Congratulations to all the recipients of the Spring 2021 UIC Graduate College competitions! These awards seek to provide funding, reward outstanding scholarship, provide ways for students to develop new research directions for their terminal degree thesis/capstone project, and/or incentivize independently identifying internship opportunities.
Award for Graduate Research
The Graduate College’s longest-running support for research by graduate students, the Award for Graduate Research funds three categories: research travel, summer research stipend, and materials/supplies.
- Juan Baños Fonseca - Studio Art (image 2)
Juan Baños Fonseca is a first-year MFA student and, with this award, he intends to continue his research around painting and robotics. The proposal he presented is called “Exodus” and is conceived as an Intermedia project addressing immigration to the United States. The purpose is to create a composition of pictorial-automated portraits that represent the movement of animated beings. The final work would be presented as a performance-exhibition that uses moving robots as cyphers for forced migration. Political, climate, and religious refugees represent the movement of real human beings forced into escape and pilgrimage. - Amanda Taves - Photography
The Award for Graduate Research will enable Amanda to conduct interviews, sample vegetation, and analyze soil extracted from the San Marcos, Texas Forensic Anthropology Research Facility. This research will lay the foundation for her new project, Genesis, which explores the unique expressions that blossom from the nutrients provided by human decomposition and what they have the capacity to nurture. Genesis will expose viewers to how their physical interactions with the landscape offer an extension of life beyond death: transferences that “bear mute witness” of our absence, perpetuating life through vegetative and fungal growth. No longer separated from the land, we will not be forgotten, enabling the continuation of life in new forms long into the future. - Leslie Wooden - Art History
- Andrea Yarbrough - MUSE (image 3)
The Award for Graduate Research will provide funding to support "in care of Black women" which grew out of a course taught by Dr. Lucy Mensah and was the basis for Andrea's capstone project. Now, as an ongoing project, "in care of Black women" continues to as a creative place-keeping initiative anchored on the southside of Chicago to cooperatively activate vacant lots and building cartographies of care.
Provost's Graduate Internship Award
The Provost’s Graduate Internship Award (PGIA) incentivizes graduate students to independently identify short (3-month) internship opportunities that might lead to employment following graduation.
- Hannah Gadbois- Art History
Host and location: University of Illinois Press (Urbana/Champaign)