Juliette Carbonnier and Collin Riggins, members of the Class of 2024, are the latest recipients of the Martin A. Dale ’53 Scholarship, which funds year-long independent projects for members of each senior class during the year following l obtaining their diploma. The two students began their work this summer.

The Dale Scholarship, established by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin Dale, offers a $40,000 grant to devote a year to “an independent project of extraordinary value that will broaden the recipient’s experience of the world and significantly enhance his or her personal growth and intellectual development.

Ten Princeton sophomores also received a $7,000 Dale Summer Award stipend for small projects they completed over the summer. The 2024 Dale Summer Award recipients are: Ozzie Bayazitoglu, Danielle Bejerano, Laurie Drayton, Oyu Enkhbold, Zehma Herring, Nandini Krishnan, Ammon Love, Simon Marotte, Joe McCauley and Dane Utley.

Juliette Carbonnier

Carbonnier graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in English and certificates in creative writing, musical theater and acting. She is a writer, performer, musician and designer whose Princeton credits include theater productions at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Theater Intime and the Princeton Triangle Club.

For her Dale project, she is writing a solo piece with music inspired by the legacy of her ancestors, some of whom were progressive Yiddish performers, actors and composers, while others were Holocaust survivors.

His piece “will explore the dissonances between art and trauma, comedy and tragedy, memory and reality, honoring the past while being faithful to the present,” Carbonnier said.

She will draw on the tropes and traditions of Yiddish theater – including comedic plays and songs written by her family members – and hopes to unravel the stories of her family’s past “to understand what it means to yearn for a place that no longer exists and how can we instead find its place in history and song,” she declared.

“Our world is wracked with anger, grief and suffering. It is the privilege, the honor and the challenge of artists to provide space to grieve, empathize, celebrate, create community and share the hope that we can all walk slowly, but surely towards a world best,” Carbonnier wrote in his application essay for Dale.

In her letter of recommendation for the award, Stacy Wolf, professor of theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts and American Studies, called Carbonnier’s project “a perfect expansion and extension of her time at Princeton, as a student, an artist and no one.” .”

“It connects his family history to the history of Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. This connects pathos and humor – a definite marker of Juliette’s writing style,” Wolf wrote.

Carbonnier is currently traveling throughout Central and Eastern Europe for research. She will then examine and translate family documents and musical scores from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. She learned Yiddish through Workers Circle, a nonprofit social activist and Yiddish cultural organization.

For her English thesis at Princeton, Carbonnier wrote, co-produced, co-designed and starred in “Bodywork,” a dark comedy about a young woman suffering from chronic pain who becomes eligible for a new body-swap operation. She also wrote a collection of poetry, “Funeral Theatrics,” as part of the creative writing program.

While at Princeton, she served as artistic director of Quipfire! Improv Comedy, resident artist at the Nassau Literary Review and writer for the Princeton Triangle Club and All-Nighter.

Carbonnier has received several honors from the Department of English, most recently the 2024 Alan S. Downer Award. She also won this year’s Francis LeMoyne Page Theater Award from the Lewis Center and was recognized by the center for her outstanding work during of his first, second, junior and senior.

Colin Riggins

Riggins graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in African American studies and a certificate in visual arts. A film photographer and conceptual artist, he has also served as a media and communications assistant for the Department of African American Studies, an undergraduate course assistant for guest speaker Majora Carter’s “The Reclamation Studio,” and co-host of the AAS podcast .

For his Dale project, “Cotton Stains,” Riggins produced a collection of black-and-white analog photographs of black cotton farmers. He is also working to develop a public art studio in Garysburg, North Carolina to support creatives in the area.

In his Dale Prize nomination essay, Riggins described his first connection in 2022 with Julius Tillery, a fifth-generation cotton farmer and founder of BlackCotton – a connection that would later serve as the backbone of his dissertation.

After making numerous trips to Garysburg, where Tillery is based, Riggins invited his great-grandmother, who grew up sharecropping in the area, to visit those same fields. Riggins said his positive and emotional response was a testament to how these communities “were the first to establish empowering relationships with cotton that fundamentally complicate the way the plant – and agriculture – is often understood in our collective memory.

“I have witnessed the spiritual potential of challenging the painful memories that encourage our repression. This recovery of cotton and its memory is precisely what I aim to accomplish as a Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellow,” Riggins wrote in his Dale application essay.

By showing these underrepresented realities in and around North Carolina, and addressing their many complexities, Riggins aims to “celebrate cotton farming through the camera,” he writes.

In her letter of recommendation for the award, Autumn Womack, associate professor of African American studies and English, praised Riggins’ proposal as an evolution of her multiyear research on the relationship between African Americans and cotton.

“When Collin describes Cotton Stain as a visual monograph that intervenes in the historical narratives of race and cotton by ‘resisting cotton’s dominant capitulations to hunt its memory in all its depth,’ I hear him describing the work of creating ‘a counter-archive. » said Womack. “Collin always views artists, creators, and community members as theorists of their own lives and futures.”

Riggins said the Garysburg studio would create arts infrastructure in the greater Northampton County area by providing young artists with creative programs and opportunities.

On campus, Riggins has served on the undergraduate advisory board of the Department of African American Studies, as a research associate at the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, and as a residential college advisor at Forbes College . He also co-founded the Black Arts Collective with Class of 2023 graduate Omar Jason Farah in 2022.

Riggins has exhibited at numerous campus, non-profit and professional art galleries, most recently becoming the first artist in residence with Art on the Block NYC in Harlem. He will present the photographs from “Cotton Stains” at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts in Brooklyn in spring 2025 as part of a joint exhibition “Blue prints, cotton spots” with Class of 2024 graduate Max Diallo Jakobsen.

Among her other honors, Riggins won the 2022 University Center for Human Values ​​Short Film Prize and the 2024 Ruth J. Simmons African American Studies Dissertation Prize.