Mass Cultural Council 2026: Five Creative Collective Members Win Grants for Creative Individuals
Essex County is showing up — and the Massachusetts Cultural Council noticed.
We are beyond proud to celebrate five Creative Collective members named as Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grants for Creative Individuals recipients. These unrestricted $5,000 grants recognize Massachusetts artists, culture bearers, and creative practitioners advancing creative expression across our diverse communities — and this year, five of them call the North Shore home. Beverly, Lynn, Peabody, Salem — we showed up.
Here’s who’s making it extraordinary:
Andrea LeBlanc — Arpeggione Ensemble, Beverly
Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grant | Multidisciplinary Arts
Photo Credit: Jamison Wexler Photography
Andrea said it best herself: “I feel very lucky to be able to expand my artistic practice in this very full, busy time of my life.”
The grant funds are going somewhere remarkable. Andrea is using them to publish a children’s book — Shoebert’s Unfinished Journey — as Arpeggione Ensemble prepares for the premiere of a full children’s operetta of the same name on October 4, 2026, as part of Beverly 400+. Yes, it’s about Shoebert, the harbor seal who visited Beverly’s mill pond in 2022 and briefly became an international celebrity. But it’s also about so much more: the textile and shoe industries of Essex County, immigration and social justice, Franz Schubert, and what it means to search for belonging.
That’s the kind of work Andrea does — praised for her “sensitive and beautiful playing, with crystalline tone and execution,” she has performed with ensembles across the country and worked with some of the world’s leading conductors. But she’s equally at home in schools, libraries, and senior centers as she is on the concert stage. As co-founder and co-director of Arpeggione Ensemble — the North Shore’s only historically-informed chamber ensemble — she has built something rare: a nonprofit that makes classical music genuinely accessible, through free outreach concerts, Card to Culture pricing, and programming that champions overlooked composers and untold stories.
When she’s not performing or running Arpeggione, she’s chasing after her two kids and making things out of fabric and yarn. She fits right in around here.
Edwin Cabrera — Lynn Music Foundation, Lynn
Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grant | Media Arts
Edwin “Steadi Eddy” Cabrera has been building something real in Lynn for a long time — and this grant is the state catching up to what the community already knows.
A filmmaker, podcaster, and educator, Edwin co-founded Grind House Recordings with his best friend and business partner Chris “Critta” Martin to promote independent music and uplift hip hop culture in Lynn. Their vehicle: The Grind House Podcast, a local hip hop podcast shining a light on talented artists who deserve a wider audience. Edwin also works at Raw Art Works as Production Coordinator and Instructor at the Real to Reel Film School — a program he’s not just leading, but one he graduated from himself.
He co-founded the Lynn Music Foundation in 2022 with that same spirit: make creativity and professional artistry accessible to underserved communities. Through music education, mentorship, performance opportunities, workshops, and master classes, the Foundation is building a more vibrant, more connected music scene in Lynn — one artist at a time.
Edwin holds a BA in Communications from UMass Amherst with a certificate in Film Studies. More importantly, he never left. He’s still here, still building, still amplifying the voices that make Lynn extraordinary.
Javiera Garcia — Cornucopia Threads, Peabody
Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grant | Crafts
Javiera Garcia’s story begins with a loom — a gift from her mother when she was 13, growing up in Chile surrounded by making. It winds through years of self-teaching, a move to the United States in 2016 to build a life with her wife, and a moment in 2021 — six months pregnant — when she asked for a tufting kit and something clicked.
She practiced daily, learning through repetition and instinct. Then her family moved to Mexico for nine months. Her tufting frame stayed behind, but Oaxaca offered something equally transformative: immersed in its artistic traditions, Javiera began to see color and symbolism differently. That season helped her find her style — rooted in nature, bold palettes, organic shapes, everyday beauty.
By 2023, Cornucopia Threads was born in Peabody.
Each piece starts as a hand-drawn design on iPad, then moves through days of careful tufting, gluing, cutting, backing, and carving — a slow, intentional process Javiera describes as deeply therapeutic. Her hand-tufted rugs and fiber art are designed to be lived with: walked on, touched, used, and cherished. She also offers bilingual tufting workshops in English and Spanish, opening the craft to more of the community she loves.
This grant is a recognition of what we already know: Javiera’s work is extraordinary.
Kathleen Aguero — Thursday Poets, Salem
Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grant | Literature
Kathleen Aguero has spent a career building space for poetry — writing it, teaching it, and making sure it reaches people who need it most.
Her collections include World Happiness Index, After That, The Real Weather, Thirsty Day, Daughter Of, and Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth. She has co-edited three volumes of multicultural literature for the University of Georgia Press, holds a Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry, and has taught everywhere from the Chautauqua Institute to the NY State Young Writers’ Program at Skidmore to Poets in the Schools programs across New England.
She teaches in the Solstice low-residency MFA program at Lasell University and in Changing Lives Through Literature — an alternative sentencing program built on the belief that books can genuinely change lives. She’s a consulting poetry editor at Kenyon Review. And through the Thursday Poets collective, she helps anchor Salem’s literary life, creating and celebrating poetry north of Boston and beyond.
The Massachusetts Cultural Council sees what we see.
Jennifer Jean — Thursday Poets, Salem
Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grant | Literature
Jennifer Jean’s life and work are proof that poetry is never just personal — it’s communal, political, and transformative. Born in Venice, California, raised in foster care until age seven, her ancestors from the Cape Verde Islands, Jennifer has built a literary life that spans continents, languages, and forms. Her poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool, with The Pacific forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2027. She co-wrote and co-translated a correspondence in Arabic and English poems with Iraqi poet Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, and edited Other Paths for Shahrazad, a bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by Arab women.
Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Rattle, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and on The Slowdown podcast. She curates the Wilder Words reading series, organizes for the Her Story Is collective, and serves as senior program manager of 24PearlStreet at the Fine Arts Work Center.
This grant is a recognition of a body of work that is utterly her own: rooted, human, and reaching far beyond any borders.
What These Mass Cultural Council 2026 Grants Mean for Our Community
When one of us wins, all of us rise. That’s not just something we say — it’s why 350+ Essex County businesses chose to build together rather than alone. Watching five members receive statewide recognition for their creative work is a reminder of the extraordinary human talent woven into the fabric of this region.
These grants are unrestricted — meaning Andrea, Edwin, Javiera, Kathleen, and Jennifer each get to decide exactly where their creativity takes them next. We can’t wait to see what they build.
Congratulations to all five. Essex County is proud of you.
Creative Collective is home to 350+ Essex County businesses crowdsourcing success together. Learn more about membership.
