COLA Artist Fellows 2026 (Night 1)

The City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship by the DCA () allows accomplished artists to create new work with increased freedom to innovate and experiment in the disciplines of design, visual arts, literary arts, and performing arts.

Grand Performances presents live showcases by 2026 COLA Artist Fellows: Michelle Bitting (Literature), Brian Sonia-Wallace (Poetry), and Maylee Todd (Music).

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Michelle Bitting is the author of seven poetry collections. She has won the Wilder Book Prize, the Catamaran Book Prize, the DeNovo First Book Award, the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Prize, and, recently, the Banyan Review Poetry Prize.

Named runner-up in the 2026 Pomegranate London Poem-Play contest, her play “Celebrated British Actress Beryl Mercer Encounters her Lost Daughter Crossing the Atlantic, 1939” was performed at London’s Cockpit Theater by Théâtre Volière.

Michelle grew up by the Pacific Ocean, studied theater at U.C. Berkeley, and has danced on film for Twyla Tharp. An essayist and flash prose writer, she has won the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, the Beyond Baroque Poetry contest, and the Glimmer Train poetry prize.

Her forthcoming poetry collection, Ruined Beauty, contains work written in the aftermath of the 2025 Palisades-Eaton fires and will be published by Walton Well Press in Spring 2026. Recent poetry appears on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Michelle is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Brian Sonia-Wallace is the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. He has spent the last decade writing poems for people who need them. This has led to some books — The Poetry of Strangers and, most recently, Maze Mouth.

Also, some accolades — Brian is a City of LA Master Artist and was the former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood as well as the Poet-in-Residence for the National Parks, Amtrak, and Mall of America (yes, really), as well as a Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and LA County.

His writing has in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, LitHub, Rattle, and American Poets, and he has performed from Walt Disney Concert Hall to the Kennedy Center. Brian teaches at UCLA Extension, runs the APLA Health Writers' Group, and leads school outreach for Get Lit - Words Ignite. Also, he is gay and tired—more @rentpoet.

Maylee Todd is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist, musician, and performer working at the intersection of music, technology, and immersive storytelling. Over a career spanning more than 15 years, she has developed a distinctive practice that blends experimental sound, live performance, comedy, and interactive media to create bold, emotionally resonant works. Her projects often explore themes of identity, mental health, speculative futures, and the body as both a technological and emotional interface.

Todd’s 2022 science fiction album MALOO, released on Stones Throw Records, introduced a live motion-capture avatar performance and received the AIM Award for Best Creative Campaign. Her work has been presented internationally at venues including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, TIFF Lightbox, Billboard Live Tokyo, and SummerWorks Performance Festival. She has also contributed as a composer for the Workin' Moms, earning recognition at the Canadian Screen Music Awards.

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