Meet Our 2025 Creator Grantees
Marnino Toussaint
Art Prevails
Singer-songwriter Marnino Toussaint, through his platform First House Creative Instagram Link, collaborates with Art Prevails Project to create intimate, community-focused events that uplift emerging artists and foster meaningful connections through live music, poetry, and storytelling.
Marnino Toussaint, a South Florida Native and currently Atlanta-based musician, is the founder of First House Media, a platform he created to support emerging artists. First House provides resources, spaces for intimate performances, and opportunities for monetization, helping artists like him turn their passion into a sustainable career. Marnino’s mission is to create avenues for artists to thrive in a world where the creative path can often feel uncertain.
Marnino had the privilege of performing on stages such as TEDx Miami, Sofar Sounds, and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, where he celebrated the legacy of Harry Belafonte through music. He has worked alongside talented creatives like Omari Hardwick, Victoria Justice, and Mary Pope Osborne, and had the honor of opening for Hip-Hop legend Chuck D. Recently,he’s begun to work with LVRN (Love Renaissance), further expanding his reach and creative network.
In 2023 and 2024, Marnino organized two independent tours, sharing his music across multiple cities and building deeper connections with audiences. These tours were more than just performances—they were opportunities to bring people together, support other artists, and prove what’s possible when passion meets perseverance.
Established in 2015, Art Prevails Project had its actual inception many years before. As a child, our Founder and Artistic Director, Darius V. Daughtry, learned the powerful impact that the arts can have on a person and community.
Their mission is to strengthen communities – particularly those that are underserved and historically disadvantaged – by investing in people through literary and performing arts. We aim to make art accessible, entertaining, informative and inspirational.
The grant provided Marnino the chance to put on a series of events scheduled between March 2025 and November 2025. These events brought First House Media shows to Fort Lauderdale, Dallas, and Atlanta, featuring live music, poetry, and storytelling by emerging artists in intimate, community-focused settings. The final showcase took place in November 2025, celebrating the culmination of the series.
More than 9 different artists across 3 cities and audiences of various sizes experienced the talents and hard work of several different creatives they wouldn’t have heard without the dedication and hard work of Marnino Toussaint and the First House Creative concerts funded in part by the Causability Creator Grant.
Beatriz Guzman Velasquez
UTRGV Agroecology Department
Beatriz Guzman Velasquez was born and raised in the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border region. Her work speaks about grounding intergenerational trauma in her immigrant border community through multimedia installations using regenerative practices.
She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an alumna from the New York Studio School and the University of Texas-Pan American. In 2024-2025, she will be part of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Advancement Fellowship as a Beginner Farmer with the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley conducting research on soil health and growing plants to use as pigments for her work.
From 2021-2022, she participated in the DocX Archive Lab Fellowship with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has formed part of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program. For the summer of 2022, she attended Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Canada. She is the founder of Juana Simona, a space dedicated to creativity and the stewardship of the land.
UTRGV is the Rio Grand Valley branch of the University of Texas organization. The Agroecology and Resilient Food Systems department of UTRGV provides various opportunities in Volunteering, Research, and Community Education.
From UTRGV Agroecology’s official website: “Agroecology is the study of the ecology of food systems, an applied science to inform the improved management of the ways we produce our food, fuel, and fiber.
The UTRGV Agroecology Program combines student-centered research and community engagement in various projects that investigates soil health, invasive species, sustainable agriculture, and the promotion of local food systems in South Texas and beyond.
The mission of our program is to generate intellectual capital through engaged scholarship and learning, participatory action research, and inclusive outreach in ways that inform the development of healthy, equitable, resilient, and economically sound food systems.”
Beatriz Guzman Velasquez partnered up with the Agroecology Department from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley to provide eco-conscious art workshops, farm to art studio tours and natural pigment guides to community members in the Rio Grande Valley.
UTRGV’s Agroecology Department provided workshop location, land to farm and conduct farm tours, a social media presence with over 3,000 followers and a management team of student workers. Participants were included in a newsletter to connect and build the RGV community.
