Bard Film Professor Ephraim Asili Wins $50,000 Creative Capital Award

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program, has won a 2024 Creative Capital Award for $50,000 to support his documentary film Eternal Rhythm. Creative Capital Awards provide artists with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Eternal Rhythm explores the personal and artistic relationship between Don and Moki Cherry after the couple moved from New York to Moki’s native Sweden in 1970. There they began a decade-long collaboration that merged multicultural expressions of art, music, and radical living into a synergetic model for communal creativity. 

Creative Capital’s “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image total $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen from 5,600 applications, this year’s awards will fund 28 innovative visual arts projects and 22 film/moving image projects, representing 54 artists in total.

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. He received his BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and his MFA in Film and Interdisciplinary Art at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College where he is also an associate professor of film production and film studies. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, and was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2021 Asili was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. During the summer of 2022 Asili directed a short film Strange Math, along with the 2023 Men’s Spring/Summer fashion show for Louis Vuitton. Asili received the Creative Capital Award in 2024.
About Creative Capital
Founded in 1999, Creative Capital’s mission is to advance artistic freedom of expression by funding underserved, risk-taking artists in the creation of new work. Known as the “gold standard in artist support,” Creative Capital Awards are made via a democratic, national open call process, and provide grantees with unrestricted project grants, professional development, and community building services to foster sustainable careers. To date, $55 million in grants and services have been awarded to 955 artists to create radical new work in the visual arts, performing arts, film, technology, literature, and multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms. More than 75 percent of Creative Capital awardees in recent years identify as artists of color, LGBTQIA+, women, and artists with disabilities, and its education programs and artist resources have served more than 250,000 artists globally. creative-capital.org



About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year, residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 164-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

This event was last updated on 02-05-2024

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