May 12, 2016
Lewis Center for the Arts awards more than $105,000 for summer study and projects to 53 Princeton students
Photo caption: Princeton students Abby Jean-Baptiste, Will Lathrop and Simon Wu (left to right) are recipients of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Alex Adam ’07 Award for 2016.Photo credits: Courtesy of the students
(Princeton, NJ) The Lewis Center for the Arts announces the award of more than $105,000 to
support the summer projects and research of 53 Princeton students, including substantial
individual awards through the Alex Adam ’07 Award, the Mallach Senior Thesis Fund, the Sam
Hutton Fund for the Creative Arts, and the Carpenter Family Fund for Comparative Literature.
The awards were made through a competitive application process that received 90 proposals
requesting just under $400,000 in funding. For many recipients the funding provides the
resources to conduct research, undertake training, and pursue other opportunities critical to
achieving their senior thesis project goals.
Three students — Abby Jean-Baptiste, Will Lathrop, and Simon Wu — have been selected for
the Alex Adam ’07 Award. Established in memory of Alexander Jay Adam ’07 and made
possible by a generous gift from his family, the award provides $7,500 in support to each of
three Princeton undergraduates who will spend a summer pursuing a project that will result in the
creation of new artistic work. While a student at Princeton, Alex Adam pursued artistic interests
in creative writing and theater. Joyce Carol Oates, his creative writing professor, praised his
work as “sharp-edged, unexpectedly corrosive and very funny.” He was also an actor, and
performed with the Princeton Shakespeare Company, Theatre Intime, and the Program in
Theater.
“The Alex Adam Award was created in loving memory of a wonderfully creative student, “says
Stacy Wolf, Acting Chair of the Lewis Center. “Current Princeton students carry on his legacy
as young artists, and this generous award allows them to travel, explore, and develop their own
artistic projects.”
This summer, sophomore Jean-Baptiste, an English major pursing a certificate in theater, plans to
travel to South Africa to explore black performance theory and practice. The first leg of Jean-
Baptiste’s journey will take her to the eleven-day National Arts Festival, which offers access to a
formal performance program, as well as to street theater, performance art, and a fringe festival.
She will continue her research and work in Cape Town, mainly through observing, “how race is
performed offstage” in the local community alongside some conventional productions at Baxter
Theater. She will also use her time to draft a play that reflects on what she learns about black
performance through the spectatorship and interviews she conducts. South Africa in particular is
of interest to Jean-Baptiste because of the historical and current tensions of performing race
onstage—she will study the lingering impact of apartheid and the performance practices that
arose as a response. Performance has been important to Jean-Baptiste from a young age, but only
recently has she begun to delve into works that address race or are created by black artists and
has found it extremely rewarding. At Princeton, Jean-Baptiste has worked as an actor, producer,
stage manager, and director for various campus theater productions. She looks forward to
exploring the playwriting side of performance before taking a playwriting class in the fall. She
anticipates a future in theater.
Lathrop, a junior and religion major pursing a certificate in Creative Writing, plans to use his
funding to undertake a canoe trip through the North Woods on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
The Trail runs 740 miles from Old Forge, New York to Fort Kent, Maine. Lathrop will compose
poetry every day, either through writing or recording his voice and the natural soundscape. In the
process he will reckon with what he terms the “solo white man in the wild” persona and examine
how objects — canoes, poems — separate self and place. The journey will take approximately
40 days. The two weeks following Lathrop will spend visiting writers and canoe makers on the
way back to New Jersey to discuss the artists’ relationships with the North Woods. After his
return, Lathrop will adapt the material he gathered into a performed poetry collection. His project
was prompted by his summers working as a canoe guide in upstate New York’s Adirondack
Park; he also draws inspiration from eco-Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, 19th-century conservationist
George Washington Sears, and Henry David Thoreau. At Princeton, Lathrop has focused his
studies so far on creative writing and religion, specifically his independent study of Buddhism in
South Africa.
An art history major pursuing a certificate in visual arts, Wu is interested in contemporary
American and Asian art and the intersection of art and social contexts. The junior plans to use his
summer funding to investigate the relationship between digital media and body image,
and unconventional forms of performance art in three Asian cities. Wu’s first stop is Rangoon,
Myanmar, his birthplace, where he will study indigenous gem-painting and bamboo-painting
practices, as well as the budding contemporary art scene to explore what role the performing
body can play in politics. Next Wu will travel to Bangkok with a focus on kathoey (ladyboy)
culture and drag performance in order to shed light on gender and gender performativity in
Southeast Asia. The project’s last stop is in Seoul, where Wu will engage with the “mock
funeral” phenomenon, a kind of performance therapy where participants simulate and
contemplate their own deaths, and its links to mental health. His response to this research will
take the form of writings, videos and various contemporary digital media.
Juniors Cat Andre and Clair Ashmead have been selected for funding through the Mallach Senior
Thesis Fund. This award established by Douglas J. Mallach ’91 supports the realization of one or
two proposed senior thesis projects that incorporate historical research and create an alternative
path to learning history with a $5,000 grant.
