Film faculty Trey Ellis has been named to the 2012-2013 class of Alphonso Fletcher Sr. fellows by The Fletcher Foundation, a private charitable organization created to develop a more just society with more equal opportunities for more of the population. As a fellow, Ellis will receive a stipend of $50,000 for work which contributes to improving racial equality in American society; his fellowship project is Affirmative, a contemporary play about the conflict that erupts when the daughter of an African-American scholar of desegregation refuses to mark her race on her college applications.
The Fletcher Foundation's fellowship program was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education. Henry Louis Gates Jr.—chair of the fellowship program's selection committee, as well as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and director of the university's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research—says that the program is important because it "continues to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work on race relations post-Brown in a way that no other program matches."
Trey Ellis is a novelist, screenwriter and essayist, Assistant Professor in the Film Progam and has also taught at the Writing Program at the School of the Arts. He is joined in the 2012-2013 class of fellows by Jane Daily, an Associate Professor at University of Chicago, and Rucker Johnson, an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley.
