The 2025 Doris Duke Artist Awards have been announced, and among them are two artists who work in and around the jazz tradition. They are Kassa Overall, 42, a drummer, producer and rapper with a history of prolific, genre-fluid perambulations, and Brandee Younger, 41, who has brought the harp into the mainstream discourse for jazz, hip-hop and soul.
The remaining four artists come from other disciplines: Aya Ogawa and Kaneza Schaal work in theater and film, while Trajal Harrell and Raja Feather Kelly are choreographers. Each Doris Duke Artist is awarded $525,000 in unrestricted funds, distributed over seven years. (They also each receive an incentive of up to $25,000 to save for retirement.) Including this year’s recipients, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has named just shy of 150 artists, distributing more than $40 million in funding.
At a time when the arts are both chronically underfunded and precariously situated in the political discourse, it felt germane to check in with Ashley Ferro-Murray, the Foundation’s Program Director for the Arts. We connected this week to talk about the program’s mission, the current class of awardees, and a new initiative designed to assist the creative community at large.
A Conversation with Ashley Ferro-Murray
This is an exciting group of Doris Duke Artists. And I’m not only talking about the improvisers — but for our purposes, let’s focus on those.
Chief Adjuah, one of our Doris Duke Artist awardees, talks about jazz as “Stretch Music,” and I think that both Brandee Younger and Kassa Overall embody the spirit of stretching of the form. I’ve had conversations recently with Brandee about how excited she is to take her work into multiple spheres. Last year the Doris Duke Foundation funded filmmaker Ephraim Asili in making a film about Alice Coltrane, and Brandee was actually the actress playing Alice in that film. Seeing the ways in which she’s carrying the form out through different media is exciting to us.
Kassa is doing the same thing in different ways, thinking about how he’s putting records into the world, using social media and other presence to think critically about how his ecstatically performative activations are carried not only through live performance, but other mediated forms. And throughout our selection process for the Doris Duke Artist Awards, which is a multi-stage process in collaboration with field experts, these artists were selected by their peers. It's extremely exciting to see the work that both of these artists embody in jazz be lifted up.
This thing that you’re talking about, making connections outside of a given frame — is that an unspoken priority of the foundation when it comes to presenting awards to jazz artists?
No, actually. It’s exciting to see how it’s happening nonetheless. We do have really specifically stated selection criteria for the Artist Awards. What you’re outlining isn’t really explicitly articulated in that criteria at all. That said, one of the specific priorities of these awards is that we’re celebrating artists who are going to continue to make an imprint on the field. I think that’s why you see so many boundary-pushing artists show up in the awardee list of the Doris Duke Artist Awards.
The awards are given across music, theater, and dance. I’m always interested in the way that a class coheres. I know that’s not intentional, but it’s easy to picture collaborations among almost any two artists in this cohort. What does that say to you?
It says to me that we have a really exciting and vibrant future for the arts. You know, the Doris Duke Artists Awards are the largest prize in the United States dedicated to individual performing artists. The award started in 2012. To date, the program has granted more than $40 million directly to performing artists. And the unrestricted funding that the award kind of gives to these artists really fills the gaps of a social safety net in our society. But because admittedly, we can only give six awards a year, we’re also launching the Doris Duke Artist Awards not just as a lifting up of one or two or six individuals, but as a moment to say: “Here’s the kind of creativity that exists in our society. This is the kind of support that the foundation believes is necessary to propel creative conditions in which artists can thrive.”
Alongside that, we do more than just give a grant. We get this incredible opportunity as a foundation to gather these artists together in the same space. They are given other kinds of resources: professional development resources, financial literacy resources, and things like that. Witnessing all of these artists coming together in the same room, you already sort of feel that kind of creative energy and overlapping bubble. It’s an added perk and benefit to watch when individual artists who meet through this program do find relationships, either personal or professional, out of it.
Last year we had the first-ever Doris Duke Artist Awards retreat, which will be an annual gathering where artists are coming together. So you look at these six artists — but then you look at everyone who’s ever received an award, almost 150 individuals, and imagine those artists sharing space together. You can see what kinds of social, personal, artistic collaborations might bubble up from that. So while it’s not a mandate of this program — this is very much unrestricted funding, with few strings attached — it’s an invitation for those who are interested to connect with other artists who receive that support. As you said, it’s exciting to imagine where those overlaps might emerge.
There’s also a new initiative this year called Creative Labor, Creative Conditions. Could you explain what that is?
It’s growing out of what I started to mention, this desire to see the work of Doris Duke Artist Awards proliferate beyond the program. Because we see the need for unrestricted support to artists growing from a lack of social safety net, we also are interested in advocating for all artists to receive the kind of conditions that they need to thrive. So we see Creative Labor, Creative Conditions as doing that work. It’s a campaign and network in response to a moment of extreme threat to livelihoods that performing artists are facing, and advocating for thrivability.
We’re bringing together diverse parties across the country. It will launch on May Day in Times Square with an activation led by artists Troy Anthony of the Fire Ensemble and Kaneza Schaal, as well as six different performing arts troupes around New York City. But it really sparks a campaign that we’ll host between May Day and Labor Day. We hope for this to happen beyond just this year. It may become an annual campaign to visit different cities and towns across the United States to consider what it means to be an artistic worker in different places and locations, because we know that this is an extremely diverse country with very diverse conditions.
So along with the kind of learning campaign, we are also launching some grant-making, which includes a $1.5 million investment in United States Artists for their National Policy Alliance and financial literacy trainings for artists, and a $1.5 million partnership with the Center for Cultural Innovation on a national policy initiative that ensures artists are included in labor protections moving forward. Through expanded technical assistance, financial services, and direct support via these programs, we’re looking to equip organizations and member artists with the tools needed to navigate a shifting policy landscape and preserve their long-term financial health.
I can’t help but wonder what the current economic landscape is doing to affect this objective — because as you talk about sustainable livelihoods and labor practices, we are not on any kind of stable ground at the moment.
I don’t think we’ve been on stable ground for a really long time. In the last decade, our generation has encountered some real desperate pressure points — in COVID, in the current financial markets. Yet I think that there were seeds of instability planted long ago, and we’ve been following them at the foundation for quite some time. So we are continuing our longstanding commitment to this work. We’re continuing to apply the kind of urgency that we’ve brought to the work for years. We’re glad that the launch of this work is being perceived as meeting this particular moment, but we also see it as real long-term work that will extend far beyond what might happen in the next year, two years, four years. We see this as a moment to really think for future generations and with future generations about what kind of sustainable arts landscape we might be able to affect from the kind of instability that we know artists experience daily today.
For more information about the Doris Duke Artist Awards, visit the program website.
