Benenson Awards

Michelle Ling ’25: Maunakea and TMT

I received funding towards my honors thesis project, titled Maunakea and TMT: The Meeting Point of Scientific Exploration, Tourism, & U.S. Imperialism, that I am completing as part of my Program II (Environmental Humanities & Multimedia).

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Matthew Nuzzolo ’27: Jewelry Design Development

Utilizing the funding I received from my Benenson Award in the Arts, I enrolled in a jewelry design and gemstone analysis class, Jewelry Essentials, at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to complete my Applied Jewelry Professional degree.

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Cate Knothe ’24: Project Eubigheim

Our goal is to create a film that both reopens discussion about this family history once thought lost to time and to also bring the footage into conversation with the present identity of Eubigheim and the global context.

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Ruby Wang ’24: Chinatowns, Distorted

I received funding to extend my visual arts spring capstone project from a reinterpretation of Asian American Theater into a more comprehensive art book project about Chinatown and motifs of “China” in America.

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Lilian Fan ’26: NC Noise and Sounds

I spent this summer exploring the soundscape of North Carolina. While I was living in Durham and recording music with my friends, I became interested in how noise, low-fidelity recordings, and “imperfections” can be used to create interesting music rather than hindering its quality.

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Emma Ren ’27: AEF + VIMA

This summer, I was fortunate to participate in two programs that expanded both my musical and language skills: the American European Federation (AEF) and the Vienna International Music Academy (VIMA).

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Maria Zurita Ontiveros ’21: Dreaming

In a world where comic book characters live side by side with real people, Malachi Washington works to free comics cast in prejudice bodies while Bob McCay seeks to revive his father's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. What follows is a compelling story of reckoning, healing, and examining the racist legacy of comics and animation, told through various forms of puppetry.

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Sophia Li ’21: The Transfer Station

The Transfer Station is a documentary photography project that examines what our waste says about who we are as people today. As our society’s waste gets continuously transferred, The Transfer Station addresses the question: where will it all eventually go? What will become of our discarded, once-valuable possessions—and of us?

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Arlene Arevalo ’21 & Lillian Clark ’22: Revelations

“Revelations” is an audio memoir/personal narrative about leaving a cult, losing family and living with their memory. It chronicles Arlene’s effort to learn about her estranged parents outside the Jehovah’s Witness framework, without actually talking to them.

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Anya Dombrovskaya ’21: Usya

“Usya” is a short film project centering on my great-grandmother’s reflections on home and motherhood as she remembers fleeing her native city in the south of Russia and having children in the wake of the Second World War.

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Robert Meese ‘20: Summer Musical Immersion

My pre-pandemic plans involved performing orchestral and wind music in the United States and Austria at several summer festivals. Instead, I spent the summer studying orchestral scores and preparing for my first semester as a graduate student in Conducting.

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Sarah Derris ‘21: false chronology

"false chronology" is an extension of my film by the same name. It is an exploration of the lingering French colonial consciousness in Algeria and the fading traditions of the Algerian Amazigh people, specifically the custom of facial tattoos.

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Valerie Muensterman ‘20: Writing the One-Actor Play

I wrote a full-length play titled God's Last Name, a piece written for one actor and a series of recorded voices. The play tells the story of Huck and Amy, two sisters who find themselves driving a mysterious (and possibly dangerous?) hitchhiker to St. Louis.

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Anthony Cardellini ‘21: New York State Summer Writers Institute

Originally, I was hoping to attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College for a fiction writing workshop. Due to COVID-19, I ended up attending Strikethrough Workshop, a virtual creative writing workshop at the University of Houston, and learned from Gulf Coast Journal fiction editor Obi Umeozor.

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Daniel Kim ‘21: “The Hollywood Asian” Screenplay

My project is a screenplay that follows Philip Ahn, the first Korean-American movie star, as he rises to stardom while pandering to Hollywood discrimination. This year, I will continue to refine the project through the Studio Duke program in conjunction with UTA literary partner Julien Thuan.

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Sujal Manohar ‘20: Collaborative Mural for Pediatric Clinic

I designed and executed a collaborative mural project at PediPlace, a nonprofit pediatric clinic in Lewisville, Texas. The 5’ x 10’ artwork encourages healthy lifestyles as patients add a leaf to the tree with their initials and pounds lost, marking their achievement and motivating others to stay fit.

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Samantha Steger ‘20: Acting for Film

I spent the summer studying with the New York Film Academy in Paris, France. There, I got the chance to spend five days a week learning on-camera acting technique. After class and on weekends I acted in students' films, all in the place where cinema was born.

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Lara Breitkreutz ‘20: Reconsidering the Oyster

I am exploring a changing human relationship to the ocean as resource in the midst of an anthropogenically altered coastal landscape and future. I focus on the oyster, an organism experiencing reconsideration in North Carolina's coastal communities for its potential ecological and economic significance.

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Janie Booth, ‘19: Peggy Guggenheim Collection Internship

Support from the Benenson Award for the Arts enabled me to travel to Venice, Italy and learn about museum work from one of the most highly regarded collections of modern art in the world. I gained invaluable experience in museum education and programming as well as collections management and curation.

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Gabriel Guedes, ‘19: Related By Blood

I completed a 15-minute film that uses the relationships between my extended family and the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 to consider the ways ideology is passed down through the family.

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