Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, Adama Delphine Fawundu ’18 has been awarded one of three CatchLight Fellowships. Established in 2017, these fellowships seek to foster an international community of visual artists who are committed to expanding the social footprint of multimedia storytelling.
Alongside a $30,000 grant awarded for the development of “long-form storytelling projects,” fellows are encouraged to expand the reaches of their work beyond institutional walls.
By working across notions of history and historicity to offer viewers the opportunity to “build their own stories, use them as historical context, or dive deeper into literacy, from writing to thinking to reading,” Fawundu’s photographs extend “an invitation to dive into the past, understand the present, and envision the future,” CatchLight explains.
This focus on building, using, and reimagining will anchor the pedagogical component of Fawundu’s residency and her year-long solo exhibition, which will include “hands-on workshops for early-career artists and create an open-source curriculum for educators,” the press release notes.
Set to begin her residency this year, Fawundu is the first Columbia University artist to join the CatchLight Fellowship community. She will be producing a publication series as part of her fellowship.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist of Mende, Krim, Bamileke and Bubi descent. Her distinct visual language, centered around themes of indigenization and ancestral memory, enriches and expands the photographic canon. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She lives and works in New York.
