Announcing Our 2024–2025 Graduate Arts Fellows
The Kenan Institute of Ethics has awarded 2024–2025 Graduate Arts Fellowships to Indigo Cook, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis; Sadé M Jones, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis; and Bren Vienrich-Felling, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Experimental & Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA).
Read more about our fellows and their project descriptions below.
Indigo Cook
Were/Where
Were/Where — every full moon, somewhere on campus… Drawing inspiration from both the avant-garde tradition of Happenings and popular concerts with secret locations, Were/Where is a new offering and a new proposition for the Duke community. We gather at a unique campus location each month on the full moon to discover ways to be, move, and play together.
Were/Where begins each full moon as a participatory performance art pop-up event that uses scores and invitations to realized actions for both the performers and anyone passing by. It closes as a site for community activation: a performance-turned-picnic that encourages connection and conversation (and snacks). The pairing of experimental performance practices with participatory audience engagement, and their ultimate synthesis and transformation into a social gathering, aims to open a space on Duke’s campus for both a rigorous curiosity and a sense of playfulness, sincere collective intention and absurd performative action, unexpected relationships and deepened connectivity.
Sadé M Jones
It’s A Vibe!
It’s A Vibe! workshop series is an immersive practice that aims to engage the participants through the act of social interpenetration and interdependence. The invitation is to be present with the internal process of excavation while being in conversation with others who are doing the same without losing one’s ‘self’ or compromising the integrity of the ‘collective’. By practicing the vibratory oscillation between internal and external environments, the skill of recognizing and operating in universality and nuance within group and inter-group contexts may be achieved.
The series will include two workshops pairing the core elements of musicality across the African Diaspora with elements of movement dynamics to trouble the position of dance and music within the Western lens. Sadé’s aim is to offer a different base of knowing with which to engage in the conversation of arts in relation to culture and society.
Bren Vienrich-Felling
In Her Hands:
Women Cultivating North Carolina’s Land
What does it mean to be a woman working in agriculture? In Her Hands: Women Cultivating North Carolina’s Land explores this question through the documentation of the harvest and people of four farms where conscientious farming practices and intentional investments in education are shaping the future of farming.
Through experimental imaging and documentary photography, Bren Vienrich-Felling invites viewers to consider how conceptions of gender influence access and acceptance of roles within agriculture. Felling explores these women’s experiences in farming from the lens of a farmer’s daughter; the project responds to the obstacles and resistance Felling witnessed her mother and aunt overcome as they moved into the role of managing the family’s cattle ranch in the Amazon of Peru. Now documenting woman farmers in her adopted homeland of North Carolina, Felling reflects on the strength, resilience, and adaptability of those who, rising above stereotypes and preconceived notions, embrace the ways they are particularly fit to sustain, educate and nourish their families and surrounding communities through their farms.