The School of Art’s annual awards honor the bold ideas, technical skill, and creative growth that define our community.
Each spring, the School of Art recognizes the outstanding work and vision of our students through the Art Awards. Selected by a faculty jury, these honors celebrate projects that exemplify conceptual depth, technical mastery, creative growth, and meaningful engagement with the world around us. Awards span every level of study, from First Year, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Awards, to specialized prizes like the Interdisciplinary Award, the Dara Birnbaum Award for new media practices, and the Marjory Glassburn Francis Award supporting professional development in painting, printmaking, graphic design, or sculpture.
Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!
Senior Awards
Luca Budofsky, Kate Myers, Nev Reich
Luca Budofsky
Junior Awards
Merlin Enriquez, Devin Gaichas, Fraser Kim, Noah Moskala
Merlin Enriquez
Sophomore Awards
Zahra El Ansary, Amanda Barajas, Noam Di Giulio, Joana Liu
Zahra El Ansary
First Year Awards
Antonia Casucci, Fin Smith, Henry Wang, Emma Zhao
Antonia Casucci
Marjory Glassburn Francis Awards
Jocelyn Harte (BFA ’26), Ava Połczyński (BFA ’26)
Jocelyn Harte
Dara Birnbaum Award
Aren Davey (BCSA ’26)
“This work is created with a pen plotter, a machine that can create precise drawings on paper. To control the pen plotter, I write Processing and Javascript code that generates vector images that is then processed into GCode by the plotter’s hardware. On some occasions, such as 02_Untitled and 04_Baubles, I created a script to write my own GCode because I needed to control the machine in a matter that could not be obtained by the plotter’s vector graphics to GCode pipeline. I find pen plotters to be lovely machines as they enable artists to bring digital artifacts into our physical realm.”
Aren Davey
Interdisciplinary Award
Bee Jackson (BCSA ’27)
For their interdisciplinary project, junior Bee Jackson is teaming up with River Sepinuck (BSME ’27) to construct a wooden table with an embedded ferrofluid display. “Since we want to limit our display to one moving entity, we will construct an XY Gantry (similar to a pen plotter) to move a permanent magnet beneath the display. This work will playfully combine the aesthetic novelty of ferrofluid displays with a functional object. The mineral-oil suspended ferrofluid will sit in a sealed segment between two layers of glass (likely with acrylic or glass on either side). The lower glass piece will be frosted so that the viewer can somewhat see the inner workings of the
system without distraction.”
Bee Jackson
C.G. Douglas “Wrong-Way” Corrigan Travel Fellowship
Yiying Wang (MFA ’28)
This summer, Yiying Wang will travel to Kunming, a city in southwest China, to conduct research and produce an experimental documentary about a community of amateur fossil hunters. “Their activities open up compelling questions about urban development, property ownership, and informal knowledge. I first encountered this community last year while joining their fossil-hunting trips. Returning to the site would allow me to deepen a line of inquiry I have already begun and develop it as part of my larger artistic practice, which engages urban transformation and layered histories embedded in place.”
About the School of Art Awards
The First Year, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Awards honor Samuel Rosenberg, who was a committed and passionate painter who continually reinvented himself. He is known for portraits in the 1920s, social protests in the 1930s, existential allegories in the 1940s, abstract expressionist works in the 1950s, and elemental light compositions throughout the 1960s. He reflected on the particularities of his own times over five decades, painting turbulent American expansion that included two world wars, the Holocaust, economic booms and superpower status. Throughout his artistic career, he created enduring works that speak just as poignantly to our own era.
The Marjory Glassburn Francis Award was established by Dr. David B. Francis in honor of his mother, Marjory Glassburn Francis, who was a 1934 art alumna. The award is to be given to a Senior woman “whose excellence in painting, printmaking, graphic design or sculpture merits recognition” and is to be used toward a project that will further the winner’s professional development.
The Interdisciplinary Award was established to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary research and creative projects.
The Dara Birnbaum Award honors Dara Birnbaum, who graduated from the School of Architecture in 1969 and is a renowned feminist artist whose work intersected at the cusp of media and technology. The Birnbaum Award was established by Patti Askwith Kenner (MM 1966) in Dara’s honor in 2017 and is presented annually to a graduating senior whose work exemplifies new artmaking.
The C.G. Douglas “Wrong Way” Award was established in 2008, when Courtney Dow and Leslie McAhren established the C.G. Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan Travel Fellowship in honor of the transatlantic pilot Doug Corrigan. This fellowship is an opportunity for students to pursue unique or otherwise unconventional travel projects. The self-directed scholar will embark on a journey over the course of this summer and will return in the fall with a presentation recounting his or her findings.