CFA Fund Awards 12 Faculty Grants

The College of Fine Arts awarded $55,000 in grants through its Fund for Research & Creativity (FRC) to faculty in all five schools, making this the best year to date for grant recipients. In total, 20 applicants vied for the awards; a jury selected 12 from that pool.

“This was our best year yet in terms of applicants and total fund distribution,” said Molly Wright Steenson, who oversees the FRC and serves as senior associate dean for research in CFA.

“Benefitting our faculty benefits our students. We make this a more vibrant Carnegie Mellon by making it easier for our students to engage in what our faculty do in the areas of research and creative practice,” said Steenson, who also is an associate professor in the School of Design and is the K&L Gates associate professor in Ethics and Computational Technologies.

This year’s award recipients are: Dana Cupkova; Daniel Cardoso Llach; Laura Garofolo; Francesca Torello; Johannes DeYoung; Katie Hubbard; Jongwoo Kim; Mark Baskinger; Mindy Eshelman; Megan Monaghan Rivas; Tome Cousin; and Freida Abtan.

Full descriptions of their associated research projects are available.

The FRC was created in 2016 to help further research and creative practice efforts of CFA faculty members. A member of each school within CFA populates the jury that awards annual grants; each member serves two years. The FRC provides either full or partial funding of faculty research, which helps to bridge a gap left by decreased funding to the arts, Steenson said.

“We help to provide some much-needed funding to ideas that may just need to get off the ground before reaching their full potential and benefits,” she said. “It’s nice to do good for people who deserve it.”

Azadeh Sawyer, a School of Architecture faculty member, was a deserving recipient in 2020. Her project focused on creating bird-friendly patterns that could be printed on glass to reduce bird collisions. More than one billion birds die every year, she said, and a major reason for this is the built environment. Early research on collision-preventing patterns examined size and spacing of repeating parallel lines and dots of varying width and diameter. However, 10-15 years later, pattern creation has not advanced much beyond stripes and dots.

“With the help of FRC, I was able to work with my students to develop complex patterns that go beyond the common dots and stripes,” she said. “Additionally, because of our research, I was asked by the American Bird Conservancy to collaborate with them on creating a book of patterns that they would like to make available to a wider audience.

The FRC grant actually served a dual purpose, she said, in that the grant funded an initial study that was successfully completed and, as such, it will be easier for her to apply for larger grants as a result.

“I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do the research I did without the help of the FRC award,” she said. “I found FRC very easy to apply to, and I would definitely encourage all my colleagues to apply for it.”

The School of Drama’s Nica Ross also received a 2020 FRC award, which helped them to finish their virtual reality project, “Permanent Visibility.” They said after initial critical funding from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier, the FRC truly extended the reach of the project.

“The technology that I used to capture the performers is completely new and originally developed at CMU as a PhD research project and required quite a lot of experimentation and research to manage the data,” Ross said. “The FRC saved the day with finishing funds that allowed me to hire a skilled programmer and composer. The result is a virtual reality-based essay that celebrates the failure of surveillance and nonhuman vision when applied to the human form. A clip can be found at my website.”

Ross appreciates that the FRC provides an annual benefit to faculty who are seeking funding, and the team behind the fund was especially helpful, they said.

“I feel very well-supported and encouraged by the CFA Research & Creative Practice Team,” Ross said. “They pointed me towards the FRC award, which I did not qualify for when I began the project because I was a staff member at the time. Moving into a faculty position really opened up the possibilities of support at CMU for my research and creative practice, and I am grateful to the CFA's investment in my work.”

Ross agrees with Steenson when it comes to the ultimate benefits for students as a result of faculty research and creative practice projects. “Supporting Faculty research is so crucial to our ability to continue expanding possibilities for the students we work with. I am very intentional about continuing a practice of being a forever student. And the investment that the FRC makes in my research pursuits is critical to my practice as an educator and as a maker.”