Brandeis Magazine

Eric Chasalow, the Irving Fine Professor of Music, has received a commission from the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress for a major new original composition. The commissioning prize, named for the former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director/conductor, provides recipients with $10,000 to support the creation of a new work. Chasalow’s composition will be a 20-minute-long song cycle for a large chamber ensemble, electronics, and soprano. The work has been co-commissioned — and will be premiered by — Sound Icon, a Boston-based sinfonietta. This is Chasalow’s second Koussevitzky commission, the maximum number allowed by the foundation. His first, in 2004, supported a flute concerto, composed for a nationwide consortium of ensembles.

Sarah Perkins, GSAS PhD’24, co-directed “The Abortion Talks,” a documentary that tells the story of a six-year clandestine dialogue between three abortion-rights and three anti-abortion leaders. The meeting of the minds — kept secret to avoid angering the leaders’ colleagues and supporters — was prompted by the fatal 1994 shootings at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics, an event that shocked all six women involved in the dialogue. “The Abortion Talks” documents the goodwill and respect that grew up among these women, even though no one’s position on abortion changed. Perkins is pursuing a PhD in English at Brandeis.

The Mellon Foundation has given Brandeis University a 15-month $150,000 grant to support the project “Re-envisioning the Role of the Humanities Center in the 21st-Century University,” under the leadership of English professor Ulka Anjaria, director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for the Humanities. The project aims to help humanities centers at higher-education institutions position themselves as a hub of socially engaged research and learning on their campus. A working group convened by the Mandel Center will address a number of challenges, including the need to advance scholarship of and by historically underrepresented groups, and the relationship of the university to surrounding communities.

A 2022 exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, “My Mechanical Sketchbook: Barkley L. Hendricks and Photography,” won a silver medal in the 2023 Graphis Design Awards. The exhibition design was created by Siena Scarff Design, a studio based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Matthew Salloway ’00 is a producer on “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a Sony Pictures biopic on the life of Whitney Houston, which opened in movie theaters in December. He also co-produced “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical,” which had its official Broadway opening at the Broadhurst Theatre earlier that month.

Sienna Bucu ’22 was awarded a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant to lead an arts project in the public schools of Union, New Jersey, which is her hometown. As part of the project, called “We Are Here,” students who have had behavioral or academic setbacks or are in need of extra social support will help create site-specific murals and installations. The artwork will both amplify students’ voices and draw attention to mental health initiatives.

From July to September, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women’s Studies Research Center hosted an exhibition titled “Seven Species, Three Generations” at the Kniznick Gallery. Three generations of the Schön family contributed works to the show, including matriarch Nancy Schön, the 93-year-old sculptor behind the “Make Way for Ducklings” installation in the Boston Public Garden. The “seven species” theme that inspired the artwork referred to the sacred species of fruit and grains said to grow in the land of Israel: grapes, dates, figs, pomegranates, olives, barley, and wheat.