Dean’s International Research Grant

David Handforth
Photography and Film

For the Dean’s International Research Grant I will produce a photographic and auditory series documenting and investigating the Swedish ritual of Årsgång. This will be the first time the locations where Årsgång transpired will be recorded, as the practice has almost been forgotten. This ritual must be completed at specific locations and can only be achieved on certain calendar dates, including Midsummer’s Eve. For this reason, I will be traveling and staying in Småland from June 14th to June 28th. During this time, I will photograph landscapes of the rite grounds, as well as document the ritual.

Andrew Grider
Interior Design

Choosing France taps into my focus of working in historic interiors since France is a historical textile epicenter. Securing exclusive access to Pierre Frey’s archives in Paris, guided by their archivist, unveils the meticulous process of archiving and how textiles are recreated for interior restoration work in iconic locations like Versailles. Ownership of Braquenie and Zuber adds depth to exploration, housing textiles commissioned by figures like Marie Antoinette. Also, venturing to Lyon’s silk mills, I aim to gain insight and techniques of the historical roots of silk and passementerie production. All of which will impact my academic, creative, and professional pursuits.

Isa Dray
Sculpture

This summer, Isa Dray will travel to the Netherlands to research contemporary performance art and artist-run collectives. Beginning in Amsterdam, Dray will visit Stedelijk to view a major retrospective of performance artist Marina Abromovic’s work. They will then travel to The Hague to participate in a residency at DIY dance and performance initiative CLOUD. While in residence at CLOUD, Dray will explore intuitive, breath-based movement through classes and independent practice. Connecting with CLOUD’s extensive network of artist-run initiatives in The Hague will empower them to envision ways of building creative communities and support systems.

Areej Ghazenfer
Interior Design

This research will aim to investigate the impact of interiors and lighting on the overall wellbeing of the Finland population, ranked as the happiest country in 2023. Focused on Rovaniemi and Helsinki, the study will utilize sketching, photography, and videos to analyze interior and exterior lighting applications during the limited daylight hours of December (approximately 6 hours). Through comprehensive exploration and fieldwork, the research seeks to uncover the nuances of design elements that positively influence the happiness and mental wellbeing of the inhabitants in the face of prolonged darkness.

Helen Hopkins
Music

From August 14-18, I will be attending workshops, panel discussions, and recitals at the International Women’s Brass Conference in Mito City, Japan. The IWBC strives to promote diversity and inclusion among brass musicians, and it provides a community of support for women in brass. This conference will offer invaluable knowledge about how to navigate this heavily male-dominated sector of the music field, and I will be able to connect with hundreds of other women with whom I share experiences, skills and career goals. This project will help me stay active in the movement to make the music field more equitable.

Naomy Cardoso Perez
Painting and Printmaking

I have collaborated (with Noah Birkeland) in the creation of a children’s picture book using the folklore and atmosphere of Norwegian mythos and nature. We wish to travel for a three-week independent study abroad to research the cultural history of Bergen Norway and surrounding cities. Our goal is primarily to facilitate a more immersive illustrative picture book with the takeaway of inspiring bravery and creativity in children who find themselves immigrating to other countries using inventive mythological concepts and environmental paintings. This storyline is inspired by my personal journey within moving to the US as a child.

Noah Birkeland
Communication Arts

I will be traveling to Bergen, Norway, and several other cities, along with Naomy Cardoso Perez to study the land, architecture, culture, populace, and history in the interest of making a children’s book. This book will be full of illustrations depicting the subject matter gathered during this research trip. These images will serve as the rich and magical world that the characters shall reside in. Through themes of immigration and self-acceptance this book shall aim to help children find the magic within their world, and accept things that may not be what they are used to.

Eileen Morley
Craft/Material Studies

Eileen will be traveling to Blönduós, Iceland to attend the Icelandic Textile Center Ós Textile Artist Residency program for the month of June. She will be drafting patterns, dyeing wool using Icelandic flora, and knitting a series of works exploring language, concrete poetry, and the use of text in art. Iceland’s rich textile history and local yarn production—as well as a knitting festival in June—serves as both inspiration and fuel for a body of fiber work, and this focused time will be invaluable for her studio practice.

