Nik Narain receives the 2025 Louis Sudler Prize
Nik Narain has been selected for this award for his distinguished record of excellence in performance and creation in writing for stage/screen and comedy performance.
Graduating Program II major, with a self-designed course of study spanning Neuroscience, Dance, and Nutrition, Michela Arietti has been announced as this year’s recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize. Michela Arietti has been selected for her distinguished record of excellence as an artist-scholar, whose work connects performance, neuroscience research, and embodiment, reflecting a broadly imaginative approach to the arts.
The body of [Arietti’s] creative work that she developed while at Duke and during summer studies attests to how she is positioning herself to engage in the arts at a professional level. In her work, she addresses critical issues in society with a mature and knowledgeable voice. Her innovative research investigates gut-brain neuroscience and embodiment. She envisions her work as healing work, moving from individual healing toward social change.
Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Duke Dance Program Chair and Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance
Arietti’s interdisciplinary work has been developed through sustained mentorship in the Duke Dance Program, including close advising from Dance faculty. Through annual contributions in the program’s seasonal performances, collaborations on MFA thesis works, and leadership within student dance communities, she has cultivated a practice that moves between performance, research, and cultural inquiry.
I can genuinely say that [Arietti] is one of the most experimental, broad-thinking, and interdisciplinary minds I have encountered at Duke.
Michael Klïen, Professor of the Practice of Dance
Michela Arietti is also a 2026 Benenson Award recipient and will use the funding this summer to develop her project, Dancing the Long Life, a choreographic work informed by ethnographic research into communal dance practices and embodied cultural rituals.
During her time at Duke, Arietti was advised by Dr. Sarah Wilbur and Dr. Maya M. Kaelberer, and completed her thesis under the guidance of Dr. Sarah Wilbur, Dr. Diego Bohórquez, and Dr. Saskia Cornes.
Michela Arietti (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, installation artist, and dance writer graduating from Duke University in May 2026, where she designed an interdisciplinary major integrating Neuroscience, Movement/Dance, and Nutrition. Trained in the Vaganova method at the Accademia La Scala affiliate in Milan and the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow, she has expanded her practice into contemporary choreography, multidisciplinary installation, and research-driven performance. She has performed in November Dances and ChoreoLab at Duke, contributed to MFA thesis works across three years, and appeared in showcases across cultural student organizations. Her work investigates the body as a sensory and political site, examining how external systems of measurement displace embodied perception, and moves from individual healing toward social change; her senior thesis, Artificial Nutrition, culminates in both a publishable interdisciplinary article and a live installation premiering in April 2026. She has been recognized with the Clay Taliaferro Dance Award, a Benenson Award in the Arts (in 2023 and 2026), and the Dance Project Award, and has led movement workshops abroad exploring how prescribed movement encodes trauma in the body. As Outreach Chair for Defining Movement and Trinity Ambassador for the Duke Dance Program, she works from a conviction that dance is not only a performance practice but a legitimate and necessary way of knowing.
My work begins with a question I cannot fully resolve: what does the body know that language cannot yet articulate?
I trained for over a decade in the Vaganova method, a tradition that demands total technical submission in exchange for artistic fluency. Although ballet formed my body and artistry, I had not yet learned to ask how profoundly that instrument had been shaped by forces outside itself– those that govern which traditions get institutionalized, which get staged, whose embodied knowledge gets treated as authoritative. Once confronted with these questions, I found I couldn’t make work that ignored them.
My practice investigates the body not as a vessel to bend, refine, and optimize, but as a system embedded in forces that govern what it knows, what it trusts, and what it is permitted to feel.
Embodied sensing is inherently political. I treat the body’s capacity to perceive and resist not only as a place for personal healing, but as a foundation for collective reimagining and social change. I believe that when individuals are returned to their own sensory authority, something shifts, not only in them, but in the communities they move through.
I am also a researcher in the Bohórquez/Kaelberer Neurobiology Lab. One finding stays with me: when given a choice between real sugar and artificial sweetener, with no ability to taste the difference, mice still chose real sugar. Their bodies knew: they were equipped with a sensory system that could discern the difference when our conscious brain couldn’t. In the studio, I investigate what happens when a body learns to override those signals, whether for a calorie count, an aesthetic ideal, or an institution’s vision of what a dancer should be. I don’t believe these are perfect metaphors for each other, but rather the same phenomenon at different scales.
This work has convinced me that dance and movement studies train a mode of attention that institutional science hasn’t learned to access. I think of my practice as an accountability project, an insistence that researchers should reckon with what they miss when they reduce the body to measurable outputs. Dance should be considered a mode of knowledge first and foremost, not simply as enrichment, but as a method.
I am not drawn to dance for its beauty alone, but because it keeps asking questions we cannot answer any other way.
Louis Sudler was a Chicago industrialist to whom the arts had been a major source of life satisfaction. In 1982, he endowed an annual prize in the arts at fourteen major universities: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Chicago, Michigan State, Oberlin College, Purdue University, Duke, Rice, and Stanford.
At each institution, an annual prize in the creative and performing arts is awarded to the graduating senior who has demonstrated the most distinguished record of excellence in performance or creation in one of the following areas: music, theater, painting, dance, design, film, creative writing, and other areas of the arts (as determined by each institution).
At Duke, each year the Office of Vice Provost for the Arts awards a cash prize of $2,000 to selected recipient. Students do not apply directly for the award but rather are nominated by arts department chairs, who are invited to make one nomination each.
Nik Narain has been selected for this award for his distinguished record of excellence in performance and creation in writing for stage/screen and comedy performance.
Emi Hegarty is the winner of the 2024 Louis Sudler Prize, given every year to the graduating senior who has demonstrated the most distinguished record of excellence in performance or creation in the arts.
Nathaniel Maxwell is the winner of the 2023 Louis Sudler Prize, given every year to the graduating senior who has demonstrated the most distinguished record of excellence in performance or creation in the arts.
The Duke Dance Program featured Michela Arietti in a graduating student interview. Reflecting on her time at Duke, she shares insights on the experiences that shaped her work and the lessons she hopes to carry forward. Read the interview →.
Duke Students & Employees save more!