Generative Performing Artist Award Fellows: Dwight Frizzell, Karen Lisondra
Kansas City, MO, March 9, 2026: Charlotte Street is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Visual Artist and Generative Performing Artist Awards, honoring the outstanding achievements of Kansas City area contemporary artists. This year, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Fellows are Heehyun Choi, Eric Conrad, and Mikey Yates. Recipients of the Generative Performing Artist Fellowship are Dwight Frizzell and Karen Lisondra.
Since 1997, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Awards have supported 114 outstanding artists living in the Kansas City area through annual, unrestricted cash awards with more than $921,500 distributed directly to visual artists. This year’s Visual Artist Fellows have practices that span moving image, soft sculpture, drawing, and painting. Choi’s films explore the physical and virtual dimensions of projected images and the subjectivity of seeing; Conrad’s textile sculptures and installations examine vulnerability and the human condition; and Yates’ paintings investigate contemporary image-making through intimate moments and interpersonal connections.
Charlotte Street launched its Generative Performing Artist Awards in 2008 as a parallel program to the Visual Artist Awards. To date, the organization has distributed $350,000 to 35 performing artists whose work expands the genre of performance. Generative Performing Artist Fellow Frizzell creates collectively based, socially engaged work spanning experimental music, filmmaking, and sound art, while Lisondra integrates devised theater, movement practices, and sound exploration into multidisciplinary performance.
Each artist will receive an unrestricted cash grant of $10,000 and recognition by Charlotte Street throughout 2026—including announcements to media, web-based marketing and promotional efforts, and special events. Generative Performing Artist Fellows are further recognized with a professional video production piece filmed in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater. Visual Artist Fellows are further recognized with a professionally curated exhibition premiering at the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace in late fall 2026.
The 2026 Charlotte Street Awards were selected through a competitive process beginning with an open call for applications from artists based in the five-county Kansas City Metro Area and in Douglas County, Kansas. Selections were made by a panel of jurors consisting of renowned arts professionals. Jurors participated in in-person interviews, presentations, and studio visits, resulting in the selection of 10 finalists for the Visual Artist Awards and 8 finalists for the Generative Performing Artists Awards, participating in in-person presentations, and studio visits to determine this year’s fellows.
VISUAL ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS
Heehyun Choi
Heehyun Choi is a moving image artist and educator based in South Korea and the United States. Her practice is grounded on the interest in the physicality and virtuality in projected images, the unseen beings outside the camera frame, and the subjectivity and variability of the act of seeing. Choi received her BA in Art&Technology at Sogang University and MFA in Film & Video at California Institute of the Arts.
Her films have been screened internationally, including at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Images Festival, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), and Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she received the Mariam Ghani Juror Award. Choi’s work has been exhibited in gallery spaces, including her recent Korea Arts Foundation America Awardee Solo Exhibition at Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and in group exhibitions at AHL Foundation Gallery, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA, and Post Territory Ujeongguk.
She is the recipient of the 2024 KAFA (Korea Arts Foundation of America) Award, WNDX x NIMAC Experimental Moving Image Award, AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship, Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking, and The Lightning Fund by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Photography & Filmmaking department at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Eric Conrad
Eric Leif Conrad was born in Toronto, Canada and explores vulnerability, psychology, and the human condition through textile-based sculptures, mixed-media installations, and drawings. Eric received his BA in mathematics and art from Kalamazoo College and an MFA degree in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and participated in artist residencies at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, and Instituto Superior Latinoamericano de Arte in Chile. He has shown his work in over 20 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Eric has also created site-specific installations and public art including exhibitions at the Miami-Dade International Airport in Florida and the the SACO Contemporary Art Biennale in Chile. Eric is an Assistant Professor of textiles and foundations at the University of Kansas.
Mikey Yates
Mikey Yates was born in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany and lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. Yates has presented recent solo exhibitions at COMA Gallery, Sydney; Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles; and Taymour Grahne, London. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art; The Hole, New York; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; and 1969 Gallery, New York among others. Yates is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and was a 2023 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS
Dwight Frizzell
Dwight Frizzell (b. 1956) grew up in Independence, Missouri where Harry Truman was his neighbor. They frequented the same library, had the same barber, and talked to a living fossil (a ginkgo tree) on their daily walks. As a youngster, Dwight learned of Truman’s nuclear bombing of civilian populations and became a life-long pacifist. He worked to re-elect Senator Stuart Symington and was active in student politics.
