Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 2019-20 Programming Grant Awardees

Columbia faculty and staff members awarded grants from Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is pleased to announce 2019-20 programing grants. This support is offered to faculty and Academic Affairs staff who wish to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion through programming events aligned with our DEI mission and available to the greater CCC community. Congratulations to all of the awardees. 

2019 - 2020 Awardees

Joan Giroux

Funds will go towards a Wikipedia edit-a-thon hosted by the Black Lunch Table. Their initiative creates and improves articles about Black visual artists. Celebrating artists of color, women artists, and artists with disabilities, this program supports inclusion and recognition of intersectionality.

Brent Kado

Funds will support The Chicago Comedy Film Festival, sponsored by Columbia College Cinema and Television Department, presenting a panel of films and guest speakers around the topic of LGBTQ voices and conversations in the comedy film industry. The program will serve the LGBTQ film and comedy community within both the Columbia College student body, alumni and the public.

Ellen Chenoweth

Funds will go towards The Dance Presenting Series, presenting new work from Nigerian artist Qudus Onikeku. Spirit Child the stage work premiered in Germany last summer, and will have its U.S. premiere at Columbia College Chicago. Building upon the work that Qudus did as Practitioner-in-Residence in the Dance Department, there will be a number of residency activities to engage the campus communities.

Karen Irvine

Funds will support The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College (MoCP), host a public lecture and student workshop by artist Edra Soto (Puerto Rico b. 1971) in conjunction with an installation of her work in an upcoming exhibition, Temporale. Organized by Danlina Perdomo Alvarez, Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Arts, Temporale will be presented at the MoCP from April 2- July 3, 2020.

Youngbin Song

Funds will support a campus-wide talk by Dr. Theresa Geller, calling into question the power endowed in the figure of the auteur and its presumptive maleness, reproduced in hiring practices and criticism alike. 

Michelle Yates

Funds will go to bring Dr. Marguerite Wilson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Binghamton University, for a public talk on Thursday March 5, 2020. Titled “Developing Anti-racist Activists through a Critical Whiteness Theory Lens,” Dr. Wilson will present her qualitative action research study on Witnessing Whiteness workshops in which she examines the motivations of white people to work toward racial justice.

Yonty Friesem

Funds will support a Civic Media workshop series featuring faculty and guest facilitators from Chicago starting January 2020. The series encompasses ten workshops, twice a month for the spring semester 2020. The civic media workshop series aim to bring along our students, practitioners, and community organizers from Chicago in order to be part of a growing discussion about civic media.

Lauren Downing Peters

Funds will support bringing the Beading Against Assimilation Workshop and Dr. Jessica Metcalfe to Columbia College Chicago in the Spring of 2020. Both the workshop and Dr. Metcalfe’s open lecture aim to advance the discourse around cultural appropriation at Columbia and to create a space for cultural reconciliation between the urban native community and students, staff and faculty.

Onur Ozturk

The grant will help launch the Islamic Arts Initiative (IAI) at Columbia College Chicago. The main goal of this initiative is to introduce scholars and creatives whose work focuses on historic and contemporary practices of Islamic arts, to the Columbia community.