Alums Win Grant for ‘Risk-Taking’ Artistic Work

Two Emerson alums won 2026 Creative Capital Awards to support their artistic work: multimedia artist Liss LaFleur, MFA ’14, and writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, MFA ’10.

Creative Capital Awards provide up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, professional development services, and community-building opportunities to support “risk-taking, groundbreaking new works.”

LaFleur, Associate Professor of New Media and Feminist Discourse at the University of North Texas, and founder of the Future Feminist Lab, works across glass, installation, and immersive media. Her grant will support “The Queer Birth Project,” an interdisciplinary work, developed in collaboration with sociologist Katherine Sobering, that explores LGBTQ+ childbirth and family formation in the U.S.

The funding will go toward completing four themes of the project — identities, birth, feeding, and loss — which will include audio and neon works made in collaboration with Lite Brite Neon Studio, LaFleur said.

Marzano-Lesnevich, author of the award-winning memoir/legal thriller The Fact of a Body (Flatiron Books, 2017) and Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia, will use their award to work on their forthcoming memoir about life “beyond the binary,” Both and Neither, due out from Doubleday in 2027, according to the UBC.

Creative Capital, a 25-year-old nonprofit dedicated to supporting artistic freedom of expression, awarded $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists nationwide, selected from a pool of more than 4,500 applicants.