PORTLAND, ORE.- PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow has announced that media artists Fernanda D’Agostino and Ime N. Etuk have been awarded the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship for 2025. The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship is an award given every other year for media-based storytellers who have shown a commitment to their craft while continuing to push forward with new and engaging work. The program is funded by the Oregon Arts Commission and administered by PAM CUT, an organization changing for whom, by whom, and how cinematic stories are told. The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship is part of PAM CUT’s year-round artist services programming which is committed to the sustained growth of multi-media artists, both locally and nationally, who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
The Artist Fellowships honor Oregon’s professional artists and their achievements while supporting efforts to advance their careers. Jurors looked for Oregon artists of outstanding talent, demonstrated ability, and commitment to the creation of new work.
“The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship is such an important part of the history of this state’s incredible moving image community, and this year’s fellows are outstanding in their respective areas of this deeply rich art form, we are honored to be a small part of their continued careers.” —Ben Popp, Head of Artist Services, PAM CUT
This year’s Oregon Media Arts Fellowship recipients are:
Fernanda D’Agostino — Fernanda D’Agostino’s internationally exhibited installations incorporate sculpture, architecture, interactive video, projection mapping and sound in novel ways. Her work engages themes of movement and growth as catalyzed by phenomena of the natural world, alchemical transformation, complex networks, and human engagement with non-human communities. Having begun her career in the 1980s as a performance artist with a focus on body work, the body and how it engages with space and objects informs all her work. Although no longer performing herself, every installation includes a performance or other live event, and often the making of the work involves performative acts by collaborators. The connecting thread in all her work is placing viewers at the center of an all-encompassing interactive media environment, in this sense the viewer becomes the performer in a “prepared environment.”
D'Agostino is the recipient of a Bronson Fellowship, Flintridge Foundation Fellowship, and Project Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund and Ford Family Foundation. She’s been a visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and ArtPark, New York. Notable exhibitions include Festival de la Imagen, Colombia; the SoundWave Biennial, San Francisco; 1A Space Hong Kong; CyberFest, St. Petersburg, Russia; Video Guerillha, Sao Paolo; Suyama Space, Seattle; Western States Biennial, Brooklyn Art Museum; Fuori Festival, Italy; Venice VR Expanded and The Map is not the Territory, Portland Art Museum; and Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Collaboration and community are central to D’Agostino’s work. She was co-founder and co-director of Mobile Projection Unit, where she worked to put projection mapping tools and skills into the hands of a diverse group of emerging artists, and she is a member of the IN/body performance collective in Portland, as well as of Collective Action Studio, San Francisco. She is an active member of the CETI (A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute) Lab community, based out of Portland State University, where the focus is on lifelong learning and collaborative, interdisciplinary innovation in creative and emergent technologies.
Ime N. Etuk — Ime N. Etuk is a versatile director and producer who has worked across every stage of film and television production. His love of storytelling began in high school, where he discovered television production. While studying journalism in college he interned at a local news station, eventually field-producing for ABC News programs — World News Tonight and 20/20. Etuk’s Hollywood break came when he was chosen as one of just 14 finalists (from more than 1,000 applicants) for the Directors Guild of America Training Program. The experience earned him DGA membership and the chance to learn on set with acclaimed filmmakers including Paul Haggis (Crash), the Coen Brothers (The Man Who Wasn’t There), Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and David Lynch (Twin Peaks).
Etuk’s latest feature film, Outdoor School, premiered June 11 at the American Black Film Festival in Miami Beach, Florida.
Recipients of the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship are selected by distinguished colleagues in the filmmaking and media arts field who lend their judgement and expertise as independent jurors. PAM CUT is grateful to this year’s jurors, interdisciplinary conceptual artist, designer, and nonprofit arts administrator Rebecca Burrell and filmmaker, animator, and Bent Image Lab founder Chel White.
