Brandeis Magazine

Composer Erin Gee, professor of music, is one of 11 winners of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which honors risk-taking midcareer artists working in dance, music, film/video, theater, or the visual arts. Each honoree receives $75,000 in unrestricted funding and a residency at CalArts. Gee’s work has been commissioned and performed or recorded by JACK Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

In October, the university will formally launch the Brandeis Alumni Art Gallery at the recently refurbished Wien Faculty Center. The new space will showcase the work of a different group of alumni artists every six months. The project was spearheaded by Brandeis Arts Council board member Andrea Molod Soloway ’89.

The 2023 Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts enlivened campus from April 21-30. This year’s festival celebrated the theme “Art in the Year of Climate Action,” and featured performances by Second Line Brass Band, Big Nazo, and Gili Yalo, among others.

Earlier this year, the Griffin Museum of Photography, in Winchester, Massachusetts, exhibited selections from a photography collection amassed by Parker Thompson ’23. His archive focuses on anonymous 19th- and 20th-century photos — snapshots, photo-booth portraits, and the like — that celebrate everyday moments of joy in the Black community. Highlights from Thompson’s collection can be viewed on his “Always Been” Instagram account and at alwaysbeen.org.

The new Samuel Scholars program, an initiative created by the Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT), is helping first- and second-year students make real change in the local community, including through the arts. Liz Sandoval ’25, for example, developed a program that connects Waltham-area high school students who want to make music with Brandeis mentors and resources. In another COMPACT project, Brandeis journalism students created a zine, available in both Spanish and English, that serves as a resource for families who have recently moved to Waltham.

Last fall, Ramie Targoff, the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, taught Shakespeare to medical students in Kigali, Rwanda, both virtually and (for a few days) in person. Students at the University of Global Health Equity — who take liberal arts classes in addition to their medical training — read and discussed “Macbeth,” with a particular focus on themes revolving around mental health. Targoff is teaching the course again this year.

An acting edition of “Burning Up the Dictionary,” a play by Meron Langsner, GSAS MFA’04, was published by Next Stage Press. The play, which premiered in 2012 at the Boston Center for the Arts, was nominated for an Independent Reviewers of New England Award for Best New Play. It tracks a couple’s dissolution through a focus on the personal language of their relationship.

The National Center for Jewish Film’s annual film festival was held in May at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Films shown included “The Levys of Monticello” (2022) and “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann” (2011). University Professor Jonathan Sarna ’75, GSAS MA’75, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History; Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies; and other Brandeis faculty members participated in Q&As that accompanied the screenings.

A musical adaptation of the Jane Austen novel “Sense and Sensibility” by Neal Hampton, associate professor of the practice of music, had its U.K. premiere in May, staged by the Surrey Opera.