She facilitated hands-on workshops during 2025 on how to create sustainable and eco-friendly natural pigments, building ecological literacy by introducing participants to the region’s history of the exploration and policing of natural resources, pollution in their water, soil and wildlife and chemicals in colorants causing health risks.
To foster a connection with nature, participants received a farm tour and explored the 5 acre location managed by the Agroecology Department of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where community members planted, harvested and processed organic vegetation. Participants were asked to follow the step by step process of creating sustainable and eco-friendly pigments: collecting dried raw vegetation, using a food processor to make vegetables into powder, adding natural binders to make paints and painting.
Participants engaged in planting seedlings and harvesting vegetables that were later used for the workshops to create pigments and were gifted the Rio Grande Valley Grower’s Guide to promote environmental stewardship and self-sufficiency.
Workshop participants were provided a Natural Pigment Guide which includes organic vegetables and native plants that can be used for pigments and the processing steps to make them into art materials. The guide includes ecological literacy and sustainable practices to instill in their participants lifelong learning beyond the workshop they took part in. Easy to follow graphs for all ages and photographs accompanied the guide and is available online to share with communities we cannot physically reach.
Tiiwon Siaway
Black Women Rest
Tiiwon Siaway, born to a Liberian immigrant, knew at the age of 5 that they were meant to be an artist. She graduated from Booker T Washington Magnet High School for visual arts in 2016, attended Tuskegee University and studied Agricultural Business, graduating in 2020. Tiiwon found her way back into art in 2021 with an internship at Pixar Animation Studios.
In July 2024, Tiiwon founded Art That Really Illuminates (ATRI). Her visual arts services include: arts education; painting; live artmaking; customized apparel; 2D animation; and “Graphic Notetaking,” which involves summarizing information by using hand drawn imagery and text. She has served individuals, businesses, institutions and organizations including: Pixar Animation Studios, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, and Tuskegee University Cooperative Extension to name a few.
Tiiwon’s journey has certainly been full of peaks and valleys, but she rests easy knowing that her 5 year old self would be incredibly proud of their progress. She currently looks forward to what’s ahead, as the storyboard is still being drawn.
Black Women Rest provide curated safe spaces for women to deepen their capacity to rest, connect to self, and heal from personal and systemic stressors in nurturing, intergenerational collectives.
Inspired by growing up and not having outlets to discuss her experiences amongst other black girls or older black women, it became more and more difficult to find community or mentorship as she moved through her adulthood. This project worked with Black Women Rest to provide an artistic outlet alongside the regular meetings.
Tiiwon created art inspired by the conversations held during these sessions, using her skills of Creative Note Taking, and created a 2026 calendar featuring all the art inspired by the meetings to sell in benefit of the BWR mission.
2025 Creator Grantees
Mary Anne Peck
The Collective Creative: An Ekphrastic Writing Workshop Project (Interdisciplinary Arts)
Mary Anne Peck has many identities—nonfiction author, storyteller, short story writer, workshop facilitator, teacher, wife, daughter, member of the queer community, survivor of sexual assault, MFA candidate—-and each of these identities have shaped her creative practice and the direction of her life.
In 2025, Mary wrote her first book, Siapo: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, which was published by Fa’asamoa Arts, a nonprofit she has been working with since 2021 as a volunteer and independent contractor.
For the past five years, Mary has taught high school level creative writing classes part-time, led writing workshops for survivors of violence, and ghostwritten blog posts and articles for large corporations in the United States. The ghostwriting helped her build her skills as a nonfiction writer, skills that were useful when she wrote her own book.
Mary is inspired by the students and participants in her classes and workshops and the beautiful island that has become her home. As a fiction writer, she gravitates towards short forms—flash fiction and micro fiction.
Folauga o le Tatau Ma Laga Aganu’u Fa’asamoa (a.k.a. Fa’asamoa Arts)
The Folauga o le Tatau Malaga Aganuʻu Faʻasamoa: Art Studio & Gallery of American Samoa strives to breathe new life into the traditional Samoan artistic practices of our past, and to bring these practices into our present and future through creation, education, and research.
