The Virginia Film Festival has been approved for a $20,000 Grants for Arts Projects Award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the 2021 Virginia Film Festival. The VAFF is among 1,073 arts projects from across America that were selected during this first round of fiscal year 2021 funding in the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects funding category.
Congratulations to UVA Music’s Professor Nomi Dave who won the Ruth Stone prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for best first monograph for her book “The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea!”
Thoughts From the Lawn has a spooky treat this Halloween weekend! Composer, screenwriter, and adjunct film lecturer Matthew Marshall in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia leads us on a trail of horror film history, iconography, and deeper social meanings.
The show goes on thanks to the innovation, dedication, and collaboration among UVA faculty and student musicians! Kelly Sulick, Senior Lecturer in Flute at the University of Virginia discusses music collaboration and performance during the Pandemic as well as the exciting future for music performance at UVA.
On this UVA Speaks podcast, Melissa Goldman, Lab Manager in UVA’s School of Architecture, talks about the Fabrication Labs. The Lab’s mission is to provide an inclusive space where students, staff, and faculty can learn through practice by using the tools and techniques of making, prototyping, and crafting across the different disciplines of architecture. Goldman also speaks about MakerGrounds, a network of UVA shops, labs, and maker spaces across Grounds open to the UVA community and the Milton LandLab, a 172-acre experimental landscape space. Listen in to hear about examples of the small and large-scale products and projects created in these dynamic spaces.
The Virginia Film Festival has been approved for a $20,000 Grants for Arts Projects Award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the 2022 Virginia Film Festival. The VAFF is among 1,248 projects across America totaling $28,840,000 that were selected to receive this first round fiscal year 2022 funding in the Grants for Arts Projects category.
Counterpoint includes recent and new photography, textile, and video installation work by Sepideh Dashti. Counterpoint is on view in the Ruffin Gallery through February 24, 2022.
Hajjar Baban’s experience as an immigrant to America exists in all aspects of her work, she says, from “the words that I may obsess over to images that become motifs.” Baban – who received a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2020 and is currently a Master of Fine Arts student in the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Program in poetry – was awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a merit-based award to support graduate study for immigrants and children of immigrants. Founded by Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros, the fellowship program honors the contributions of continuing generations of immigrants in the United States.
Acapella concerts on the Lawn, dance showcases, live theater productions – student performances have long graced the University of Virginia. In the past year, as coronavirus brought in-person shows to a halt, UVA’s performance groups adapted to create virtually and keep their art alive. Some groups are taking advantage of technology like Zoom or TikTok to allow students in different places to create, practice, or learn together virtually, while others have met in small groups with a lot of precautions in place. UVA Today reached out to a number of student arts groups across Grounds to find out how they survived the past year.
West African architect Francis Kéré, founder of the Berlin-based firm Kéré Architecture, is the 2021 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture. Kéré received his architectural degree from the Technische Universität in Berlin in 2004, having originally been trained as a carpenter both in his native country of Burkina Faso and in Germany. While still an architecture student, he set up the association Schulbausteine für Gando e.V, later named Kéré Foundation e.V., which loosely translates to “School Building Blocks for Gando,” to fund the construction of a primary school for his hometown of Gando.
In 2019, the UVA Library proposed a project to the Cornerstone Program to pilot an Art in Library Spaces program. The Cornerstone project team — Emerson Aviles, Kelli Martin, Jennifer Hasher, Katherine Grove, Gabriela Garcia Largen, Kate Beach, and David Sauerwein — developed a display plan for students, staff, faculty, and Charlottesville community art in Library spaces that represents the diversity of the University community. With so many Library spaces currently undergoing renovation, we are proud to have the opportunity to reimagine the feel and inclusivity of our Library.
This year’s Double Take speakers were, in order of appearance, former Cavalier football player and member of the Class of 2020 Charles Snowden, UVA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis, first-year student Taylor Curro, community member Paul C. Harris Sr., his son and ’13, ‘16 ‘double Hoo’ Paul C. Harris Jr., UVA Hospital Cafeterias sous chef Eryne Zerihun and Joel Gardner, a ‘70, ‘74 ‘double Hoo.’
