ArtBeat

Sheldon Best
Mike Lovett
Sheldon Best

In March, actor Sheldon Best ’08 received a Martin E. Segal Award, given to highly deserving rising artists nominated by Lincoln Center’s resident organizations. Best played the lead in a six-week run of “brownsville song (b-side for tray)” at the Claire Tow at Lincoln Center Theater. He has appeared in a dozen off-Broadway plays as well as in popular television shows, including “The Good Wife” and “Person of Interest.” The Segal Awards gala was held in Alice Tully Hall and hosted by Audra McDonald.

Computer programmer and philanthropist Peter Norton has donated 41 works by leading contemporary artists to the Rose Art Museum. Drawn from Norton’s personal collection, the donation seeks to deepen the integration of the visual arts in higher education, foster creative museum practice and engage audiences with contemporary art. The works include video, photography, painting, prints, sculpture and mixed media by such artists as Mark Dion, Nicole Eisenman, Omer Fast, Kara Walker and Lisa Yuskavage.

Alicia Ostriker ’59, a fellow at the Women’s Studies Research Center, has been elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Previous chancellors have included W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery. Ostriker is an award-winning poet and critic, and a contributor to feminist Jewish thinking. Her 2009 volume of poetry, “The Book of 70,” won the National Jewish Book Award.

Yehudi Wyner, professor emeritus of composition, has been elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He will serve a three-year term at the helm of the highly selective honor society of architects, composers, artists and writers. He became a member of the academy in 1999. In 2006, Wyner earned a Pulitzer Prize in music for his piano concerto “Chiavi in Mano.”

In February, a quartet of Brandeisians were among those awarded the biennial Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. This year, the prize went to local artists working in the area of interactive projects and performance art, including Ricardo De Lima, a 2014 postbaccalaureate in studio art, who is a visual artist, technologist and DJ. Sean Downey, lecturer in fine arts; Lucy Kim, lecturer in fine arts; and Susan Metrican, curator at the Women’s Studies Research Center, were also honored as members of kijidome, an experimental project space and collaborative in Boston’s South End. The museum will host an exhibition of the award winners’ work from April 21 through Aug. 9.

A 1992 novel by Stephen McCauley, “The Easy Way Out,” is the source material for a new French film of the same name (French title: L’Art de la fugue), directed by Brice Cauvin. The story follows three bickering brothers as they deal with thorny situations in life and love. McCauley is associate director of the university’s creative writing program and professor of the practice of English.

Lecturer in music Jason McStoots, a member of the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) Vocal and Chamber Ensembles, shared in a 2015 Grammy award for Best Opera Recording, given to BEMF’s “Charpentier: ‘La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers’ and ‘La Couronne de Fleurs.’” McStoots sang the roles of Ixion in “Orphée” and Forestan in “Couronne.”

Music professor Allan Keiler received the 2014 Silberger Scholar Prize, which recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary work in psychoanalysis. Keiler earned the honor, given by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, for his previously unpublished paper “Liszt as Romantic Hero: Imposturing and the False Self.”