This mission is vital to the continuation of Samoan culture in the Pacific and around the world. The Art Studio & Gallery will fill a necessary role not just in the preservation of our indigenous art forms on our island, but in the education of Samoan and foreign peoples around the world.
Mary will hold workshops, teaching the importance as well as the cultural and historical significance of Siapo Making for the Samoa islands. Using what people learn during these workshops, they will create art on the barkcloth made from the traditional siapo making which will be bound by hand with barkcloth binding in a Zine to raise money for her partnered nonprofit.
These workshops will create a foundation and itinerary for future workshops so the nonprofit can teach Samoans the importance of barkcloth for years to come.
Rebekah Ressler
Arts + Wellness for Youth Impacted by the LA Fires
A California State University Long Beach graduate with a degree in illustration in 2021, Rebekah Ressler started muraling in 2019, and has already contributed Vinyl murals to the city of Long Beach through the Long Beach Arts Council (2022) and the City of West Hollywood through the West Hollywood Arts division (2023).
In 2021, Rebekah was a grant recipient through the California State Arts Council for emerging artists and most recently in 2025 received a grant through the Professional Artist Fellowship with the Long Beach Arts Council. In June of 2025, Rebekah was a selected artist for the Sun Prairie Mural Festival in Wisconsin USA, where she completed a 218 square foot mural in less than a week.
Additionally, they have eleven years of experience working in the non-profit sector where they have worked as educator, and artist serving the queer and trans community, formerly-incarcerated youth, and survivors of genocide. Rebekah’s artwork is deeply informed by the communities they’ve had the privilege working with and being a part of.
Since its founding, ABG has administered thousands of art classes for thousands of young people living below the poverty line and has spearheaded the creation of over 125 youth-designed and community-created murals.
“Arts Bridging the Gap (ABG) uplifts the voices, experiences, and self-expression of youth from under-resourced communities through healing arts programs. Through our work, youth develop interpersonal skills and growth mindsets that enable them to be their best selves in our community.”
This program will launch in January of 2026 with workshops centered on the theme of Foundation & Community Building, focusing on relationship building, introduction to the art medium, and activities centered around foundational skills. Workshops will continue through February, where students will focus on artistic techniques, identity, community, and storytelling. In March, they will dedicate time to collaborative project design, which will include mural planning and installation preparation. In April, they will transition into the production phase, finalizing art pieces and beginning to plan logistics for our public unveiling. The project’s public unveiling will take place in May followed by a community celebration. Additionally, the program will be hosting a reflection session with students for evaluation.
Vivian “Vivi” Torres
Tierra Nepantla: Experimenting with Seasonal Shifts and Clay
Vivian is a multimedia artist from Mission, Texas, located in the Rio Grande Valley. Majored in Studio Art with a minor in Philosophy at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Vivian comes from a lineage of makers who worked with clay, deep in the heart of Mexico. Her practice was born out of ancestral connection as well as from a desire to transform everyday objects into sacred relics, beautiful objects that are reminders of the magic that exists within the ordinary.
Vivian’s practice remains rooted in deepening her relationship with ceramics so she can continue to lead community-based workshops that integrate creativity with healing and connection. She moves through her work with intention, committed to interweaving new and ancient processes that aid in envisioning future worlds that center on land restoration, community-driven practices, and connections to self. For the past several years, Vivian has worked with community organizations such as ENTRE, Trucha, and Voces Unidas to gain firsthand experience in organizing, managing workshops, and establishing relationships within the RGV community.
Trucha began as a grassroots multimedia platform among creatives led by co-founders Josue Ramirez and Omar A. Casas Jr., who held a common goal: to uplift the stories, culture, and social movements of the Rio Grande Valley. Trucha shows the power, creativity and the joy of the RGV community over the mainstream portrayal of their home.
Trucha is based in McAllen, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley along the US Mexico frontera and is the only multimedia nonprofit to exist in the 956 operating as a non profit 501-C3 grassroots publishing, creative and cultural organization.
Trucha supports the next generation of RGV storytellers and artists by providing a space to share their creativity and push local movements forward.
