Students, alumni earn prestigious awards to travel around the globe

For just the second time, a Connecticut College student has been awarded a prestigious Mortimer Hayes-Brandeis Traveling Fellowship Award, which provides travel and living expenses outside of the United States for students in art history, studio art and photography.

Juan Flores ’16 will travel to Mexico to study the eccentric, experimental electronic music scene, analyzing how local and indigenous sounds fit into a contemporary context. His research will bring together digital sound, video installations, painting and printmaking.

The project, “Looking for Mexican Techno-Culture Through the Country’s Eccentric Electronic and Experimental Sound Scene,” is an extension of Flores’ senior project in the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology (photo above) and his studio art practice. For his work, Flores received the Art Department’s First Prize.

Flores was one of only three recipients of the $19,000 fellowship, which is open to students at just 10 colleges and universities, including Yale, Harvard and Columbia.

In recent months, several other students and alumni have won awards that will take them around the world to continue within their field of study:

First-year student earns Critical Language Scholarship

Brandy Darling ’19 was awarded a prestigious Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department.

Darling will travel to Dalian, China, this summer to pursue Mandarin language skills. She will live with a host family for 8-10 weeks, and her trip will include classes in Mandarin, excursions and immersion in local culture.

A Posse Scholar who plans to major in economics and East Asian Studies, Darling began studying Mandarin in high school in Chicago. Through the College’s Office of Volunteers for Community Service, she has worked as a tutor for a local Chinese-speaking elementary school student, and has worked with students at New London’s Regional Multicultural Magnet School on their foreign language skills.

Six awarded U.S. Fulbright grants

Five recent graduates and one alumnus have received U.S. Fulbright Student Program grants to teach English abroad. The College has now produced 33 Fulbright winners in the last five years.

The recipients are: Kevin Ith ’14, who will travel to Azerbaijan; Kaitlin Cunningham ’16, who will travel to Georgia; Jessica Durning ’16, who travel to Thailand; Taryn Kitchen ’16, who will travel to Mexico; Stephanie Reeves ’16, who will travel to Russia; and Leela Riesz ’16, who will travel to Spain.

Riesz was also the first ever recipient of the Claire Gaudiani ’66 Prize for Excellence in the Senior Integrative Project for her honors thesis in the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts. Riesz completed an internship in Spain, and her work there served as the topic of her thesis, which focused on the intersection of food and the migrant Muslim experience in southern Spain.



June 7, 2016