CCNY Faculty have received a variety of prestigious awards, including a 2025 Environmental Arts Grant for Professor Emily Raboteau.
The Division of Humanities and the Arts at The City College of New York has an abundance of good news to share from its faculty.
Writer and Professor Emily Raboteau (“Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse’”) received a 2025 Environmental Arts Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Anonymous Was a Woman. The grant supports environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists from the United States and U.S. territories. Raboteau, a professor of Black Studies, was awarded $20,000 for her project, “Voices from the Cross-Bronx Expressway.” Her book-length essay in-progress amplifies the perspectives of local activists combating The Cross-Bronx Expressway’s toxic harm for the sake of generations to come. In addition to historically displacing residents, separating communities, and abetting segregation, it is one of the most congested interstates in the nation with some of the highest rates of traffic and collisions. The neighborhoods surrounding the corridor suffer not only some of the worst health issues in the city, but the highest rates of asthma in the country. Raboteau’s work will examine what it means to survive environmental racism and to struggle against it.
English Professor Lyn Di Iorio was the recipient of a 2025 Faulkner Society Faulkner-Wisdom gold medal for a work in progress. Di Iorio also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her novel “Outside the Bones” was shortlisted for the 2012 John Gardner Fiction Award and won a Foreword INDIES Silver Fiction Prize.
Philosophy professor Elise M. Crull has been named a 2025 American Physical Society (APS) Fellow for “outstanding historical research, including the expansion of the historical record pertaining to the EPR paradox and revealing new commentary between 1927 and1935, especially the contributions of Grete Hermann, and for leadership of the Women in the History of Quantum Physics working group.” Crull is one of two recipients in 2025. She is the co-author, most recently, of "The Einstein Paradox: The Debate on Nonlocality and Incompleteness in 1935" with Guido Bacciagaluppi.
Chairman of the Art Department and Professor Hajoe Moderegger spent 10 months in Taiwan on a 2024-25 Fulbright Scholarship at the National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia to research and work on a new project: "Journey to the Semiconductor" that combines glove puppetry with electronic devices. This is Moderegger’s second Fulbright. Since 2001, he has worked in conjunction with Franziska Lamprecht as eteam. In Taiwan, the artistic duo explored the tools, rituals, and storytelling techniques of both historical and contemporary puppet performance. They found surprising parallels between digital handheld communication devices, such as smartphones, and their analog counterparts—hand puppets. Both serve as intimate extensions of the human body and tools of storytelling, performance, and communication. A one-hour excerpt from a performative lecture is available, here.
Art historian and Lecturer Jayne Cole exhibited work in a show called “Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City” which won the “ARTNews” award for “Best Thematic Museum Show.” The show was at NYU’s 80WSE, an art space located at 80 Washington Square East in Greenwich Village. Cole was a curator of the show along with Howie Chen and christina ong [sic]. The show was exhibited September 11–December 20, 2024. Competition was stiff and included nominees from the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and SITE Santa Fe. “Legacies” was billed as the first institutional show ever to survey artists of Asian descent in its titular city, surveying the period from 1969 to 2001. Ninety artists were included in the show and mostly centered around three organizations: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, the Basement Workshop, and the Asian American Arts Centre.
Film Updates
Filmmaker and Professor Campbell Dalglish was honored on the Bioneers website for his film “Savage Land,” as one of nine films that tell indigenous stories. Bioneers is an innovative nonprofit organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet. “Savage Land” tells the story of the slaying of Mah-hi-vist Red Bird Goodblanket, an18- year-old Cheyenne Arapaho boy, by Custer County Police. As descendants of the Sand Creek and Washita Massacres 150 years ago, the horrors of the past resonate in current America.
Film and Video Professor Andrea Weiss and her Jezebel Productions have had two films digitally remastered and readied for release. “Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story” has been newly restored from 35mm film. The film is playing at select cinemas and is now available on Amazon for home streaming. Directed by Weiss and Wieland Speck, it’s a cautionary tale for our dark times. The brilliant, rebellious children of German author Thomas Mann, Erika and Klaus espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were defiantly queer in an age of secrecy and repression. The film is based on Weiss’ book, the Publishing Triangle Award winner “In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story,” now available in paperback. Due out in Spring 2026, the film “Paris Was a Woman,” written and produced by Weiss and directed by CCNY alumni Greta Schiller, will be available from Zeitgeist Films, thanks to the exhaustive work of IndieCollect and the support of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund. The film is also based on a book Weiss wrote, the Lambda Literary Award-winner of the same name.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Lightcast puts at $3.2 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers, and society. At City College, more than 16,500 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity, and scholarship. In 2023, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together,” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College's mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic, and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu