2026 Grant Recipients
Telluride arts artist Grant Recipients
Priscilla A Morales • Art for Art's Sake Award Recipient
Proyecto: El Viaje del Río Colorado
Priscilla Alejandra Morales Zatarain nació en San Diego, California, pero su travesía comenzó con su primer viaje de regreso a Tijuana, México, donde creció. Como muchos habitantes de la frontera, es hija de padres migrantes.
Desde pequeña tuvo el privilegio de explorar el mundo a través de una videocámara familiar y de diferentes cámaras fotográficas que pertenecían a sus hermanos mayores. Su inspiración proviene de las emociones que despiertan las fotografías. Aunque no cuenta con una formación académica en fotografía, su perspectiva artística está profundamente influenciada por sus estudios en arquitectura.
Estudió Arquitectura en la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California y desarrolló habilidades de carpintería en Job Corps. Actualmente trabaja como suplente de mantenimiento en la biblioteca, dirige su propio estudio de dibujo arquitectónico y, durante el invierno, se desempeña como ski technician.
La idea de “El Viaje del Río Colorado” es algo que ha estado conmigo desde siempre. El agua que llega hasta Tijuana viene desde acá, Colorado, y así como los ríos y la ciudad se caracterizan por su gran dinámica, yo también he estado en un viaje constante, viviendo en 3 países, más de 5 ciudades y más de 10 casas.
Creo que el movimiento, para muchos, puede proyectar inestabilidad, pero también crea un gran poder de adaptabilidad y resiliencia, y gracias a ello, sin querer queriendo, he llegado a la fuente del río.
Este trabajo muestra una línea del tiempo de los paisajes por los que pasa el Río Colorado, los seres vivos que se benefician de el y el impacto que ah tenido con el paso del tiempo, es un trabajo también personal, porque eh capturado con mi celular momentos significativos en compañía de personas importantes, sin la intención de algún día presentar esto en una exposición.
Andy Konigsmark • Art for Art's Sake Award Recipient
Project: Fat Pitch
Andy Konigsmark is an author, ordained Presbyterian minister, and stand-up comedian, a combination that makes more sense the longer you sit with it. Raised in Georgia, he moved to Telluride with Dodi in 2008. He's a proud father to Emmi Claire and Crew. His writing is focused on grace, second chances, and humor.
“Fat Pitch” is the story of a divorced youth minister who secretly pays a suspended NFL player to save his late father's church softball team. It began as a screenplay, grew into a novel, and this grant provides the opportunity to return the story to its original form: a scene that introduces the world to Denny Clark and Pastor Pine.
Ashley Shupp • Art for Art's Sake Award Recipient
ProJect: Machinery + Equipment for Fox + Stag
Ashley Shupp is a Telluride native who was raised in the San Juan Mountains and graduated from Telluride High School. A lifelong artist with a passion for creativity, she went on to study graphic design, where she developed a strong foundation in visual storytelling and design.
Ashley and her family continue to call Telluride home. Her two children now attend the very same high school she graduated from, and her deep roots in the community extend through multiple generations, with her mother and sister also living in the area. That strong connection to her hometown continues to inspire both her life and her work.
In recent years, Ashley has combined her love of art, fashion, and sustainability by creating one-of-a-kind upcycled clothing and custom handmade swimwear. Every piece is thoughtfully designed to celebrate individuality, craftsmanship, and creative expression.
Deeply committed to giving back to the community that shaped her, Ashley has been an active supporter of the Telluride AIDS Benefit (TAB) and has participated in the TAB Fashion Show for the past three years. Through these collaborations, she uses fashion as a medium for both artistic expression and community impact.
Whether transforming reclaimed textiles into wearable art or designing custom swimwear, Ashley’s work is inspired by the beauty of the San Juan Mountains, her passion for craftsmanship, and the vibrant community she is proud to call home.
Sarah Tyler • Community Engagement Grant Award Recipient
ProJect: Open HeART Apothecary - Music and poetry as medicine
Sarah Tyler is a daughter, sister, mother, wife, family nurse practitioner, and interdisciplinary artist who embraces creativity as a way of living. She is the founder of Kindred Integrative Care, an integrative primary care practice in Telluride, Colorado. Her art finds expression in handmade birthday cards, imaginative costumes, her personal style, foraged creations from nature, iPhone photography, and occasionally through poetry, songwriting, drawing, and painting. Throughout both homemaking and her nursing career, art and creativity have been central to how she connects with others, expresses love, finds meaning, and moves through the world.
Open HeART Apothecary is an immersive community art installation created by family nurse practitioner Sarah Tyler that reimagines healing through music, poetry, and the shared human experience. For more than a decade, Sarah has recommended songs, poems, and live-music experiences to patients to foster reflection, comfort, and connection, one of her approaches to care that inspired the vision behind Open HeART Apothecary. Through collaborations with local artists, Aubrey Mable, Emily Scott Robinson, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, the project features music and poetry as artistic "prescriptions" for rest, hope, joy, love, inspiration and more.
Open HeART Apothecary is a sculptural, papier-mâché anatomical heart transformed into an illuminated medicine cabinet. Its atria and ventricles become apothecary shelves filled with handcrafted capsules, prescription bottles, and prescription cards containing poetry, song lyrics, and QR-linked audio experiences. Together, these objects create an immersive metaphor in which the language, rituals, and symbolism within medicine are reimagined through the healing power of art.
ellen metrick • Professional development Award Recipient
ProJect: Children of the North Winds
Brandon Berkel • Community Engagement Grant Award Recipient
ProJect: Ski Pass
Elizabeth (Shevi) miller • Professional development Honorable mention
ProJect: one-on-one instruction in stone setting for Silversmithing
Shevi Miller is a Telluride-based emerging silversmith inspired by the natural beauty and rich mining history of the San Juan Mountains. After years devoted to raising a family, she is now pursuing the creation of handcrafted jewelry that celebrates traditional craftsmanship.
