Narrative Revolution Fellowship 2025-2026
Creativity lies at the heart of how girls and young feminists organise and transform the world. For many, it is the direct use of art in their activism – using poetry, graphics, illustration, murals, graffiti, music, spoken word and other artistic forms of expression to agitate, protest, reimagine and show the world what is possible. Art emerges as a tool for political awakening and education, healing, resistance, hope and beyond.
THE FELLOWSHIP IS DEDICATED TO CENTERING, SUPPORTING, AND AMPLIFYING THE EXPERIENCES, WISDOM, STRATEGIES, AND DREAMS OF GIRLS AND YOUNG FEMINIST ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS USING ART TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD.
Serving as a community-centric and creative incubator, the fellowship is a program that brings together 9 girls and young feminist artists and activists from across movements and regions to explore: What would the world look like, feel like, sound like if it supported the dreams, power, and resistance of girls and young feminists?
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Fellows will receive a $2,000 award to support their participation in the program along with strategic support for community learning and building that includes peer creative coaching, advisors, and more.
2025 Fellows
Ain Husniza Saiful Nizam
MALAYSIA
“Because my activism started in digital spaces, I’ve also seen the misogyny and alt-right content that dominates them. It makes me ask: can we reimagine a more feminist digital space, one that uplifts both girls and boys instead of polarizing them? My content often sparks gender justice discussions: What would our institutions look like if they supported girls? How can we synthesize complex issues through a feminist lens?”​
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At 17, Ain founded the #MakeSchoolASaferPlace movement after speaking out against a teacher’s rape joke in class. The digital campaign was fueled by creative short-form videos, illustrations, and youth-led writing that spread widely across Malaysia. The hashtag reached over 21.4 million views and helped push forward Malaysia’s Anti-Sexual Harassment Bill in 2022, but it also revealed the cost of speaking up as a young girl — lawsuits, intimidation, and ridicule. That experience taught her how essential art-based strategies are to activism: not just as tools of resistance, but as practices of healing and connection.
In 2024, she founded Pocket of Pink, a youth feminist initiative that combines art, advocacy, and education. Its flagship programme, Express to Empower, uses art activities and workshops to advance Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE). Alongside this, the initiative produces infographics and visual campaigns with a Gen Z aesthetic to translate complex feminist issues into engaging narratives. Its creative outputs range from activity books for younger audiences to reels and digital productions that resonate with older feminist youth.
Ain’s work has been featured by BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, Vice, and TEDx, and recognised through the WikiImpact Top 100 Changemakers, the KLSCAH Civil Society Award, and Prestige Women of Power. At the heart of her practice is a belief that art is not decoration to activism, but the very medium through which we imagine and build safer, more equal futures for girls and young feminists.
Chehak Gidwani
INDIA
"Mainstream feminist narratives erase disabled girls, women, and gender diverse individuals. However, we continue to defy, desire and hope, despite not having the adequate tools to do so.
Crip Freedoms is both an artistic and political process to view crip feminist liberation not as a distant ideal, but as something already being lived and actively imagined by disabled girls and women at multiple intersections in the margins, in motion, in textures and in colours. It is a process through which we create things that eases our existence in the world and makes the world belong to us."
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Chehak is a feminist researcher and development practitioner working at the intersections of disability justice, gender and public health. Their journey began in community spaces where they witnessed how disabled women and girls were routinely left out of conversations on health and pleasure. This realization shaped their practice of designing participatory, evidence-informed and rights-based interventions that reimagine care as collective and political.
They have worked at the Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy on Project Outlive, a youth suicide prevention program, wherein they engage with marginalised youth to build capacities for policy engagement and advocacy for suicide prevention. Most recently, they also were a fellow at Women of the South Speak Out Fellowship where they are conceptualising and implementing a project to advocate for legal and policy interventions for disabled survivors of violence and disabled women and trans people at risk of violence. They also write on the intersections between queerness/transness and disability.