Hope Ollivant
Craft/Material Studies

Hope Ollivant will be traveling to London for a University of the Arts London short course at Central Saint Martins in the first week of June. The course, “Introduction to the Jewellery Business,” will reveal unknown and unseen aspects of the jewelry industry, from market stall to luxury brands. Hope will also be conducting independent research by visiting art galleries and the Central Saint Martins Library during the week. Hope recently completed a three-week winter course at UAL College of Communication on the creative industries in London and is interested in taking a deeper dive into her area of focus, jewelry.

Nina Gregory
Interior Design

Very few cities contend with the architectural duality of old and new like Copenhagen, Denmark. The city boasts both a plethora of 19th Century castles and some of the most cutting-edge design in the world today. This research project would go to the streets of Denmark’s capital in May 2023 to conduct a series of creative field studies including writing, sketching, photography, and video that would be compiled in order to answer the question: how exactly does the architecture of the past and the architecture of the future work together to create the distinct, vibrant, Copenhagen seen today?

Ellyx Martinez
Painting + Printmaking

This summer, Ellyx Martinez will be funded to attend Joya’s art and ecology artist residency. Time at this residency will give them the opportunity to rekindle connection to a piece of their mixed Mestizo identity, investigating land’s capacity for memory and story-telling. Having never been to Spain, time spent as a Joya alongside the neighboring landscape will offer the invaluable opportunity to continue ancestral research while gaining perspective on present and future land/community relations. It will also enable them to tell their story with a deep clarity speaking to a wider return to sustainable cycles.

Aija Bowditch
Photography + Film

Aija will travel to Riga, Latvia to photograph cultural festivities that celebrate the bond between people and nature: the Summer Solstice, and the Latvian Song and Dance Celebration, which takes place every five years. Latvian culture—including its songs, folklore, and spiritual life—focuses on the harmonious bond between humans and nature. As an artist focusing on humans within the natural world, Aija will photograph events where this bond is explicitly celebrated with age-old songs and rituals; with human bodies adorned with flowers; and with woods, fields, and beaches that are the venues for all-night celebrations.

Joel Freeman
Photography + Film

Joel will travel to Jamaica for a photography project where he will focus on capturing the country’s vibrant and unique fashion scene through his lens. His goal is to photograph locals and Jamaican fashion, and to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and people of Jamaica. With the help of a friend who was born and raised in Jamaica as a tour guide, he believes that this experience will be a valuable addition to my personal and professional development as a photographer.

Lilly Parker
Photography + Film

Lillian Parker will travel to Flam, Norway to create an experimental photography series in collaboration with the Norwegian fjords. The fjords were created by massive glaciation movement 2.5 million years ago and have served as a place of protection. The project engages the sediments found in the fjord particularly in trace metals and their interactions with silver halide of 120 film. This opportunity will allow Lillian to capture the fjord in this moment of history through her interaction with the physical aspects of the landscape.

Anna Kovina
Sculpture

This grant would enable Anna to travel to England to continue her research of feminist art history and contemporary feminist artists and movements, which began in connection with her work on social psychology of childbirth funded by the VCUarts Interdisciplinary grant. U.S. museums’ collections contain limited references to childbirth. British museums are making much more concerted efforts to include and highlight modern and contemporary feminist art and historical references to women’s experience with reproduction, pleasure and power. In addition to museum research, she plans on meeting some of the artists working in England to address structural inequalities.

Molly Marsh
Theatre

Molly will be traveling to London to research “Live Cinema,” a new medium that merges cinema and theatre. This style of performance has not yet reached the U.S. in a significant way, but her goal is to bring this art form back to VCUarts. She plans to gain hands-on experience with “Live Cinema” among the pioneers of a new multimedia approach that re-imagines classical texts and enhances the performance with technology.

EB Fox
Photo + Film

EB will travel to the port city of Rotterdam, Netherlands to film a short documentary about the major land reclamation project happening on the Dutch coast. Since the early 1800s, the Dutch have been working to reclaim land from the North Sea using a technique called poldering. She will spend 10 days in early September studying the environmental impacts of this project and the large-scale fight against climate change. The findings from the Netherlands will then be juxtaposed with that of Tangier, an island off Virginia’s Eastern shore that is being completely overtaken by the bay.