With the generous support from the Telluride Arts Direct Artist Grant, I will receive one-on-one instruction in stone setting to strengthen my silversmithing skills. My goal is to create heirloom-quality jewelry that honors both the beauty of natural stones and Telluride’s silver mining heritage.
Social Justice Grant Recipients
Aela Morgan • Social Justice Grant, Award Recipient
Project: In Pieces Together
In Pieces Together is a mixed-media body of work created from shredded paper and layered paint that examines political division, civic unrest, and the tension between fracture and connection. Through acts of breaking apart and rebuilding, the project asks whether wholeness is possible within a landscape of competing narratives and collective uncertainty.
Aela Morgan is a mixed-media artist based between New York City and Telluride. Beginning with landscape photography and later evolving into painting and collage, her practice explores the human condition through themes of connection and separation, fragility and resilience, and the emotional landscapes that shape our collective and personal lives.
Christy Ferrato • Social Justice Grant, Award Recipient
Project: Obantu Series
The Obantu series confronts systemic oppression and the erosion of basic human rights. The series includes five figures built on 13” artist’s mannequins covered with text, symbols, and found objects. These works operate as vessels for truth and reflect how visual art has historically been used to challenge tyranny, corruption, terrorization, violence, censorship and the denial of civil rights and due process. They stand as radical symbols of defiance against authoritarian structures and demand justice.
Christy Ferrato is a poet, artist, educator, and performance artist whose work has been featured in lectures, publications, poetry performances, and exhibitions at venues and events including the Lake Eden Arts Festival, Taos Poetry Festival, the Re(dress) Poetry Series in Los Angeles, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Durango Arts Center, the Henderson Fine Arts Center, the Ray Drew Gallery, The Kennedy Gallery, Fusion 708 Gallery, the Strata Gallery, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her honors include a Best New Poet nomination and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and her poem “On The Road To Julius’s Sheep Camp” was included in the anthology Four Corners Voices, which won the 2025 Colorado Book Award.
Cie Hoover • Social Justice Grant, Award Recipient
Project: Eroded World
"Eroded World" is a proposed large-format (48" x 72") mixed-media wood relief that explores the intersection of environmental degradation and intergenerational justice. The piece will serve as a visual meditation on the "inheritance" of a precarious planet, centering on a father and child standing at the precipice of a shifting landscape.
Cie Hoover is a Colorado-based artist redefining wood as a contemporary medium. Formerly a Nashville music industry professional and touring musician, Hoover’s “Organic Contemporary"” work blends subtractive carving with musical rhythm to explore the connection between nature and the soul. He is the founder of Cie Gallery in Ouray and is represented by Raitman Art Galleries (Breckenridge / Vail, CO), Piper J Gallery (Truckee, CA), and Summit Gallery (Park City, UT).
Jed Smith & Amy Cao • Social Justice Grant, Award Recipient
Project: Los Migrantes
During the late 1800s, trappers were hired on by local and state officials to eradicate wolf populations across the western landscape.Through large-scale watercolor and replica historic letterpress prints, artists Jed Webster Smith and Amy Cao use “The Wolfer” narrative in a subversive manner to spark conversation about who has the right to call this land home, the lasting impacts of xenophobia, and the targeting of an “othered” group. Drawing upon historical research, their works address parallels to conversations, debates, and lived experiences with immigration, borders, and removal and deportation today.
Fifth generation Coloradan, Jed Webster Smith holds a BA in Anthropology and Studio Art from Fort Lewis College and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Through large-format watercolor painting, collage, and printmaking, his works explore and challenge the myth of the West, examining contemporary issues through the use of historical narratives, Western archetypes, and the collective perception of the past. Amy Cao holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology from Wesleyan University and an MA in Museum Studies from Southern University at New Orleans. Drawing from her professional experience as a museum collections specialist, Amy’s work as a collaborative printmaker and artist-member at the Mancos Common Press centers place-based, historically-grounded, and community-focused projects.
Olivia Perea • Social Justice Grant, Award Recipient
Project: Too Bad
Too Bad is a collage series that explores the complexity of womanhood through a collective, community-based lens. The project is built from anonymous written submissions describing lived experiences of womanhood, foregrounding voices from a range of perspectives rather than a single narrative. It reflects the belief that women in the artist’s community have experienced a wide spectrum of highs, lows, and in-between moments that may not be captured by one individual’s perspective, and it seeks to platform those experiences visually and conceptually. Through this approach, Too Bad offers audiences a more nuanced and expansive view of female identity that extends beyond a singular lived experience.
Olivia Perea is a collage and mixed-media artist living and working in Durango, Colorado. Her studio practice and art history research explores the intersection of visual arts, cultural grey areas, and community engagement. Wether it is creating collaborative artworks, creating zines that detail aspects of her process, or hosting creative workshops, Olivia's personal and professional life is grounded by a want to create approachable and inclusive experiences around visual arts. Olivia holds a B.A. in Studio Art with a Minor in Art History from Fort Lewis College ('25) and currently works as the Collections Education and Research Fellow at the Center of Southwest Studies.