Janelle VanderKelen Wins Creative Capital Award
School of Art professor Janelle VanderKelen has won a Creative Capital award for her project, The Golden Thread, a 16mm feature film that highlights ways unseen fungi help slow climate change and mitigate its effects.
VanderKelen, an assistant professor of Cinema Studies and Time-Based Art, is one of 55 artists representing 49 projects who received the prestigious award for 2025. The Creative Capital Foundation granted $2.45 million to fund new works on the basis of their groundbreaking formal and conceptual approaches, in mediums that include painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, video, installation, dance, theater, jazz, opera, multimedia performance, narrative film, experimental film, documentary film, and creative writing. The funded projects will explore a range of urgent issues and topics.
Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
“News that I was a 2025 Creative Capital recipient filled me with gratitude and wonder,” said VanderKelen, whose previous films have screened at festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, CROSSROADS, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Festival. Other recent honors include include a 2023 Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship, a juried award at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival, and a 2023 MacDowell Residency.
“I have been so profoundly supported by family, community members, and colleagues throughout the course of my career,” VanderKelen continued. “I could neither have made all the projects that lead to this award nor developed my feature project, The Golden Thread, without their generosity, care, and feedback.”
The Golden Thread is an experimental documentary that will be filmed in Germany near the home of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century abbess, proto-feminist scholar, composer, and self-taught naturalist. Her copious writings demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of more-than-human agency and continue to influence environmental dialogues nearly a millennia later. Hildegard’s life was also marked by numerous mystical visions, and her writings mention intriguing images of golden strands connecting all life.
Janelle VanderKelen, The Golden Thread, 2027. Still from 16mm film transferred to video + sound. Photographer: Janelle VanderKelen
The Golden Thread reimagines the connective threads from Hildegard’s visions as the glistening fungal mycorrhizae that recent scientific discoveries indicate are integral to interspecies plant collaboration, human agriculture, forest conservation, and carbon sequestration. Throughout the course of the film, animated sequences will make the agency of these golden fungal threads visible as they envelope the architecture of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, a religious community founded by Hildegard that is still active today.
“I believe deeply in the influence that more-than-human entities share in our environment,” said VanderKelen. “The 2025 Creative Capital Award will provide me with the opportunity to fully flesh out this feature film while collaborating with numerous plants, fungi, and humans along the way!”
The 2025 Creative Capital Awards will be announced in print in The New York Times on January 26, 2025.