Announcing our 2026 Jerome Mentorship Recipients
Congratulations to the 2026 Jerome Mentorship Recipients, Taylor Ngiri Seaberg, Daniel Acevedo, and Brenda Tran!
Taylor Ngiri Seaberg
Taylor Ngiri Seaberg (they/them) is a queer, 3rd generation, Kenyan-American community organizer and multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, piano) based in Minneapolis with artist communities in Mexico City and Chicago.
Currently, they are a 2025-2028 Jerome Foundation Hill Artist Grant Recipient releasing a Black Trans short horror film and a book on incarceration and a music album under their artist moniker, “Manic Pixie Dream Boi,” highlighting bi-polar disorder and de-stigmatizing mental health in the Black community. They were awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board (MSAB) 2019 Cultural Community Partnership grant for an artist networking series called, "Artist Feast." They were awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) grant and a Red Bull Arts grant for their protest photography surrounding the Uprising in the Twin Cities in 2020. Ngiri was a lead director on a compilation community album called, "The Art of the Revolution," which included works of resilience from 10 different Black arts organizers and activists in the Midwest. Ngiri was also a Metro Regional Arts Council (MRAC) finalist for the $5,000 Next Step Fund grant for a live streaming concert incorporating Kiswahili and English for a live production
showcase.
Work
Daniel Acevedo
Daniel Acevedo is a Mexican photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work uses photography as a form of self-expression, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging through portraiture, installation, and image-based practices.
Centered on collaboration, his process blends conversations with subjects to translate lived experiences into visual form. His work reflects themes of personal heritage, connection, and spatial identity. He earned a BFA in Photography with a minor in Advertising from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Work
Brenda Tran
Brenda Tran is a visual artist, designer, and cultural organizer exploring graphic design, illustration, film, and animation as tools for sharing hyperlocal and diasporic stories.
Her work chronicles the mundane and unique details of everyday lives in order to tell bigger stories about migration, colonialism, consumerism, and popular culture. In 2021, she started Banana Leaf Collective, a Twin Cities-based community that aims to nurture early-career BIPOC working at the intersection of arts, media, and digital technology. A lover of chaotic and collaborative artmaking, she has co-produced one short film and seven publications with the help of dozens of local contributors.
Jurors
Jocmarys Viruet Feliciano is a visual artist from Arecibo, Puerto Rico with a focus on hand papermaking and Book Arts. She holds a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus and a Master's degree from the University of Iowa, Center of the Book. Jocmarys worked as an intern at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio and her first experience with handmade paper was in 2014 as an exchange student in South Korea. Jocmarys has taught several bookbinding and handmade paper workshops in Puerto Rico and in the United States at places such as Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, North Carolina, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Taller Lapaduma in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Her artist's books are part of special collections such as University of Miami, University of Iowa, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Her most recent artistic experience was being part of a winter residency in the mountains of Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and The Lucayan Archipelago Artist Residency at the Poinciana Paper Press studio in Nassau, The Bahamas.
Mason Collins (they/them) is currently the print production manager at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, CA. Their role at the archive is to ensure that works in the collection are reproduced in publications as beautifully as they exist in real life. Prior to Letterform, they spent nearly a decade in New York working on artists’ books, photobooks, zines, and special-edition publications for small independent presses such as Small Editions and Diagonal Press. On weekends, you’ll find Mason at zine fairs, studying bobbin lace, or enthusiastically chatting about color theory.
Wen-Li Chen (Taiwanese American, b. 1981; resides in St. Paul, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and independent publisher whose work bridges visual art, photography, book arts, video, installation, community engagement, and collaboration. She is moved to encounter and present intergenerational dwelling and inheritance through oblique poetics, vulnerable histories, enduring relationships, and personal experiences.
The Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Central Library collect two of her artist books. Chen has exhibited internationally and nationally in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. She was recently awarded the McKnight Fellowship for Book Artists from the Minnesota Book Art Center. She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals, the VAF (Warhol Foundation), the Lanesboro Artist Residency, Women's Studio Workshop Residency, and the NCAF (National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan).
She serves as Adjunct Faculty at St. Cloud State University and has previously taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the University of Wisconsin–Stout. She received her M.Des. in photography from The Glasgow School of Art in the UK and an M.Ed. in Dual Language Immersion Education from the University of Minnesota. She is also the co-founder/director of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, a platform supporting contemporary art, publishing, and cultural exchange.
The MCBA/Jerome Book Arts Mentorship
Since 1985, the Jerome Foundation has helped artists push the boundaries of contemporary book arts by supporting the creation of new work. Book arts projects funded by 16 series of Fellowships (now known as Jerome Residency) and eight prior series of Mentorships range from exquisitely crafted fine press volumes and sculptural books to documented performances and one-of-a-kind installations that “break the bindings” and redefine conventional notions of book form.
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