Lillian Hobart
Photo + Film

Lillian will be traveling to Ballyvaughan, Ireland to attend the Burren College of Art Artist Residency program in mid July. She will explore the glacio karst landscape of the Burren, focusing specifically on the distinct geological formations caused by the glaciation of Ireland over 20,000 years ago. Lillian will create a series of photographs communicating her research findings, depicting the necessity of a human relationship to deep time and the importance of glacial landscapes to the health of our planet. She will be able to establish an independent studio practice and have round the clock darkroom and studio space.

Barrett Reynolds
Photo + Film

From July 1st to July 8th, Barrett Reynolds and Jack Fox will travel to Nova Scotia, Canada to create a photography series combining documentary and narrative storytelling portraying the excessive amounts of shipwrecks the area experiences due to heavy fog. Through photographing local townspeople, native wildlife species, and exploring sailor’s tall tales surrounding shipwrecks, they will create a series that captures speculations surrounding the abnormal occurrences in the province. This opportunity will allow Barrett and Jack to explore how Nova Scotia’s peculiar environment shapes the collective identity of its inhabitants. 

Elise Wojtowicz
Art Education

Elise will travel to Ireland in late May to investigate bog, where she will create a series of sculptural photographs in collaboration with this unique and essential environment, completing an ongoing body of work centering this landscape. The project engages with the mystical and macabre qualities of boglands from an feminist perspective, while revealing their environmental necessity in an age of climate decay.

Jonah Wilder
Photo + Film

Jonah will travel to Karasjok, Norway and Kiruna, Sweden with film students Noah Carpenter and Victoria Lowry to film a short documentary about the Sami cultural practice of reindeer herding as well as the massive industrial complexes that exist in Arctic Scandinavia. During their stay, they plan to assist in herding reindeer, care for a kennel of Alaskan Malamutes, and explore a town forced to move 3 kilometers east to avoid collapsing into the largest iron ore mine in the world.

Samuel Lo
Photo + Film

Samuel traveled to Hong Kong with his father, where his father was born and raised before he immigrated to the United States. As an artist of mixed-race ancestry, Samuel’s artwork has explored the relationship of his genealogy to place and culture. Having grown up and been enculturated in suburban Maryland for the majority of his life, traveling with his father to the location of half of his ancestry served as an excellent opportunity to explore the space and culture of Hong Kong.

Noah Thompson
Communication Arts

Noah traveled to the Svalbard archipelago to study the walrus population and the ways animal-based art can be used as an environmental advocacy tool. Working with scientists, policy-makers, historians, and artists, he learned about the walrus and about the ways artists and others are advocating for, and depicting the walrus and other species.

Matin Kordnavahsi
Kinetic Imaging

Matin traveled to the remote village of Çifteköprü in Turkey to produce a short documentary about a young tea farmer and social media enthusiast that serves tea to local people and visitors. The tea farmer has a background in English and economic studies and initiates creative discussions among his guests. Matin also produced a three-channel video installation based on the tea farmer’s story.

Nicholas Hemann
Art History

Nicholas traveled to the city of Tartu, Estonia to study the emerging practice of bioart — art which makes use of organic elements as a medium — utilizing semiotic methods developed by the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. He spoke to professors and students at the University of Tartu working on the semiotics of culture, utilized the public art libraries of the University, and visited contemporary art spaces throughout the city and in Tallinn, Estonia to produce a research paper which was submitted to the academic journal Biosemiotics.

Rachel Azzinaro
Graphic Design

Rachel traveled to Merida, Mexico to study the intersection of immersive art, architecture and spirituality in the ancient Mayan culture, while making comparisons to modern ideas of graphic design and the practice of viewing art. Through focused research in Mayan ruins and cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, she explored the universality of panoramic and immersive art, comparing and contrasting the findings to contemporary technologies such as the mass-printed poster and virtual reality.

Lily Donahue
Craft + Material Studies

Lily will travel to Cambridge, U.K. to examine Antarctic travel diaries written by Western explorers of the Heroic Era using the archives of the British Antarctic Survey and the Scott Polar Research Institute. These documents will be used to continue her research on how the coded sociopolitical values and ‘objecthood’ of these diaries have affected global perceptions of the continent of Antarctica. Her findings will be used to create an artist’s book that appropriates the form of travel diaries to question how narrative distorts fact.

Hannah Sahr
Interior Design

Hannah researched Chennai, India’s historic architecture to examine how Western ideals of design affects and changes the culture’s built environment. She used her design education as a framework to look at the ethics of making in an international community.

