PRATT COMMUNITY RAKES IN THE HONORS

From an Oscar and an Emmy to a Jane Jacobs Award and Guggenheim Fellowship, the Institute and its students, faculty, and alumni were recognized for their achievements across disciplines this past year, garnering many awards, fellowships, and scholarships. Below are some highlights:

Institute

Pratt received its 2nd Second Nature Climate Leadership Award in the “Special Focus Institution” category. The award is presented to colleges that demonstrate unparalleled campus innovation and climate leadership that helps transition society to a clean, just, and sustainable future. This year, the Institute was recognized for its leadership role in creating the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation. Watch a video on the Incubator that was part of their Second Nature submission.

Collegiate Advertising Awards honored Pratt with the Bronze Certificate in the “Total Advertising Campaigns” category for its 125th Anniversary Campaign. The Collegiate Advertising Awards is an elite program designed to recognize today’s most talented educational marketing professionals for outstanding excellence in all forms of advertising, marketing, and promotion.

Faculty 

Ron Shiffman, professor, School of Architecture, and founder, Pratt Center for Community Development, was recognized with two national honors: the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership and the American Planning Association’s 2013 National Planning Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer. Shiffman received the Jane Jacobs Medal for his role in creating the model for community development corporations commonly used today and for his belief in the power of community-based groups.Ron Shiffman

Gia Wolff, professor, School of Architecture, won the inaugural 2013 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 traveling fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, her proposal to study the design of parade floats around the world, was selected from more than 200 proposals from 45 countries around the world.

Sarah Strauss, visiting associate professor, Interior Design Department, was chosen as the first place winner of the 2012 Innovative Interior Design Education Award. This award recognizes and celebrates innovative teaching and program-related practices that advance the cause of excellence in interior design education. Strauss’s entry, Tropical Interiors Studio, modeled experiential learning, blending classroom and studio techniques with immersion into place.

Eric Trenkamp, professor, Film/Video department, won the Best Director Award for his feature film American Bomber at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival (AoBFF) held on May 17. A panel of renowned filmmakers, directors, and actors selected the award. American Bomber, also written by Trenkamp, is about a patriotic American who is transformed into a would-be suicide bomber.

School of Information and Library Science (SILS) Associate Professor Cristina Pattuelli and SILS Assistant Professor Irene Lopatovska received the Carroll Preston Baber Research Grant from the American Library Association (ALA). The grant supports their project, E-reading in the Academy: Investigating Adoption and Use of E-books in Academic Libraries, conducted in collaboration with Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Barnard College, and Pratt Institute libraries.

Alumni

Shawn Christensen (B.F.A. Communications Design '97) won the “Short Film (Live Action)” Oscar for Curfew, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. He plays a depressed New Yorker whose life changes after he spends a few hours babysitting his nine-year-old niece.

Shawn ChristensenJonathan Dorfman and Szymon Weglarski (both B.F.A. Computer Graphics and Interactive Media ’02) won an Emmy for "Outstanding Special Visual Effects" for their work on the HBO show Boardwalk Empire. The Emmy-winning sequence appeared in the episode Georgia Peaches, (Season 2, Episode 10).

Carrie Moyer (B.F.A. Painting ’85) was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her bold acrylic paintings. Based in Brooklyn, Moyer has been showing her work since the mid-1990s. Her work has been widely exhibited at national and international venues including PS1/MoMA; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Shedhalle (Zurich), among others.

Melissa Umberger (M.S. Historic Preservation ’10, M.S.C.R.P. ’12) was recently honored with the Robert C. Weinberg award for her thesis Disaster Planning and Mapping, which focused on the danger posed to the Rockaways, and its potential disproportionate impact on minorities and people with lower incomes. The award is given by the NY Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association every year to one graduate of each of the four city planning programs in New York City.  

Jane Mai (B.F.A. Communications Design ’11) and Simon Arizpe (B.F.A. Illustration ’06), both received honorable mentions in The Society of Illustrators inaugural Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Arts Festival Awards of Excellence exhibition.

MFA exhibition posters designed by Graduate Communications Design students from the class of 2012 won a HOW International Design Award. This highly selective competition, sponsored by HOW magazine, recognizes outstanding creative work produced by individuals and creative agencies from around the world. A team of design industry veterans judged nearly 1,000 entries in 15 categories and selected winning projects that demonstrated an ideal mix of concept, strategy, and execution.

