Fellowships History

2023

An Undo-sical

If the musical is “a play or movie in which singing and dancing play an essential part,” then writer/theater-maker Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, University of Chicago scholar David Levin, and musician/writer/producer Erin McKeown are making an ‘undo-sical,’ where song and dance don't play a conventional role. Through a series of workshops with Chicago-based musicians, sound-makers, and actors starting in Fall 2022, complemented by a student seminar, The Undo-sical Project unsettles, recomposes and experiments with a musical experience of/with/against a script written by one of the collaborators.

Dance as History

Tara Zahra, Homer J. Livingston Professor of History, and professional dancer and dance educator Meredith Dincolo develop new forms of embodied historical and artistic practice, including new methods for historical research and for representing and transmitting history, as well as new choreographic vocabularies for conveying narrative and storytelling.

Experimental Cinema and Speculative Approaches to the Archive and Media Histories

In Fall 2022, filmmaker Christopher Harris and University of Chicago scholar Allyson Nadia Field begin a collaborative and creative engagement with issues of film materiality, loss, fragmentation, opacity, erasure, silencing, and survival within African American film and media history.

Radical Therapy

Radical Therapies is a research and experimental film project, bringing together an anthropologist (William Mazzarella), philosopher (Aaron Schuster) and artist (Imogen Stidworthy) to investigate questions of therapy today. In a context of global crises on many fronts—covid, climate, racism, energy, economy, Ukraine—this collaborative team sees a widespread preoccupation with trauma and healing.

The Useless Tool

There are two questions at the center of this collaborative fellowship between Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone: What might skateboarding offer to the pursuit of the humanities? What might the humanities offer skateboarding? Building off of each collaborator's respective expertise in movement, performance, narrative, and architecture, The Useless Tool will function as a platform to focus on and experiment with such core components of skateboarding as ethics, style, failure, destruction, and repurposing.

vanessa german: Inaugural Joyce Foundation Fellowship

The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry is proud to announce a long-term collaboration with self-taught citizen artist vanessa german in preparation for her first museum solo exhibition in Chicago at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Supported by the Gray Center’s inaugural grant from the Joyce Foundation, this two-part residency and exhibition project will unfold at a critical point in the artist’s career and bring together the conceptual manifestation of her visual art practice with german’s community activism.

Fellows

vanessa german

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2015

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2012

2011