Center for Human Rights and the Arts Announces 2022-23 Residential Fellowship Recipients

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) has appointed Sabine El Chamaa and Lara Fresko Madra as its 2022–23 resident research and teaching fellows. This year’s applicant pool was competitive and diverse, featuring over fifty candidates from sixteen countries, demonstrating the richness of the contemporary landscape of research on and practice in human rights and the arts. 
 
The goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding engagement in human rights and the arts by scholars, artists, and activists. Fellows are appointed for a one-year period to pursue their own research, contribute to the curriculum of the MA program in Human Rights and the Arts, and actively participate in the public life of CHRA.

“Sabine and Lara are talented young researchers with daring intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices. They will explore with our students a range of investigative and documentary strategies, theoretical frameworks, and case studies that will bring the frontlines of the struggle for rights into our classrooms,” said MA program director, Ziad M. Abu-Rish. “They are an essential part of our MA teaching team, intersecting with yet expanding the theoretical, methodological, topical, and geographic repertoires that anchor our graduate coursework.” 

Lara Fresko Madra holds a PhD in Art History from Cornell University and has an interdisciplinary background with an MA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University and a BA in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University. Her research focuses on contemporary artistic practices that challenge official history and offer alternative ways of relating to the past. Her dissertation investigates the role of spectrality, speculative fiction, discursivity, photography, and the archive in the artistic practices of four female artists working in Turkey. Fresko's current research tackles the potentials of water as a formal metaphor and an elemental vessel to imagine non-linear and anti-hegemonic forms of historiography. She has worked as a researcher, curator, and writer.

Sabine El Chamaa is a filmmaker who holds a PhD in Communications, Media, and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MFA, Cinematic Arts in Film Production from University of Southern California.. From Lebanon, she has worked as an editor on independent film projects in Europe and the United States before moving back to Beirut. Her diverse projects include fiction and non-fiction films, multidisciplinary installations, photography and podcasts. El Chamaa's current interests center on the ongoing reconstruction of collective and personal memory in relation to one’s embodied experiences and personal archives such as photos, diaries, or dream recollections.

El Chamaa and Fresko will each design and teach two seminars over the course of the academic year, as well as organize and contribute to public programs that engage students, faculty, and staff across OSUN. CHRA researches, inspires, and extends the intersection of art and human rights. The fellows' presence across OSUN will further CHRA’s mission of supporting multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production on the intersection of human rights and the arts.

Learn more about the Residential Fellows and CHRA here.

Post Date: 07-18-2022