The Tierra Nepantla project will be a series of 4 workshops. For each season of the year, there will be a new workshop highlighting a specific organization and weaving their work into the creative focus of the workshop.
Workshops for each session and the partner organizations include:
Winter- Ceramic Pinhole Cameras with ENTRE Film Center, highlighting the importance of documentation and archival work. (This project will be informed by the work of Steve Irvine)
Spring- Fossil Tiles with the National Butterfly Center, learning how to identify native plant life, sourcing natural materials, and using clay to preserve their memory
Summer – Ollas to plant native pollinator plants in partnership with Native Plant Project, encouraging participants to directly engage with supporting our ecosystems
Fall- Copalero (smudge bowl) and Altar Building with Voces Unidas, creating rituals and gratitude practice participants can return to for grounding and honoring our natural spaces
Meet Our Judges
Alice Bybee
As a design leader with a background in both sociology and graphic design, Alice has been able to move fluidly between non-profit, consumer and global tech sectors providing design solutions, creative direction and brand management that produces results. Clients and companies include The Marine Mammal Center, the de Young Museum, the North Face, Levi's, Salesforce, Microsoft, Slack and more.
Alice served on the board of AIGA San Francisco (AIGA SF) where with her in-depth knowledge of design for social good, she co-created the AIGA SF Social Impact chair and cause/affect, a biennial graphic design competition celebrating the work of designers and organizations that set out to positively impact our society. She also went on to serve as Vice President and President of the board.
Alice received a BA in sociology from Brandeis University and a BFA in graphic design from the Academy of Art University. She is currently Director of Brand Design at Lattice. Round 1 & 2
Nic Cocco
Nic Cocco graduated in 2010 with a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas. Over the years she has studied and worked with various mediums from drawing, painting, ceramics, mixed media, interactive media, digital art, and graphic design. She served for over 5 years as an advisory board member for Scrap Denton, a creative reuse center that provided sustainable art education and art supplies to teachers and after school programs. Nic has worked with a variety of artists that promote a more sustainable future with their craft, the materials they use, and their processes. Round 1
Alex Rosalez
I am a product executive that has over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. I am a pragmatic, empathetic, principled, customer-obsessed and technical leader with a proven track record of impact in AI/ML, eCommerce, search, personalization & recommendations, and product equity.
My career includes 22 years of success at Amazon, where I directly managed product and engineering leaders and teams to deliver innovative and impactful products. These products generated billions of dollars in revenue and also delight hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.
Most recently, I was a Director of Product at Snap, where I built and led a center of excellence with the long term of goal of making Snap's products fully inclusive for marginalized communities. I tapped into my experience as a 3rd generation Chicano and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community to build empathy with these communities. My efforts in initiating, developing and implementing processes and metrics laid the foundation for measuring and continuously improving product inclusiveness across Snap's product teams, ensuring long-term impact on inclusion and user growth. Round 1 & 2
Dione Sims
Dione Sims is the President and Founder of Unity Unlimited, Inc. She is also the granddaughter of Dr. Opal Lee, known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. Dione and her grandmother both fearless female leaders and forces for positive change. Dione is the producer of the Annual Juneteenth Fort Worth Celebration. She orchestrated the Opal’s Walk campaign for national Juneteenth recognition. And she is also the Founding Executive Director for the National Juneteenth Museum that is being constructed in Ft. Worth, Texas. Round 1
Kelsey Giroux
Kelsey Giroux was born and raised in Wyoming, where she still lives and works. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honors in 2012 from the University of Wyoming and then Master of Arts in Education at the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2020. Her artist experience includes published and exhibited works in 2D, book arts, and photography. Her recent handmade fictional artist book won the Maggi Murdock Award for Social Justice from the University of Wyoming’s Art Museum. She is the Project Director of Strong Families Strong Wyoming and 501(c)(3) Wyoming Families First based in Wyoming where she runs a federally funded grants program with arts-based programming for youth involved in juvenile justice. Additionally, Kelsey is a self-practicing artist with a deep-seated belief that the arts play a crucial role in quality of life and have a big impact on personal and societal growth. Round 2