Press Release: Mizna is Recognized as Regional Cultural Treasure

McKnight, Ford, Bush, and Jerome Foundations Create New Initiative for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American-Led Arts Organizations

Press contact:
Lana Salah Barkawi, Executive & Artistic Director
lana@mizna.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2021

While we are heartbroken and distraught by the brutality that is being experienced by Palestinians today, Mizna has some happy news to share: we are one of ten Minnesota organizations to receive the Regional Cultural Treasure Award. This award is part of a $12.6 million regional initiative of America’s Cultural Treasures which will provide new funding for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American-led arts organizations. The funding is made possible by a collaboration of the McKnight, Ford, Bush and Jerome Foundations.

To honor the significant impact Mizna has made on the local and national cultural landscapes over decades, the organization will receive an unrestricted grant of $500,000, to be distributed over the next five years. 

For more than twenty years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art. Mizna publishes the only Southwest Asian and North African literary and art journal in the country; produces the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival; and offers classes, readings, performances, public art and community events, which have featured more than 400 local and global writers, filmmakers and artists.These generous unrestricted funds will help us continue this critical work sustainably for another twenty years.

“This award is staggering. The recognition of and investment in our work is incredible and far from typical for us,” said Lana Salah Barkawi, Mizna’s Executive and Artistic Director. “We are so often doing more with less—working to be the cultural space that our incredible artistic community deserves. This award affirms our work and our values.”

Mizna has been named as a recipient alongside nine other Minnesota organizations, American Indian Community Housing Organization Arts Program, Ananya Dance Theatre, Indigenous Roots, Juxtaposition Arts, Pangea World Theater, Somali Museum, Theater Mu, TruArtSpeaks, and Walker|West. Many of these organizations have been partners in our endeavor to create decolonized and diverse cultural spaces with and for our communities.

“We hold both joy and grief today,” Barkawi said. “While we celebrate and feel honored by this award, our hearts and minds are with our Palestinian family in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and everywhere in occupied Palestine. We have made the Palestine Issue of our literary journal available for free as a small gesture of solidarity.”

Learn more about the Regional Cultural Treasure Awards here.

So far this year, Mizna has launched the Mizna Film Series, a monthly series featuring expanded film programming exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from SWANA and beyond; we published the special Comix Issue of our lit journal; we premiered Out of the Depths: Winter Stories, a digital winter-themed performance evening featuring local SWANA artists with First Avenue as part of the Great Northern Festival; and hosted a reading featuring sixteen authors published in our Queer + Trans Voices issue of Mizna.

In 2020, Mizna published the Queer + Trans Voices issue of our lit journal, co-presented three public discussions about Black Lives Matter and the SWANA community, toured a visual art exhibition and film series to rural Minnesota, presented the Arab Film Fest Collab virtually with three other leading Arab orgs, and much more.

Keep up with Mizna’s programming here.