University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Creative Arts Awards Honor Excellence in Artistic Practice and Research
Jun 16, 2023
Each year, the Division of the Arts at a2ru partner school University of Wisconsin-Madison presents its Creative Arts Awards in an end-of-year ceremony that spotlights the achievements of its faculty, staff and students in artistic practice, outreach and research across the disciplines. The ceremony features performances by many of the evening’s winning individuals and ensembles.
Division of the Arts Director Chris Walker says, “The 2023 Creative Arts Awards celebrate distinguished honorees who have all excelled in the areas of creative inquiry and production, outreach, and professional excellence. These colleagues embody the exceptional range, quality, and diversity of the creative arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.”
He continued: “Every time we do this, I remain inspired, inspired by the work that the faculty’s doing, inspired by the work that our students are doing and inspired by the interdisciplinary potential that exists here. Folks are engaging difficult problems and are bringing solutions.”
Some of the awards and winners this year included:
Creative Arts Award
Funded through the generosity of the Bassett and Evjue Foundations, the Creative Arts Award (established in 1995) recognizes and honors extraordinary artistic projects and endeavors of the highest quality carried out by tenured members of the UW–Madison arts faculty.
The award provides $30,000 of general research support to a faculty member in the creative arts.
2023 Winner: Douglas Rosenberg, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Art, Art Department
Douglas Rosenberg (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and author, Professor of Art and former Department Chair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work in performance, video, installation, and other media has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years in museums, festivals, galleries, and elsewhere. He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and keynote talks as well as books including: “Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image,” published by Oxford Press and “The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies,” which was awarded the prestigious Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research. He is a founding editor of “The International Journal of Screendance” and acknowledged as a leading scholar in the field and his work has been supported by numerous grants and awards including: the NEA; The Rockefeller Foundation; The Soros Foundation; the MAP Fund in New York; and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video. In 2022, he was awarded a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship. His most recent film, “Song of Songs,” has been screened at over a dozen prestigious international screendance festivals in museums across Europe and elsewhere, including, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, Cinedans Fest, Eye Museum, Amsterdam, London International Screendance Festival, Manifest Dance-Film Festival, Pondicherry, India, InShadow Festival of Screendance, Lisbon, XIX Punta del Este Jewish Film Festival, Uruguay, and the Museo de Trajes, Bogota, Columbia. Hi book of essays on art and culture, called “Staring at The Sky,” is under contract with Korpen Publishing in Gothenberg, Sweden and expected to be released in 2023/24.
The award supports the creation of “The Sea,” a film that will explore how the relationships and experience of aging is “written” on our bodies and can be extrapolated through movement.
Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award
The Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award (established in 2012) seeks to enrich cultural offerings and inspire future artists in Wisconsin communities underserved by the arts. The award supports faculty or staff in the creation of new art works in areas both emerging and traditional and/or the presentation of new or existing works of art across the state.
The award provides support in the amount of $3,500.
2023 Winner: Michael Velliquette, Assistant Professor of Art Foundations, Art Department
Michael Velliquette is a mixed media artist whose work investigates the junctures where materiality meets conscious awareness. His intricately crafted and contemplative sculptures make use of modest and often ephemeral materials such paper. The Wiechers award supports “Embodied Looking // Embodied Making,” a social practice and community engagement project where participants apply techniques derived from mindfulness meditation to generate intimate and contemplative arts-based experiences.
Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Graduate Student Award in the Creative Arts
The Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Student Award in the Creative Arts (established in 1997) is presented to an undergraduate and graduate student in the creative arts “who has made the greatest contribution to the field(s) of study covered.”
The award carries a grant of $2,000.
2023 Winners: Trace Leighton Johnson, DMA student, Music Performance; Ruth Llana, Ph.D. candidate, Spanish with a Minor in Transdisciplinary Study of Visual Culture; Matthew Francis Ludak, MFA student, Art; Orion Lee Risk, Ph.D. student, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies
Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Arts Award
Funded by the Division of the Arts, the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Arts Award (established in 2022) supports undergraduate students working across disciplines to create work and/or to conduct scholarly research. Full-time undergraduate students enrolled in creative arts academic programs at UW–Madison during the spring semester of the award year, and their collaborators, are eligible.
2023 Winners: Maile Evelyn Llanos, undergraduate, Art; Maia Therese Rauh, undergraduate, Textiles and Fashion Design with a Certificate in Studio Art; Katie Ryann, undergraduate, Dance and Environmental Studies
The below video highlights graduate and undergraduate student award winners.
For a complete list of awards presented at the Creative Arts Awards and their winners, please visit the Division of the Arts website.
The full playlist of presentations and performances from this year’s award can be viewed on the Division of the Arts’ YouTube channel.