Lauren RubensteinThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Wesleyan a $250,000 grant to implement an innovative artist residency model to deepen engagement with the arts on campus and expand their impact in the community. The grant will be spent over three-and-a-half years, in a period ending in June 2022. Wesleyan has a long history of hosting artist residencies, in which visiting artists offer master classes and give talks based around a single performance or art installation. Most residencies have been relatively short-term, with a few notable exceptions. Under the Mellon grant, the University will establish an expanded version of the artist…
Bill HolderAntonio Gonzalez, professor of Spanish and director of the Center for Global Studies, is comfortably seated in front of a semicircle of 11 students. He holds an iPad Pro that controls two large screens on the wall behind him and enables him to move effortlessly, seamlessly from Google Maps, to video clips, to text he can annotate on the iPad. All the while he converses in Spanish with his students about a movie that tells the story of a Moroccan woman repatriating the body of her brother after he died crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in a small boat. In…
Kate CarlisleThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Wesleyan's Center for the Arts a $750,000 grant to support the Creative Campus Initiative and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Half a million dollars of the $750,000 grant will be matched by $1 million to be raised to endow continued cross-disciplinary Creative Campus activities. With support from Wesleyan alumni, the fundraising campaign to meet this challenge is being launched on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the CFA during the 2013-14 season. "This terrific grant is a recognition of the critical role the arts play at Wesleyan," said President Michael S. Roth.…
David PesciThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Wesleyan's Center for the Arts (CFA) $750,000 to support the development of artists’ new work, interdisciplinary collaborations, co-teaching initiatives and arts-based campus-wide projects as well as the planning and partial funding of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP), a new post-graduate professional certificate program for performing arts presenters. "The CFA’s goal is to elevate the place of art, artists and the artistic process at Wesleyan in ways that innovatively strengthen teaching, student learning and art-making," says Pamela Tatge, director of the Center for the Arts. "The Mellon-funded projects will help to…
Olivia DrakeJill Morawski, director, Center for the Humanities, professor of psychology, and Don Moon, dean of the Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Professor in the College of Social Studies, professor of government and tutor in the College of Social Studies; received a $142,000 Mellon Foundation grant on Oct. 2. The award will fund the John E. Sawyer Seminar on "Comparative Study of Cultures."