Fulbright U.S. Student Program
SAIC was the top producer of Fulbright U.S. Students in its category for the 2020–2021 year, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.
About the Fulbright Program
U.S. student Fulbright fellowships are awarded by the U.S. Department of State for one year of study or research abroad for U.S. citizens. Seniors, graduate students, and alums are eligible to apply. The application process begins in May. Applications are due in September.
Congratulations to Our Current SAIC Fulbright Grantees:
Zoe Butler, BFA in Film Video New Media, 2021
Host Country: Trinidad & Tobago
Project Title: Conversations & Constellations
Caribbean folktales whisper of extraordinary characters and warn us about corrupt entities hidden within our day-to-day environments. In Trinidad and Tobago, the lore details narratives that are vibrant, devastating, and alive. Conversations and Constellations is a body of creative research that engages with local folktales and the histories from which they emerged to encourage the continued exchange and mutuality of oral storytelling.
Bio
Zoe Butler is a New Media Performance Artist who uses abstraction to explore the relationship between material culture and embodiment. Butler’s recent work engages archives to investigate slavery’s haunting through moving images and to emphasize the resilience of counter-historical artifacts. Her work often discusses how power sculpts our visual and lived realities through mediums ranging from computer-animated films to wearable technology-assisted performances. Her work has been performed and screened with institutions such as The National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Gene Siskel Film Center, and Ars Electronica.
Clara Emery, MFA in Photography, 2023
Host Country: Taiwan
Project Title: Gods, Landscape, and Memory: Investigating Sites From Taiwanese Taoist Lore
Across Taiwan, there are many places that are tied to local religious lore. My project investigates sites that are linked to stories about the origins of local gods, miracles performed in Taoist communities, and traumatic events that are believed to have attracted ghosts. Using a large format camera and other documentation methods, I will create a visual record of these sites, and tell the stories of the communities connected with them.
Bio
Clara Emery (b. 1997; Seattle, WA) uses large format photography and experimental film to capture fragments along the continuum of visible and invisible realms. Drawing from tales inherited from the Gila Wilderness, and traditions adopted in childhood from the Pacific Northwest and Taiwan, she weaves together history, memory, and superstition. Emery graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2019 with a degree in Photography, and received her MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023.
Rosalyn Farney, BFA in Printmaking & Animation, 2021
Host Country: Germany
Project Title: Visionary Abstraction in Germany: Stop-Motion Animation and Transformative Archive
My Fulbright project embraces interdisciplinary approaches to museums; it will explore archives, gender studies, and moving images. As the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is housed in an internationally recognized museum, my animation practice emerged within the context of utilizing collections for art-making. When investigating similarities of my work to the museum, I realized that animations and archives both transcribe life, time, and change. I will conduct creative archival research in Berlin, Germany while producing stop-motion animation, with the ambition of giving materials a sense of lasting life and significance.
Bio
Rosalyn Farney (she/they) is an artist from San Antonio, Texas. Rosalyn studied at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, San Antonio’s Southwest School of Art, and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rosalyn aims to develop stop-motion animation techniques and pursue a career in collection management with an emphasis on gender studies. Inspired by collaboration, she appreciates the potential for artwork to build community and set the stage for radical movements.
Elisabeth Heying, BFA in Painting, 2022
Host Country: Cyprus
Project Title: Throughlines in the Cypriot Landscape: Pigments and the Essence of Place
The project will examine the natural earth pigments of Cyprus in relation to the histories embedded in the landscape. In affiliation with Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institution (CAARI), the Museum Lab of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) and CYENS Centre of Excellence, I will research the abandoned mines and revered archaeological sites on the island while collecting and processing local earth colors. The project will culminate in an archive of Cypriot pigments and a body of paintings presented in a gallery exhibition.
Bio
Elisabeth is a painter, researcher and educator. Her work explores place, landscape, material and surface as records of and containers for human experience. Born and raised in Minnesota, Elisabeth received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2022, and her BFA in 2015. She was the founding director of a state of the art facility called StudioLab, where she educated students on how to make and use traditional and modern painting and drawing materials from 2016 to 2022. Heying serves as a Board Member of Pigments Revealed International, and has been a member of the ASTM Artists’ Materials Subcommittee as well as a Golden Artist Educator since 2017. She received the Rhodes Scholarship for Research and Travel in 2020, has exhibited widely in group exhibitions throughout Chicago and the Midwest, and debuted her first two solo exhibitions, Ache of Erosion, and Shifting Matters, in 2021 and 2022. Elisabeth spent the past year archiving local earth pigments and creating a body of paintings in Santiago, Chile, and is preparing to move to Cyprus on a Fulbright grant to realize her project investigating earth pigments as throughlines in the Cypriot landscape.
Hannah Ivanov, BFA in Painting, 2023
Host Country: Bulgaria
Project Title: Non-Conformist Modes in Bulgarian Painting from 1960 to 1990
The project aims to create a catalog, alongside a series of paintings by the artist, that documents the work of painters from the Burgas School. It is a project to understand what held back this work from being shown outside of merely the political context of abstraction’s consequences under a socialist regime invested in classical realism and propagandistic aims. Had these painters been recognized, and if they were known today, they could have changed the trajectory of contemporary Bulgarian painting and propelled the country onto an international stage.
Bio
Hannah Michelle Ivanov is an artist with a practice focused in painting, drawing, and writing. She explores the post-modern relationships between self and location, language and the border of comprehension. The ambiguity she works between arises from the fluidity of living as one caught between two cultures, that of her Bulgarian heritage and attempted American upbringing. In the end, she is just trying to understand.
Catie Rutledge, MFA in Performance, 2018
Host Country: Germany
Project Title: Pleasure and Pain in Community: Performing Queer Archives in Berlin
My Fulbright project utilizes archival research, community dinners and first-person interviews as source material for a collaborative performance and publication on the ways in which Berlin’s queer BDSM community works through personal and collective trauma. I will be conducting research in the Schwules museum archives and Spinnbodenn Lesbenarchiv, and working with Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin to produce the performance and publication.
Bio
Catie Rutledge (b. 1992, Alexandria, VA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. She uses performance, video, painting, and installation to combine personal confession with pop performative tropes, creating a space where discourse about shame, loss, and obsession can exist. She received a BFA with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2015) and
an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), and has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, including at Grace Exhibition Space (NYC), RUSCHMAN (Chicago) and Project Pangée (Montreal).