Previous MIller Arts Scholars Award Recipients

In this grant I am applying for a new guitar as well as funding for lessons over the summer/fall which will help me perform a professional recital and help make my career in music after school a reality.

I propose that I will spend the 2022-2023 school year creating and visually designing a romance TTRPG. I am particularly interested in Regency romances (e.g., Jane Austen and Netflix's Bridgerton) and will create my game under this theme. In my game, players will use character sheets of my design to create characters in Regency England's high-society.

This coming academic year I would like to apply for the 2021 Yale Summer Directing Intensive and then stage a student written work for the UVA community. After taking Directing I with Professor Dalton in Fall 2019, I found myself yearning to learn more about the craft. After having previous training in acting, directing was a new venture. Though I have choreographed in the past and helped produce showcases (collaborating with sound and light designers), working with actors and staging a scene was a whole new world.

I am asking for funding for continued vocal study with Pamela Beasley during the summer months, in addition to coordinating all aspects of a fourth-year recital in Spring 2022, which includes a space rental, accompanist fees, and other miscellaneous costs.

To enrich my fourth year studio art DMP thesis, which is in its embryonic stages, I am interested in utilizing Miller Art’s support to offset the costs associated with my practice and thesis exhibition next year. My thesis will result in a body of photographs, and I plan that they will serves as a study of obscure, bodily forms in the vein of postminimalist and feminist art. At the Miller Arts outcome report, I will provide a presentation that delineates how my research cultivated into a final body of photographs. I am requesting a Rising Fourth Year Award so that I can engage in a more liberated practice next year, one that will allow me to freely explore the parameters of my ideas without being restrained by the cost of materials.

I would like to professionally record my recital and release it as a live album. A recording technician and professional videographer would allow me to accomplish this by documenting the concert and then mixing and editing the recordings.

I look forward to expanding my acting training and involvement in short films as I will explain below. I have created the following detailed proposal for my Artistic Trifecta in which I hope to enrich my acting development. Essentially, I am centering my summer project around three training principles: professional feedback, self-inquiry and study with theory books, and immediate training application through involvement in a web series. I want each spoke of the trifecta to enrich the others as I work through each stage in parallel to nurture my acting development this summer. Seeing as this is my last summer still in college, this is the best time for me to tackle such a project.

For my fourth year award, I will return to my original artistic passion: theater. Stage performance was the primary reason why I applied for the Miller Arts Scholars program. Since my acceptance, I have explored other forms of art, but I always end up returning to the stage.

With summer break fast approaching, I have high hopes of spending my time focusing entirely on music. School, work, and other involvements often have me expending energy that would ideally be put toward writing, recording, and playing shows; I am often daydreaming of time devoted solely to creating. For my Miller Arts rising fourth year grant, I am proposing a summer with less of these obstacles and therefore with more time to write, record, tour, and collaborate with other artists.

For the rising 4th-year grant, I am proposing creating another book following my experiences in Italy, with photographs, journal entries, and sketches, etc. For my outcome presentation in April 2020, I will have a handmade book to display as well as prints to install.

Using a mix of film and digital cameras, I would like to conduct a series of environment-oriented film studies. This would involve travel to a variety of both rural and urban places. I am particularly interested in the ways that nature and technology come together, so would seek out spaces in which industrial and natural forces meet head on. The final products of this project would be two or three observational films, between six and ten minutes each.

I am proposing to create a film called “Juniper” with a rising Fourth-Year Award. “Juniper” will use visual and audio components, as well as dialogue, to create an exploration into a nonsensical word.

I am applying for a Miller Art Scholars Rising Fourth-Year Award to support my participation in Bel Canto in Tuscany, an intensive and immersive opera training program in Italy. This program, focused on advanced study in Italian vocal traditions, features a month of comprehensive vocal, musical, dramatic, and linguistic study.

This summer of 2017, I would like to pursue my performance- based career goals and continue developing both my skills as an individual and as part of an ensemble (a key part of being a performer). I hope to work with past and new teachers in an attempt to better understand and exercise my voice, all the meanwhile gaining valuable insight from the professionals at the programs.

For our joint Fourth Year Art Award, we will travel to Finland and Russia alongside our Printmaking professor, Dean Dass. We will travel from October 1st through October 11th to the Balkans to study the origins of printmaking as an art form. This exploration of art and culture will involve participation in the Graphica Creativa, the oldest international printmaking exhibition in the Nordic countries, in Jyväskylä, a university city 200 km north of Helsinki. Subsequently, we will take a bookmaking course with the graduate students at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Having researched the connections between leadership and dance, I would now like to shift my focus to exploring the role of movement in the policy process. Dance can contribute to both issue advocacy and policy implementation by directly involving community members in the process of bringing about social change. For this grant project, I would like to explore a trajectory that has already been set forward by several dance makers, community leaders, and social activists dating back to the 1930’s and 40’s in the US. I plan to conduct in-depth research on dance artists and companies who are using movement to advocate for social change. Specifically, I am interested in the work of Anna Halprin, Liz Lerman, Dance Exchange, Axis Dance, Paloma McGregor, and Jennifer Monson. With funding from a Miller Arts Scholar Award, I will develop an advocacy campaign for a social policy issue specific to the Charlottesville and UVa community. The year-long advocacy campaign will include two movement workshops with members of the community that will serve as fodder for the creation of a choreographic work as part of the dance program’s spring concert.

My proposed project is to craft and perform a devised, movement-based circus show with the advice of Associate Professor Marianne Kubik after taking classes this summer at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts. I specifically trust Professor Kubik’s guidance because of her extensive knowledge in movement direction and devised performance. Over the course of the next school year, I will rehearse and stage this show with the help of the Moonlight Circus Group in Charlottesville. Funds from this grant would go towards supporting classes, purchasing equipment for practice and performance, and towards supplies for making costume and set pieces.

The title of this proposed project comes from the 1986 videogame The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It is spoken by an unknown by an unnamed old man who gives the player their first wooden sword. Prompted by this phrase, by Norman Mailer, by Joseph Beuys, and by Captain America, I propose to make a series of wooden shields. Onto these shields I will collage paintings and prints. I will then carry whatever shield I am currently working on with me throughout my daily routine.