Pair of graduate students receive funding from the American Association of University Women
The Office of Fellowships is pleased to announce that Naeema Jamilah Torres (TGS, Documentary Media) and Aisha Motlani (TGS, Art History) have each won financial support from the American Association of University Women (AAUW)! Naeema received a Career Development Grant to fund her filmmaking, and Aisha received the American Fellowship to fund the final year of her PhD program.
Naeema arrived at Northwestern with a wealth of professional experience. After graduating with a BFA in media and communication arts, film and video production from the City College of New York, Naeema worked for several years in film distribution. Northwestern’s MFA in documentary media represents a return to Naeema’s creative roots in storytelling. Using documentary as a blueprint, she aims to tell unapologetic stories about urban life, complex ethnic identities, and womanhood. She is currently developing her thesis film on the legacy of the largest slave rebellion in US history, to be completed in 2019.
In addition to the Career Development Grant, Naeema is a recipient of the Time Warner Foundation’s Next Generation Grant, the Jane and Michael Hoffman Foundation Fellowship, and the Graduate Research Grant, furnished by Northwestern’s Graduate School. When not hard at work behind the camera, Naeema volunteers with the Foster Care Film and Community Engagement Project, working on outreach and distribution of their award-winning documentary series about foster care youth.
Aisha is a sixth-year PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern. Before she arrived in Evanston, Aisha earned a BA in architecture at the University of Cambridge and an MA in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She currently studies the visual culture of colonialism, with a focus on representations of India in Victorian Britain. Her interests include the relationship between British art, empire, race, and gender, and her dissertation examines visual representations of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Her other interests include the serialization of artworks and resulting issues of originality and reproduction, particularly as they relate to nineteenth-century bronze sculpture. With support from the AAUW, Aisha will complete her dissertation, titled “Crisis and Innovation: Visualizing the 1857 Indian Rebellion.”
AAUW is one of the world’s oldest leading supporters of graduate women’s education, having awarded more than $115 million in fellowships, grants, and awards to 13,000 women and projects from more than 145 countries since 1888. Candidates are evaluated on the basis of scholarly excellence, quality and originality of project design, and active commitment to helping women and girls through service in their communities, professions, or fields of research.
Contact Beth Pardoe at e-pardoe@northwestern.edu to learn more about AAUW fellowships.