PAST FELLOWS

FALL 2019 FELLOW /
ERNST KAREL

contact: ernkar@sas.upenn.edu

Ernst Karel works with sound, including experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, electroacoustic music, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm [film/video]. His work focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary. His work has been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Arsenal, Berlin; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. Sound installations with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at the Gardner Museum in Boston, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Bienal. Video with multichannel sound collaborations include Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). He completed his PhD on the anthropology of sound in the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago, in 2003. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for vilms including The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan, and developed and taught a practice-based course in 'sonic ethnography.' Currently he is working through the archive of tape recordings from the so-called Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961, in collaboration with Veronika Kusumaryati.

 SPRING 2019 FELLOW /
AIMEE MEREDITH COX

   CONTACT: aimee.cox@yale.edu

Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Cox earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Vassar College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan) and co-editor of a special issue of Public: A Journal of Imagining America on art and knowledge production in the academy. Cox is also a former professional dancer. She danced on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured extensively with Ailey II. Her next ethnographic project, Living Past Slow Death, explores the creative protest strategies individuals and communities enact to reclaim Black life in the urban United States.

FALL 2018 FELLOW /
LOUIS MASSIAH

   CONTACT: lmassiah@scribe.org

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides training and equipment access to community groups and the independent film/video community. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” 1996-2001, two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in in Four Voices, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown, have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe and Africa. In 2011, he was commissioned to create a five channel permanent video installation for the National Park Service’s President’s House historic site. Currently, Massiah is executive producing two major community oral history projects, the Precious Places Community History project, a video project designed by Massiah and composed of 73 short documentaries produced collaboratively with neighborhood organizations in Philadelphia and Chester, PA, as well as Camden, NJ. He also is producing the Muslim Voices of Philadelphia community history project.