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​As a Co-Founder and Research Lead at RADIATE, they develop resources and advocacy rooted in their lived experience- very recently through Cripleasure, a campaign on disability justice and sexual and reproductive health incubated by Haiyya- a young feminist organisation in India. Through storytelling, co-design, and grounded feminist inquiry, Chehak continues to build pathways for disabled women and girls to access pleasure, autonomy, and safety. They believe that research can be a form of resistance, and that every story of survival is also a blueprint for liberation.
Concha Armas
NICARAGUA
“I believe in childhoods and in rebellious youths; I believe in nonconformist girls. I believe in the power of reconnecting with our imagination and our ability to dream, in the power that through narrative change we can create, to build more dignified and kind futures.”​
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Concha identifies from a feminine perspective and recognizes herself through transness. She is a trans, fat, brown woman; her pronoun is she, always she. She is a transfeminist and anti-fatphobic content creator for @lagordanosecalla. Although she is a lawyer, she primarily dwells among letters, which are her passion, as well as theater and the scribbles in her notebooks. Yes, she is the girl of the markers. She is a writer and contributes articles to the Central American feminist magazine Miradas Moradas, a media outlet of the Asociación Puntos de Encuentro. Poetry moves her: for her, writing is a visceral and emotional act. She writes from the dignified rage that lives in her stomach, from resilience, love, relationships, and her genuine pleasures and desires. She writes her story, told in the first person, as a strategy of collective memory and a tool of support that allows her to resist the violences of her context.
Keeshi
KENYA
“Young feminists in my community are already building alternatives to the current genocidal capitalist and patriarchal systems we live in. Through seemingly small actions these groups of people are building functioning and regenerative ecosystems; an argument and a proof that things can be different. Ultimately, Haba na haba hujaza kibaba [Little and little fills the pot] is about changing the narrative that nothing can be done or that one or two people are too little to make meaningful change. It is grounded in the idea of the "small revolution" that we, the people, are what make a revolution.”​
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Cynthia, better known as Keeshi, is an artist and organiser whose practice refuses the boundaries between disciplines. She currently dabbles in writing, body piercing, podcasting, visual art and mutual aid/community organising.
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At the core of all of these activities is a journey of sense making because life can’t only be about a 9-5 right? One of their main life goals is to witness the fall of capitalism or at least the beginnings of its final crumble. They currently work as the communications associate at Feminists In Kenya; a grassroots organization working to increase feminist thought in Kenya while responding to the ongoing crisis of femicide and gender based violence. Some of their other notable work is with their podcast Re-education Radio and their mutual aid organising work at Trans Queer Fund Collective. Keeshi is also a former resident at the annual TICAH Artist Residency (2024) and a fellow of the Global Narrative Hive (cohort) 1 by Global Dialogue. They are also currently part of the Rhizome Narrative change fellowship by Culture Hack Labs.
Mariana Veliz Matijasevic
ARGENTINA
“Feminist perspectives are important because they are a beacon for this world where capitalism, ableism, patriarchy, and colonialism impose destructive thoughts and ideas. For me, feminisms create bonds, community, and support among peers.”​
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Mariana Veliz Matijasevic is a woman with a motor disability and is intersex. She has been an activist for disability rights in Argentina since the age of 20. For the past few years, she has also been actively involved in advocating for intersex rights. An illustrator and audiovisual creator, she enjoys exploring themes of disability and the LGBTTQI+ community in her work, creating characters that reflect these identities and experiences.
Okyanus ÇaÄŸrı Çamcı
TURKEY
“I believe in the transformative power of personal stories within societies. Since 2016, I have been researching the lineage of the women+ in my family. I think the experiences of past generations lay the groundwork for today’s activism. Each generation has its own survival practices, and I believe these practices are transmitted through trauma and memory. Through this transmission of memory, it becomes possible for us to imagine new future possibilities situated between fragility and resilience.”​
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Okyanus ÇaÄŸrı Çamcı is a visual artist and researcher based in Türkiye. Her practice focuses on identity, memory, and survival, drawing from personal archives to explore familial narratives and queer histories. The work interrogates belonging and resistance, unravelling personal and communal histories through visual storytelling.Okyanus has participated in programs such as the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme (2021–2022), the Nesin Village Art and Social Justice Programme (2021), and the ALIKEV Young Artist Fund (2024), and was also one of the recipients of the 2025 Prince Claus Seed Award. Artistic projects, including exhibitions like Resurgence in Fragments at Depo Istanbul, reimagine family heirlooms and cultural artifacts through a queer perspective. Contributions to the 16th Sharjah Biennial further emphasize collaboration and collective memory.
