2024 Abakanowicz Fellowship Awardees
The Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation (AACCF), in collaboration with Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association, is pleased to announce the 2024 Abakanowicz Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research Fellowships.
AACCF was established in 2018 to promote the legacy of Magdalena Abakanowicz and to fund programs that investigate concepts of human creativity, the role of art as a visual language within cultures and a dynamic force within contemporary society, and the intersection of art and other modes of inquiry for the purposes of extending the meaning and relevance of Abakanowicz’s art and its underlying ideas. Applicants must be a second-year, third-year, or dissertation student in good standing with the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecopsychology (CLIE) Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Hanae Gonzales
My name is Hanae Gonzales and I am a 2nd year CLIE student. I am a multi-cultured person who champions liberation and decolonial practices to generate spaces and resources for a more holistic and pluriversal reality within the nonprofit sphere, especially pertaining to the current youth of this generation. My project is based in Hiroshima, Japan recording ancestral knowledge and activation when it comes to returning to the land and through oral tradition from the elders of the community. These findings will be documented through an art based mixed mediums, called art memos (2 per day for 14 days, 28 art pieces), and will be combined into a final art display of three larger art panels depicting the project experience.
Jessica Joe Frank
Jessica Joe Frank has cross-sector experience conducting research and supporting science-based programs to advance policy and inform decision-making in environmental and human health sciences. She has professional experience conducting research in marine and coastal systems, rare disease, exposure science, systematic review and risk assessment. Her academic training is in ecology and environmental toxicology. She is a chaser ofnuminosity and follows her intuition in search of spiritual experience and meaning deeper than what is offered by Western modernity. For her first-year praxis, Jessica Joe will practice creative expression (e.g., weaving and storytelling), embodied practice (e.g., meditation and ritual),embodied knowing (e.g., intuition and dream tending) to explore sacred landscape ecology and the sacred feminine at pre- and early Christian sacred sites associated with her ancestry with the hope to reclaim ancestral memory. Using organic inquiry methodology and semi-structured interviews, she will explore how individuals within pilgrimage communities experience sacred ecologies of landscapes and the feminine.
Robin Chancer
Robin Chancer has focused her life’s work on the intersection of mental health and immigration justice. First trained as a social worker, she was drawn to Pacifica’s CLIE program through relationships with Indigenous Guatemalan people, who introduced her to ways of being which are far more dimensional than her Euro-American training. The award will be used to support a community garden project in collaboration with diasporic Maya communities in northeast Ohio. The communities identified a key missing element of their well-being: renewing the relationship with the Earth that was harmed by displacement and ecological destruction. The community-led garden will provide space for food and medicine cultivation, sacred cultural practices, community gathering, and land-based healing practices.
