that appears at times and in places we least expect it. She wants her art to haunt the viewer, and for challenging ideas and top craftsmanship to appear in the “commonest” of situations. Robin lives in Cleveland Heights, OH with her artist husband Jesse Rhinehart.