Paula Cerescu
MOLDOVA
"A world that supports the dreams of girls and young feminists is a world where we bear no shame for who we are, where we can discover ourselves and connect freely, move creatively and spontaneously, where we have access to our basic needs and are safe in its most comprehensive meaning. It is where we have the certitude that we matter - what we think, say and do matters and has an impact, and is to be carried with as much empowerment, as responsibility and care."​
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Paula is a 25-year-old activist, poet, and community organiser from the Republic of Moldova. They currently works as the Queer and Feminist Programme Coordinator at LAOLALTA NGO (“TOGETHER”). They coordinated projects, organised events, and participated in initiatives related to wellbeing, awareness raising, and community building for and with LGBTQIA+ people, women from marginalised backgrounds, and queer and feminist activists in Moldova. In collaboration with many local organisers, Paula’s involvement has included Pride Park (2018–2023), the Night March for Women’s Safety, Solidarity Days for Palestine as part of the @Moldova.for.Palestine informal movement, solidarity protests with victims of transphobia, queer visibility days, and various creative workshops.
The most recent project they coordinated at @laolalta.md was the School of Community Urbanism, a programme designed to support young people aged 14–22 from both Moldova’s regions and the capital in developing participative urbanistic initiatives for their localities. The programme included learning modules, a Summer School, mentorship, and mini-grants.
In September 2024, Paula co-initiated a peer support group for families of people living with schizophrenia. They are also the co-founder of a clothing upcycling atelier, “destul de bine” (“good enough”), and has been part of Rhythms of Resistance Moldova. Between the ages of 16 and 18, she volunteered with GENDERDOC-M NGO, later continuing as an employee from 2018 to 2023 in the role of LGBT Community Development Program Coordinator. These experiences have taught Paula how to shape narratives as an activist in a hostile environment and, most importantly, how to centre wellbeing and joy as essential forms of resistance.
Rae Klancnik
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“A world that supports the dreams of young feminists is a world where support and respect are not conditional upon maintaining a narrow status quo. It is a world where life is allowed to be messy and beautiful, vast and diverse.”​
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Rae is a young artist and poet residing in the Midwest of the United States. Their identity as a disabled, chronically ill, and genderqueer person heavily influences their work and the way they move about the world. As someone who has been frequently housebound due to their health, they value the time they can breathe fresh air and exist outdoors. They often bring this love of the natural world into their work. Rae discusses their experiences with gender, body image, sexuality, disability, and the connection between the body and spirit in their art and writing. As an autistic person, they value the creative use of written and visual language for communicating their inner world, where traditional conversation often fails. They earned a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and Creative Writing from Ripon College in 2022. Currently, they are a member of the U.S. Gender and Disability Justice Alliance, and they are a dedicated advocate for disability justice and queer liberation.
Rin
ROMANIA
“I find utopias are an important part of resistance because they usually are based on principles or values that already exist in our reality to some extent, which then become the core functioning way of the utopia. Through the way I imagine alternative futures, I try to also bring hope and gratitude towards the work that already exists in our communities.”​
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Rin is a non-binary artist based in Romania whose practice spans writing, theatre, and video essays. They create hybrid texts as a form of emotional processing and solace, seeking to hold space for grief. Their current interests lie primarily in speculative fiction, which they use as a tool to cultivate strength by imagining alternative futures. Rin believes in radical care and strives to maintain a sense of naivety, softness, and curiosity toward the world they inhabit.
They have been a member of Cenaclul X— a horizontally organized, non-hierarchical, autonomous, and anti-authoritarian group grounded in queer feminist principles—since 2021. Rin also collaborates with various informal activist groups and movements, including FCDL (the Common Front for Housing Rights), Rhythms of Resistance, and Food Not Bombs.
