The 2024-25 awards were announced at the end of the Spring semester. Our first newsletter of the fall semester features the faculty who received those awards. 

Academic Service Award Award

In recognition of the important role of service among Senate constituents, the Academic Service Award is presented annually to a faculty, chair, assistant chair, or staff member who demonstrates cumulative and ongoing contributions to service (broadly defined). The recipient addresses graduates at Awards Convocation each spring.

Carlos Motta

Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice
School of Art

Carlos Motta’s most recent exhibition, Pleas of Resistance,, MACBA, Barcelona, highlights his practice over the last 25 years.  The exhibition traverses more than twenty-five years of practice, which consistently engages with the body and sexual dissidence as a terrain of experimentation and political contestation.

His early explorations of photographic self-portraiture are shown alongside his most recent performances and video installations. The exhibition explores the magnitude of Motta’s artistic research and its implacable rigor in relation to the archive, interrogating its violence, its silencing and its desires. Motta’s work challenges the imposition of Eurocentric epistemologies – from the time of the conquest and colonial period in the Americas to the present day – and considers the legacy of religion as a perpetrator and disturbing vehicle of coloniality. 

Motta initiated his artistic trajectory at a young age, in the late 1990s, shortly before emigrating to New York and settling there. The exhibition pays close attention to the artist’s engagement with political histories and social movements – specifically the politics of sexuality and gender and the hiv/aids epidemic – and their contemporary manifestations on the fragility of bodies. The notion of the collective body and the artist’s attention to the politics of care are central to both individual and self-representation, as well as to the various forms of collaboration that the artist has realised in his diverse projects over the years. 

Motta’s works propose alternative accounts to the hegemonic narratives of history, religion and democracy. His work and artistic collaborations materialise the potential for social reform by rewriting the official histories of colonization, military dictatorships and neo-fascism – in a pilgrimage that is always blasphemous, corporeal and political.

Bio and photo:
https://www.macba.cat/en/actor/carlos-motta/

Research Recognition Award

The Research Recognition Award recognizes cumulative and ongoing contributions to research, broadly defined. The Research Recognition Award (RRA) Committee reviews nominations for the award and recommends candidate(s) to the Senate, which confers the award jointly with the Provost. The recipient presents at the annual Research Open House in March and is recognized at commencement. 

Rosetta Elkin

Professor of Landscape Architecture
School of Architecture

Rosetta S. Elkin is a practiced-based scholar in landscape studies. For over 20 years, her research, writing and teaching explore the relationship between people and plants. Rosetta’s work is grounded in first-hand experience through fieldwork, archival survey, drawing and creative documentation.

This deep interest in interdisciplinarity is conveyed in her most recent publication, Landscapes of Retreat (K.Verlag, 2023). Now in its second edition printing, the book offers a portrait of climate change adaptation found in the land that is left behind as settlement patterns shift due to a changing climate. The methods rely on multidisciplinary partnership across five case studies that cut across history, citizenship, and geography to rework notions of fixed settlement. As she writes: “Retreat is a catalyst because it unsettles and thus begins a process of recovering broken relations—amending connections.”

The book has been described as “a hopeful perspective on retreat as a mode of climate adaptation—a cultural practice of living with, not against, the more than human world.” And received the 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize from The University of Virginia Center for Cultural Landscapes.

I believe in open access publishing, so the entire publication is available here:
landscapesofretreat.com

Other links
https://kverlag.com/products/landscapes-of-retreat-second-edition
https://www.arch.virginia.edu/news/center-cultural-landscapes-announces-2024-jb-jackson-book-prize-winner
https://practicelandscape.com/project/le-jardin-de-bord-de-mer

Distinguished Teacher Award

For over 40 years, the Distinguished Teacher Award (DTA) has recognized exceptional teaching and dedication to the Institute’s mission and students. The DTA Committee reviews nominations made by the student body and recommends candidate(s) to the Senate, which confers the award jointly with the administration and Board of Trustees. The recipient addresses the student body at Commencement and presents the mace at graduation ceremonies.

Frank Franca

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Communications Design
School of Design

Frank Franca is a photographer, educator, and creative director whose work bridges art, activism, and design. Born in Havana and raised across Cuba, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom, his cosmopolitan perspective informs a practice that spans four decades.

His work has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Le Monde, The Guardian, and many other publications, and has been exhibited internationally at the Royal Festival Hall (London), Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Nonconformist Art (St. Petersburg), the International Center of Photography (New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), the House of Photography (Hamburg), and institutions in Japan, Germany, Norway, Russia, Canada, and the UK.

Franca was a founding member of the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus, creators of the Red Ribbon, and co-founded the activist public-art installation Electric Blanket, which brought the AIDS crisis to public space worldwide. His curatorial and publishing projects include Shift, a photographic anthology for the International Center of Photography presented at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in France.

A former London correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, Franca is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute and the International Center of Photography. He has also taught or lectured at The School of Visual Arts, The Cooper Union, MARCO (Monterrey), Dumb Type (Tokyo & Kyoto), and LCI (Mexico). He was a founding faculty member of ICP @ The Point in the Bronx, a program that received a President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities award, presented by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House.

Grants and fellowships include support from the Citizen’s Exchange Council, Open Society, ArtsLink, The British Council, PS122 Studio Program, and the Pratt Faculty Development Fund among others.