By 1974 Dwight had chosen to respond to injustice with inclusive art making rather than divisive politics. That same year he was ordained in support of his Conscientious Objector status. Since then he has been creating collectively-based, socially engaged art through filmmaking, music, writing and performance.
In 1976 Dwight released his Beyond the Black Crack LP, the first publication of music based on the physics of black holes. The record was widely reviewed, featured in the infamous Nurse with Wound list (1979), and reissued on Paradigm Discs (2000).
“If the idea of Sun Ra’s Arkestra jamming with electric-era Miles Davis and Frank Zappa on some distant burnt-out asteroid appeals, then this could be for you.” —Edwin Pouncey, Top
Dwight began an 11-year master-adept relationship with Sun Ra after meeting him in Chicago in 1980. Frizzell is a founding member of the Black Crack Revue, newEar contemporary chamber ensemble, National Audio Theatre Festivals, Alter Destiny and Myth-Science Ensemble. He has received Peabody and Golden Reel Awards for his radio work.
His new projects include MU: The Cosmic Void that Created the Universe (with Shanté Clair, Jacob Souders and Brad Cox), Ergosphere (sonifying black hole physics with Michael Henry and Greg Mackender), and Journey of Turtles, a multi-channel soundscape composition featuring the rejuvenating waters of Greer Springs in Missouri’s Ozarks (with Marideth Sisco, Thomas Aber and Tony Brewer).
Dwight holds a terminal degree in Sound Design for Theatre from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is Professor and Sound Head at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Karen Lisondra
Karen Lisondra is an award-winning international performing artist, theater-maker, and educator. An original company dancer in Argentina’s aerial sensation Fuerza Bruta, she later toured three continents with El Teatro de los Andes’ production of Homer’s Odyssey and received three Bolivian National Theater Awards for her one-woman show Mocambo.
In Kansas City, she created a Spanish-language radio drama for KC Public Theater, co-created and directed We Are the Landscape through Charlotte Street Residencies, and co-wrote and directed A Storytelling Project/Pachakutec with UMKC’s MFA Acting and Directing program. She has puppeteered for the Lyric Opera, Fire Tale Theater, and Art in the Loop.
Trained in devised and anthropological theater, Karen integrates butoh, contact improvisation, Chen tai chi, and sound exploration into her creative laboratory, as well as into
mindful-movement workshops for Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness, Art is Mentorship, and InterUrban ArtHouse. She is a veteran yoga instructor for Yoga at the Kauffman, Maya Yoga, and the Kansas City Indian Center Youth Camp, a certified DanceAbility International inclusive-dance teacher, and a cancer survivor.
She is a recipient of the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program and has completed artist residencies with Teatro BioBio/Danza Expansiva (Concepción, Chile), Teatro Tierra (Bogotá, Colombia), Teatro Epi d’Or (Pontigny, France), and the Charlotte Street Foundation
(Kansas City, MO).
Karen is currently adapting her stage play Princess Goddess Witch Weaver—a kaleidoscopic, modern reimagining of The Odyssey—into a film. She can also be seen onstage as Helen in Trojan Women MCI at the Unicorn Theatre.
VISUAL ARTIST AWARDS JURY
Abel González Fernández-Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit—MOCAD Larry Ossei-Mensah-Curator and Cultural Critic; Curator, The Medium Group;
Co Founder & President, ARTNOIR Co.
Raechell Smith-Director and Curator, Emily & Todd Voth Artspace
GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARDS JURY
Brandon Alvendia-Artist, Curator and Educator; Technical Director, Public Media Institute
Jeff Harshbarger-Composer and Bandleader
Arien Wilkerson-Artistic Director, Tnmot Aztro Dance Company and Program Manager, Judson Memorial Church
For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at [email protected] or 816-994-7734.
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
ABOUT THE EMILY & TODD VOTH ARTSPACE
Since 1999, the Artspace has championed emerging and established contemporary artists through exhibitions, public programming, and educational initiatives. As an integral part of KCAI, the Artspace is a bridge that connects campus and the wider Kansas City community, promoting engagement with contemporary art and fostering future generations of artists and creative professionals.
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View the press release as a PDF here.