Students

Sara Cochran (B.F.A. Jewelry ’13) and Lauren Curry (B.F.A. Jewelry ’14) recently received The Tiffany & Co. Foundation Scholarship, each receiving a generous $25,000 award that provides significant encouragement and financial assistance to the most promising students in Pratt's jewelry design program. As part of the scholarship screening process, Cochran, Curry, and their classmates presented their work to jurors and each wrote an essay about their design aesthetic and philosophy and how ethical and sustainable metals practices inform their work.

At this year’s fashion show, Madeline Gruen (B.F.A. Fashion ’13) was recognized with the $25,000 Liz Claiborne Award—Concept to Product, which will support her creative, entrepreneurial activities and help cover the costs of developing a collection post-graduation. Gruen also received the Pratt Fashion Entrepreneurship Award, a new recognition that will provide her with a studio in Pratt's Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation rent-free for one year with ongoing mentorship at the Incubator. As part of this award, Gruen will be able to attend classes, tuition-free, that are part of Pratt’s recently launched Certificate Program in Design Entrepreneurship.

Gruen was also one of the winners of the WHO’S NEXT Prêt-à-Porter Paris x Arts Thread competition. The winning designers will have their collections shown in July at a trade show by the same name, the largest in Europe. 

Giovania Tiarachristie, an incoming graduate city and regional planning student, has been selected as one of 30 winners of the annual Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which supports the graduate educations of U.S. residents, naturalized U.S. citizens, or children of naturalized citizen parents. Tiarachristie  was born in Indonesia to parents of Chinese heritage and came to the United States when she was 10. She has been chosen as one of the winners on the basis of individual merit.

The Department of Communications Design recently announced more than 30 student awards won through two widely recognized competitions. The Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Competition chose 17 of their pieces as winners, with four students taking home named scholarships totaling nearly $12,000. Another 23 pieces by students were selected as winners of the American Illustration 32 competition.

Four students from the Fashion Department were awarded $5,000 scholarships for their successful entries in the YMA Fashion Scholarship Fund Competition: Xinyue Zhu (’15), Lauren Sander (’15), Caroline Kaufman (’14), and Elizabeth Lindholm (’14). Paola Ricardo (’13) was a semi-finalist in the YMA/FSF Geoffrey Beene scholarship competition and was awarded $10,000 for her project. The objective of the competition was for each student to select an online fashion company that offered "flash sales" and develop a new product line for the company of their choice.

School of Information and Library Science student Claudio Leon (M.S.L.IS. ’15) received the YALSA Excellence in Library Services to Young Adults award. The Young Adult Library Services Association selected up to twenty-five innovative teen programs from all types of libraries to feature at the 2013 ALA Annual Conference and to include in a sixth edition of Excellence in Library Service to Young Adults. SILS alumni Anja Kennedy (M.S.L.IS. ’08) and Regan Schwartz (M.S.L.IS. ’11) were also recipients of the prestigious award.

Industrial Design student Masamune Kaji (B.I.D. ’13) was one of the winners of the Behance Talent Search for his sculptural chair design, Kachi-Katah. When the chair is unfolded, the user can compose his environment, changing how it stands and how the blocks of the seatback create negative space.

Molly Sherman (M.S. Interior Design ’13) won the American Society of Interior Designers student competition Repurpose for Today: Design for Social Impact. In her entry, she redesigned seating on a bus used by the migrant farming community.

Architecture student Amanda Mullen (B. Arch. ’15) of Woodbridge, N.J. has been awarded a scholarship by the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Mullen, who is in her third year of the five-year bachelor's degree program, received a $5,000 grant.

Pratt’s Undergraduate Communications Design Department was chosen as one of only nine schools nationwide to receive a Gold Pencil at the Advertising One Club’s Student Awards ceremony. This is an honor for the department, as several thousand entries were submitted and 24 pencil awards announced, of which only nine were gold. Pratt entered approximately seven pieces in the competition, compared to the hundreds sent in by other competitor schools.

Kai Alexis Smith (B.F.A. Writing ’05, M.S.L.I.S. ’13) was one of three individuals to receive the Wolfgang M. Freitag Internship Award for her contributions to Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) as well as the profession of art librarianship. This prestigious award grants $2,500 to support a period of internship for a student preparing for a career in art librarianship or visual resources curatorship. Smith has chosen to use her award to help support her summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Yun Bai Kim (A.O.S. Graphic Design ’13) was recently announced as a 2013 CLIO Award winner (Silver) in the design category for his matchbook cover designs for the American Lung Association. Kim’s work was judged by advertising professionals from around the world and selected as a winner. The CLIO Awards are the most prestigious international awards that recognize innovation and creativity in communications design.

Text: Luke Degnan
Photos: Peter Tannenbaum, Getty Images