Last week, Idea Capital, a grassroots arts funding collective based in Atlanta, announced its 2025 Idea Grant recipients via Instagram. This year’s cohort includes a curator, publishers, a photographer, a filmmaker, a multimedia artist, a performance artist, and a painter.
Founded in 2008, Idea Capital began as an experiment. Five artists and organizers each contributed $100 to fund a single grant. Since then, donations have allowed the group to help fund hundreds of Atlanta-based creative projects through micro-grants, awarded annually through a competitive application process.
Meet the 2025 Grantees
Anna Akpele — elsewhere, Curation. Akpele is an Atlanta-born curator and arts administrator. In 2022, she launched elsewhere, an evolving curatorial practice that creates intimate, artist-led exhibitions outside traditional gallery spaces – often in homes, gardens, or storefronts – to make the process of making and showing art collaborative and fresh.
Carley Rickles, Sasha Tycko, and Joel Silverman — Interpolate Magazine, Publication. Interpolate is a new magazine exploring infrastructure as culture. The editorial team uses research, interviews, and visual storytelling to reveal how systems like roads and pipes shape everyday life.
Jackson Markovic — Extended Dance Edit, Photography. Markovic is a photographer whose work explores the dancefloor as a site of utopia and transformation. With support from Idea Capital, he’ll photograph the Honcho Campout, a queer music festival in rural Pennsylvania, as part of a new series exploring movement and perception.
Laura Asherman — The Weight of Armor, Documentary Film. Asherman is an Atlanta-based documentarian and animator. Her upcoming film, The Weight of Armor, follows Nashville Armored Combat, a gender-inclusive medieval fighting gym, and its founder as they challenge gender norms in a traditionally male-dominated sport.
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Madison Nunes — The Department of the Stolen Corporeal, Site-Specific Installation. Nunes’ multi-media installation critiques historical and present-day medical abuse. Drawing from photography, sound design, and audience interaction, the project acts as a “living archive” of medical exploitation and institutional harm.
Pressurized Delicacies — Jungle Seasons in the Cycle of Stars, Multi-media Performance. This performance collective blends ritual, improvisation, and storytelling in a speculative fable about Earth’s journey toward healing.
Rosa Duffy — For Keeps Press, Publication. Duffy is the founder of For Keeps Books, a bookstore and archive on Auburn Avenue dedicated to Black classic and rare literature. Her grant supports For Keeps Press, a new publishing initiative that will expand the bookstore’s mission of literary preservation and liberation.
Yoon Nam — Your World is Getting Smaller and Smaller, But What Have You Lost?, Painting Series. Nam is a self-taught artist with a Ph.D. in English literature whose work spans drawing, painting, and poetry. Her new series examines memory, migration, and loss through surreal figurative compositions and layered visual storytelling.
As the 2025 Idea Capital grantees bring their visions to life, they offer not just new work—but new ways of seeing, gathering, and imagining what art can do.
