Current Create Awards Recipients

2025 Create Award Recipients

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Ren Coryell

One of my goals at Art Gym is to build meaningful relationships that last long after the six month program. The experience of creating art in communication and collaboration with others is something I already miss about college, and the open studio style of Art Gym is exactly what I’m looking for.

Another goal I have is to develop habits and routines that sustain my art practice through stressful times and continue after the scholarship ends. While I had a great art practice in college, I imagine I’ll need to somewhat relearn what that looks like in my new post-college life. This is another way in which learning from other artists is so beneficial, as hearing what different methods/practices work for others will be helpful in figuring out my own.

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AJ Dubler & Carmela Murphy

AJ Dubler and Carmela Murphy are a stop motion directing duo. They met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where they created their thesis film “A Bird Hit My Window and Now I’m a Lesbian.”

AJ is a Colorado native who has lived in Chicago for the past seven years. They love sewing, knitting, and swimming at the beach with their goggles on.

Carmela is originally from Massachusetts and is an avid rock climber, kickboxer, and tea-sipper.

Together, they relocated to Denver to begin production on their next stop motion short film. They hope to continue their work telling funny, dramatic, hand-crafted stories that uplift the queer community.

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Apple Hultz

Reclamation is a performance and research project that explores how gender expectations have shaped my body, movement, and daily physical expression. Inspired by the question posed by Alok Vaid-Menon—“What feminine parts of yourself did you have to kill in order to exist in the world?”—this work seeks to excavate the gestures, postures, and ways of being that I’ve suppressed, masculinized, or hidden in order to survive as a trans and non-binary person.

The project is a deeply personal inquiry into the embodied effects of gender conditioning, especially as it intersects with movement, performance, and everyday life. I am particularly interested in tracing how suppression manifests not only in external presentation but also internally—through breath, anxiety, digestion, and muscle memory.