Andre is an English Major pursuing a certificate in theater. For her directing thesis, she plans to
stage Caryl Churchill’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s Dream Play. Strindberg created the
unusual work after what many scholars identify as a mental break, and its world is poetic and
fragmented. The play uses the character Agnes, a suffering young woman, to explore dark
themes of interiority, memory, and suicide. Andre will work to unravel the emotional truths that
underlie Strindberg’s play and channel those truths through Agnes; her interpretation will
distinctly anchor Dream Play in Agnes’ interiority. She plans to use her funding to travel to
London, where she will conduct research on Emanuel Swedenborg, whose work obsessed
Strindberg at the time of Dream Play’s writing, and also visit the National Theatre’s Archive,
where she will be able to study past production materials and thus understand the play’s
performance history. Next Andre’s project will take her to Stockholm, where she will spend
much of her time studying and working at the Strindbergsmuseet, an institution devoted to the
playwright’s life and works. She will also visit the theaters where many of Strindberg’s plays
were originally performed and examine the Swedish Film Institute’s Ingmar Bergman Archives.
Andre will then visit Oslo to gain better insight into Ibsen, Strindberg’s greatest rival.
Ashmead, a history major pursing a certificate in creative writing, plans to use her funding to
travel to sites in England, Denmark and the U.S. to visit the homes of the female authors who
have shaped her as both a writer and a woman. While visiting the former homes (now museum-
estates) of the Bronte Sisters, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor,
Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Karen Blixen, she will be keeping a fictional journal of events
as she travels. The fictional journal will be set in the future and written in the voice of her
granddaughter, who will be intentionally paralleling Ashmead’s journey on a pilgrimage of her
own. The journal will incorporate memoirist sections of her actual journey, fiction of how her
descendant feels, as well as poems and drawings of the sites she will be visiting. Ashmead plans
to use this journal as the potential framework for a thesis in the Program in Creative Writing.
Junior Alexander Quetell has been selected for funding from the new Sam Hutton Fund for the
Arts. This award was established by Thomas C. Hutton ’72 and supports undergraduate summer
study, travel and thesis research in the Lewis Center for the Arts with a grant of $5,000. The
visual arts major pursuing certificates in dance, environmental studies, and German plans to
pursue dance training, as well as ground-level research in environmental and arts groups. He has
been accepted to Springboard Danse Montréal, a 20-day program of workshops, performances,
auditions, and networking with choreographers, dance pedagogues, and performance companies.
He will also participate in the Northwest Dance Project: LAUNCH, a two-week dance intensive
in Portland, Oregon, and a contact improvisation workshop at EARTHDANCE in Northampton,
Massachusetts, an organization that provides a mix of dance, somatic, and interdisciplinary arts
training with a focus on sustainable living, social justice, and community. During those programs
he will also be researching environmental and arts advocacy groups. He will then return to his
home state of Michigan and embark on a two-week intensive research project looking at the way
dance functions in the post-industrial fabric of Detroit and how environmental and arts advocacy
groups have been working with one another in the redevelopment of the city. This project is
inspired by the fall semester course “Arts of Urban Transition” where the class analyzed post-
industrial landscapes through an interdisciplinary approach. His summer training and research is
planned as the basis for a full-length senior thesis performance.
Junior Sydney King has been named the winner of the $3,800 Carpenter Family Fund for
Comparative Literature and the Creative Arts established by Katherine R.R. Carpenter ’79 to
provide support for teaching and research at the Lewis Center for collaborations between the
Center and the Department of Comparative Literature. Junior Erin Berl has been selected as the
recipient of $3,000 in support through the Mellor Fund for Undergraduate Research, which
provides funding to Lewis Center students for course, travel, and/or research costs related to
studies in the creative and performing arts. Junior Alex Ford has received a $3,000 award from
the Lawrence P. Wolfen ’87 Senior Thesis Award established for travel or research costs,
materials, equipment or other expenses of current juniors for thesis work in the creative arts,
especially the visual arts or graphic arts. Freshman Crystal Liu and junior Chanyoung Park each
received $2,350 from the Mary Quaintance ’84 Fund for the Creative Arts established in her
memory to foster talents similar to those Quaintance developed in writing, film studies, and
literature in the creative arts programs at Princeton. Juniors Alexis Foster, Emily Madrigal,
Yankia Ned, and Elisabeth Weiss each received grants of $1,250 from the E. Ennalls Berl 1912
and Charles Waggaman Berl 1917 Senior Thesis Award in Visual Arts, which was established in
1999 by Marie Broadhead to provide support for research, travel or other expenses of current
juniors undertaking senior thesis work in the Program in Visual Arts.
In addition, 37 students received support through the Peter B. Lewis Summer Fund with grants
ranging from $500 to $2,800.
To learn more about the Lewis Center for the Arts and the funding available to Princeton
students visit: arts.princeton.edu.
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