The Council for the Arts at MIT provides funding for arts projects with a special interest in supporting projects that engage the MIT community. The Council’s Grants Committee considers proposals for projects in the fall and spring semesters. Applications for Undergraduate Mini-Grants are accepted on a rolling basis at any time.
Spring 2021 Grants Committee Funding Recipients
City Science Group – Kent Larson, Gabriela Bílá Advincula, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, and colleagues, With(In), to support an immersive documentary installation at the Venice Biennale focusing on the stories of three women living in Guadalajara, Mexico; Cairo, Egypt; and Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Guangqi Cui, ’21, First-Year Arts Program, to fund materials costs for a pre-orientation program that introduces incoming first years to the multitude of artistic opportunities available at MIT.
Sofia Gulaid, Mandela, Massachusetts, Design Futures for a Proposed City, an interactive public art project that engages the community in speculative design of Mandela, inspired by proposals in the 1980s for a city comprising majority-Black neighborhoods in the Boston area.
Ayşe Güvenilir, Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air, covering editing, designing, and publishing costs for a collection of poetry by Muslim women students and alumnae of MIT.
iFootprint, Zoey Zhu & Sheng-Hung Lee, MAKE TO:GATHER, to support the expansion of an initiative that aims to foster remote collaboration and co-creation through a series of art and design workshops.
Infinite Magazine, Infinite Issue 8, for production and printing costs for a new issue of Infinite Magazine focusing on the theme of “light.”
Eliyahu Keller, Cinema and Architectural Imagination Film Series, to support screening rights for two films in a series that brings together MIT students and faculty to explore the intersections of film, architecture, and imagination.
Jennifer Kenyon, Synergy II, to support production costs for a collaborative project that fosters co-creation by ocean scientists at the MIT Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute paired with artists from the Art League of Rhode Island.
Daniel Landez, ’21, Brownface, for development and production of a multi-media theatrical performance exploring multicultural identity and the politics of contemporary American culture.
Aarón Montoya-Moraga, Tiny Trainable Instruments, to fund materials for a series of workshops in English and Spanish for artists and beginners about how to use machine learning and microcontrollers for building instruments that react to color, gesture, and speech.
Anjali Nambrath, ’21, Wuthering/Hurlevents, to launch a staged reading with a professional cast of Nambrath’s translation into English of a play written by celebrated French Canadian playwright Fanny Britt.
Karsten Schuhl, superpose, to support an interactive installation that creates visualizations of sound waves and acoustic spaces through movement of water.
Carolyn Tam, Form Follows Time, for materials to develop a series of prototypes exploring artistic sculptures made of Finite, a new material developed by Tam and colleagues, which is as strong as concrete but can be melted down and reused for multiple cycles.
Amanda Ugorji, Soft City: Texture Mapping Black Boston, to support the creation of large-scale textiles that represent historically Black neighborhoods in the Boston area.
Wuming Theater Club, Angels in America, to support an online Chinese-language production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.”
Zhicheng Xu & Mengqi Moon He, Lodgers: Serendipity in the Wilderness, to fund materials for a workshop for MIT students about environmentally-conscious design, and installation costs for an exhibition of prototypes and documentation of the design process.
Laura Zittrain & Alexis Hope, At the Margins: An Interactive, Online Exhibit from a Feminist Future, to fund fees and materials for an only summer arts festival for MIT undergrads focused on social justice, collaboration, and activism.