Qiduo Zheng
Communication Arts

Qiduo traveled to the Shanxi Province of China to visit five templates and two museums to study the line art in Chinese mural. His research focused on religious murals from the Yuan and Ming Dynasty.

Rebecca Renton
Photo + Film

Rebeca traveled to Paris to complete a documentary photo series and subsequent book. In a city famous for its idyllic Haussmann boulevards and residents’ classic sense of style, she documented its lesser-known brutalist architecture and youth fashion subcultures. Her work presented a more stark Paris that reflects its current and historic unrest amongst the youth.

Keenan Ferguson
Fashion Design

Keenan traveled to the village of Spannum, Netherlands to study the sustainable practice of wool felting and natural dyeing as an intern for Dutch artist, Claudy Jongstra. During his internship, he assisted in the tending of Jongstra’s botanical garden which cultivated the dye wool fiber used throughout her work. Utilizing naturally dyed fiber sheared from Jongstra’s flock of Drenthe Heath Sheep, he learned the traditional process of wool felting. After the internship, he designed a creative installation in response to the sustainable practices he experienced.

Julia Folkart
Theatre

Julia spent two weeks traveling to London, Paris and Amsterdam to sketch, paint, and photograph the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements in the cities that bore them. This grant allowed her to understand these movements, by observing them in the context of complete holistic aesthetics.

Priscilla Franklin
Theatre

Priscilla traveled to Shandong University of Arts in Jinan, China to explore and practice Chinese traditional ink painting, language and theatre. She applied her study in traditional Chinese painting to theatre scenic painting and studied the Chinese language in order to translate Chinese play scripts. This allowed her to understand the meaning behind some dialogue that cannot be directly translated like popular Chinese idioms. She also visited famous ancient architecture as inspiration for her future theatre scenic designs.

Elena Gavrilović
Art History

Elena spent three weeks in Serbia exploring the presentation of iconography in religious and secular institutions. She studied iconography as it is displayed in Belgrade museums, as compared to its function in ancient monasteries of the Fruška Gora region. Elena interviewed both curators and practicing iconographers, to gain insights from a range of perspectives about how to display and contextualize sacred objects outside of their religious settings.

Mason Goolsby
Graphic Design

Mason traveled to Tokyo to study Japanese design, both historic and contemporary. He met with current Japanese designers to discuss inspirations, methods of making and practices. The experience helped him inform, inspire and hone his work as a designer.

David Hall
Photography & Film

David traveled to Odense and Billund, Denmark to conduct documentary research on the LEGO community. Denmark serves as the headquarters and origin for the famous toy brick. Over its 60 year lifespan, LEGO has not only become an iconic toy to the public but also as a medium of art. The community’s research supported his education in the visual and creative language of documentary filmmaking.

Matthew Malone
Music

Matthew traveled to Dubrovnik and Zagreb in Croatia and Budapest, Hungary to study the traditional folk music and the teaching methods of this music. He sat in on rehearsals, met with musicians, and learned how to play native and traditional folk instruments. In addition, he studied the methods of teaching these styles of music to adapt them into his own processes of education.

Daisy Matias
Art History

Daisy traveled to the Mexican cities of Guadalajara, and Oaxaca de Juarez, to study the division between fine arts and crafts in contemporary Mexican culture. She studied the influence of race, class and gender on this divide and the effects of the legacy of philosopher Immanuel Kant on how art is viewed. Daisy spoke to local artists, artisans and gallery owners about their beliefs on what they believe defines art in order to explore less Eurocentric perspectives.

Caroline Meyers
Sculpture + Extended Media

Caroline traveled to Ravenna, Italy to take a mosaic workshop and study the work of Marilyn Stokstad, a prominent art historian, who specialized in Medieval art and wrote about Byzantine mosaics. With the tactile and art historical information that she learned through making and viewing these mosaics in their city of origin, she created studio-based extensions of Stokstad’s writing that ask questions about who makes and views mosaics today and why.

Alexandra Norman
Craft/Material Studies

Alexandra traveled to the Asturias province of Spain to learn traditional stone cutting and timber-framing techniques while helping a young couple restore their 19th century Spanish home and gardens. Her research focused on learning hard skills when it comes to traditional construction craft and restoration methods and how attempts to preserve places of the past can help create a more sustainable future.