Help Fulbright Scholar Bring Healing Through Art

I’ve been in London for five months living a life that would seem like a dream to most people. While I have had my fair share of transformative experiences and wake up everyday extremely grateful for the opportunity to be a Fulbright Scholar, the reality is that it has been very difficult financially.

Though Fulbright is a prestigious grant that offers a generous grant amount of £20, 767 (which is equivalent to $26,818) the cost of living in London is so high, even with me living very far from the center, that all of my funding goes purely to housing and survival. Over the 10 month period that I am here, I get paid in five installments and with that money I immediately pay two months of rent, two months of paying a guarantor so that I am able to rent, and then budget out the rest for two months worth of groceries, laundry, and transportation. At the same time, there’s been many unforeseen costs associated with moving to a new country that forced me to use the savings that I had to survive in my initial months here. Survival-wise I am doing okay and am grateful for what I have but I provide this overall context to shed light on what I truly need support for.

Many know that for the last six years I’ve been developing a solo jazz-infused memoir play titled X: The Soul Wound Memoir. This play is centered on the coexistence of grief and love at the intersection of parental emotional absence, oppressive institutions of patriarchy and racism, and intergenerational trauma within my dysfunctional family of color. The play is written in the style of prose poetry and uses jazz musicians to heighten the poetic nature of the text. From 2023-2024 I was granted a playwriting residency with the Boston Center for the Arts and in March of 2024, I premiered 30-pages of this play to an invited audience. And until September of 2025, I’ll be doing auto-ethnographic research as a Fulbright Scholar on Ghanaian-British immigrants’ relationship to intergenerational trauma to inform my fathers’ character arc within the play. The impact of this work has been profound: audiences have been moved to tears, hugs and better yet, have been moved to speak about their own traumatic events that were once seemingly unspeakable and begin healing in community.

In order to further develop the work and its impact, I need to hire collaborators for my work-in-progress sharing in July of 2025. For this next step in the plays development, I am seeking to increase the number of performances and thus, rehearsals. This will allow me to test my endurance as a performer who is re-telling traumatic events and will allow my creative team and I to have time to build more original music. To financially support this work, I’ve personally done everything individualistic culture says to do - last year I used $3,000 of my own money to fund my March sharing, I’ve applied for additional grants (and have been denied), I’ve applied for part-time jobs (which has proven to be slow and difficult in a new country), I’ve collected loose change … Overall, I’ve tried to avoid asking for help because being a Fulbright Scholar is viewed in such a high regard but I’m at my wits end and simply cannot achieve this creative feat alone. I need support.

So from March 14th - April 14th (my 28th birthday!) I am launching a birthday campaign for those in my community and beyond to help me realize the work that has been at the forefront of my life as an early-career artist.

$12,000 would pay for:

A director

Two musicians

Two staff members for rehearsals

A stage manager

A technical director

A small set

A videographer

Timeline:

1 first read through. 10 rehearsals. Two tech days. Two sharings. 16 days total.

Paying all collaborators an equitable wage.

One time a colleague asked me, “What is the greatest gift you’ve ever received?” and I said, without blinking an eye, “The financial support of those who believe in my work because it means they believe in me.” A donation towards my play is the greatest gift I could ever receive. But please know, that if you donate, it is not only a one-time donation but an investment that has exponential benefits. Anyone who invests in me knows the positive ripple effects that it brings to our world in small and large ways because I am a person who is able to foster community, make anyone feel accepted, can have compassionate dialogue about hard things, and spread generosity and love in all directions. An investment in me and this project is an investment in what our world currently needs and is a step towards communal healing and liberation.

For an example of my work, please view this excerpt: https://youtu.be/BzzGYT63qmo

If you wish to avoid any fees associated with this website, please donate via Venmo: @Shanelle-Villegas