City College filmmaker and cinema expert Boukary Sawadogo wins CUNY’s Wasser Award

Boukary Sawadogo of The City College of New York’s Division of Humanities and the Arts, is a winner of the 2021 Henry Wasser Award for outstanding Assistant Professors from the City University of New York.  

The honor is one of two presented to outstanding assistant professors CUNY-wide by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. The other accolade is the Feliks Gross Award. The Academy selects recipients for the two awards from a large group of highly qualified, academically impressive, assistant professors from all 25 CUNY campuses. Half receive the Gross award and half receive the Wasser award, randomly.

Sawadogo is affiliated with both CCNY’s Media and Communication Arts (MCA) and the Black Studies Program.

His research concerns the construction of subjectivity and intersectionality in African cinema, with the intended purpose of contributing to popularize African cinema within the larger field of cinema and media studies. Such a trajectory enables to re-inscribe the parameters of critical interventions in cinema studies to encompass African cinema by showcasing multiplicity of cinematic traditions and practices around the world. 

He is the author of three books and several articles on African cinema. Sawadogo’s forthcoming fourth book, under contract with a university press, addresses African presence and trajectory in the world, with a focus on encounters and exchanges between Africa and the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Sawadogo was nominated by MCA Chair Jerry Carlson and Vanessa Valdés, director of Black Studies. 

“Boukary is widely-acknowledged as an expert in the field of African Studies; the author of four monographs, he is also a filmmaker and curator of film festivals. He is a valued member of the faculty of the Department of Media and Communication Arts and the Black Studies Program here at The City College of New York and we offer our deepest congratulations on being named the winner of the 2021 Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser Award,” said Valdés.

The awards are named after Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser, two of the founders of CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences.

This is the second consecutive year that a faculty member from the Division of Humanities and Arts has won a Gross and Wasser award.

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