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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