Artist Team Selected for the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence 2025

The Driskell Center is pleased to announce the award winners

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College Park, Md.— The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, is thrilled to announce the 2025 winners of the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence. This year’s award is going to a team of three artists –Eli Berman, Armond Dorsey, and Bonita Oliver. Their project, “Deity of the Circle,” is a multimodal performance and exhibition installation scheduled for spring semester 2025. Rooted in African American gospel, Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial, and African musical storytelling, “Deity of the Circle” engages West and East African mask rituals and the mystical Jewish practice of building golems. Berman’s hand-crafted musical instruments, Dorsey’s original musical compositions, and Oliver’s mask-work and designs for augmented reality will merge to immerse viewers in the ideas and experiences of ritual. To develop their final project, the team will draw from research in The Driskell Center archival and art collections and other university and local resources during their site visit planned for late October 2024. Their winning application voiced their “aim to activate dialogue around the role of new technologies and the transformation of ancestral rituals while creating room for new spiritual practices to be born.” The Driskell Center is excited to engage with these innovative, contemporary creators in this low-residency program as they develop and realize their project. The Center looks forward to cross-campus collaborations with partners invested in the arts, culture, and technology.

About the Award

The David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence, created in partnership with the University of Maryland’s Arts for All initiative, is designed to provide emerging scholars and artists with access to The Driskell Center’s collections in order to conduct new research or create new artistic work that furthers the Center’s mission of expanding and deepening the field of African diasporic studies in the visual arts.

About the Artists

Armond Dorsey (they/he) is a world-builder and interdisciplinary artist-researcher synthesizing storytelling with research to deeply inquire “why not be free?”. Their creative work builds dream-like worlds through rituals—cyclical structured improvisations involving audience participation—to foster collective healing and actualize radical imaginations of our shared reality free from antiBlackness and oppression. Armond immerses audiences into live performance, installation, & theater settings to experience these worlds otherwise using health-promoting sound design interwoven with poems on everyday Black life. Born and raised in Prince George’s County, MD, Armond amplifies intergenerational memory across the African diaspora by drawing from narratives of how Black folks have lived and dream of living. Deeply-listening to these narratives grounds their practice as a performer-composer, poet, playwright, and dramaturg. As a Dartmouth alum currently pursuing their M.Div at Harvard Divinity School, Armond’s core principal instructors include: Ashley Fure, César Alvarez, Allie Martin, Taylor Ho Bynum, avery r. young, Carmen Rivera-Tirado, William Britelle, and Samita Sinha.

Bonita Oliver (she/her) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, improviser and astrologer. Her work is about transitions–the process of moving through. She creates deeply emotional, body in space, concept art through voice, music, environmental soundscapes and movement. The motivation is to heal personal and ancestral trauma in order to make way for discovery and connection. Her process is in the moment and responds to stimuli–be they internal or external–through embodiment and interaction. Her live works exhibit this process in real time. Much of her subject matter highlights Black American experiences and often combines elements of spirituality and ritual. The motivation is to heal personal and ancestral trauma in order to make way for discovery and connection. Bonita (who also performs under the name of French Leave) is originally from Springfield, Massachusetts. She is an actress, award-winning filmmaker and member of SAG-AFTRA, ASCAP, NYWIFT, and WOCU. She is based in Harlem, NYC.

Eli Berman (she/they) is a vocalist, composer, producer, and new instrument builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She creates electro-acoustic music using extended vocal techniques that weave together khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk song, and western classical repertoire for countertenor, baritone, and choirs. Over the past five years, Berman has been developing her “vocal feedback pipes,” a series of feedback instruments that extend the human voice using amplified plastics and metals modulated by digital effects. She has also begun to create club music entirely from processed samples of her voice as a founding member of Kleztronica, a burgeoning rave scene that mixes house and techno with Jewish folk and liturgical music. Berman has performed nationally and internationally at venues such as the Neues Nationalgalerie (Berlin, Germany), National Sawdust, Sultan Room, Watermill Center, Banff Centre, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, the New School, New Music On the Point, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, and Gender Unbound.

About The Driskell Center

The Driskell Center is a creative incubator dedicated to a world where Black artists exist at its center. We invite inquiry, experimentation, and dialogue to reexamine histories and shape shared futures. All programs at The Driskell Center are free and open to the public. For further information regarding exhibitions and activities at The Driskell Center, please visit driskellcenter.umd.edu or call 301-314-2615.

For media inquiries, please contact Sarah Snyder at ssnyder3@umd.edu.

Left to right: Armond Dorsey, Bonita Oliver, and Eli Berman

Images courtesy of the artists, and, for Eli Berman, copyright Lindsay Morris, courtesy of the Watermill Center