Class of 2024 members Juliette Carbonnier and Collin Riggins are the latest recipients of the Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship, which funds year-long independent projects for members of each senior class in the year following their graduation. The two students began their work this summer.
The Dale Fellowship, created by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin Dale, provides a $40,000 grant to spend one year on “an independent project of extraordinary merit that will broaden the recipient’s experience of the world and greatly enhance the student’s personal growth and intellectual development. “
Ten other Princeton students also received $7,000 Dale Summer Award scholarships for smaller projects they completed over the summer. The 2024 Dale Summer Award recipients are: Ozzie Bayazitoglu, Danielle Bejerano, Laurie Drayton, Oyu Enkhbold, Zehma Herring, Nandini Krishnan, Ammon Love, Simon Marotte, Joe McCauley and Dane Utley.
Juliette Carbonnier
Carbonnier graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in English and certificates in creative writing, musical theater and theater. She is a writer, performer, musician, and designer whose Princeton credits include theater productions at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Theater Intime, and the Princeton Triangle Club.
For her Dale project, she is writing a one-woman play with music inspired by the legacy of her ancestors, some of whom were progressive Yiddish artists, comedians and composers, while others survived the Holocaust.
Her work will “explore the dissonances between art and trauma, comedy and tragedy, memory and reality, honoring the past while being true to the present,” Carbonnier said.
She will use the tropes and traditions of Yiddish theater—including comic text and songs written by her family members—as inspiration, and hopes to untangle stories from her family’s past “to wrestle with what it means to yearn for a place that is no longer exists and how to instead find home in story and song,” she said.
“Our world is full of anger, sadness and suffering. It is the privilege, honor and challenge of artists to offer space to grieve, empathize, celebrate, create community and share hope that we can all slowly but surely march towards a better world”, wrote Carbonnier in his Dale essay.
In her letter of recommendation for the award, Stacy Wolf, professor of theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts and American studies, called Carbonnier’s project a “perfect expansion and extension of her time at Princeton, as a student, artist and person.”
“It unites her family history with the history of Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. It ties together pathos and humor – a clear marker of Juliette’s style as a writer,” Wolf wrote.
Carbonnier is currently traveling across Central and Eastern Europe for research. She will then review and translate family documents and notes from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. She is learning Yiddish through Workers Circle, a non-profit social activist and Yiddish cultural organization there.
For her English thesis at Princeton, Carbonnier co-wrote, co-produced, co-designed and starred in “Bodywork,” a dark comedy about a young woman with chronic pain who qualifies for a new body replacement surgery. She also wrote a collection of poems, “Funeral Theatrics,” through the creative writing program.
During her time at Princeton, she was the artistic director of Quipfire! Improv Comedy, a resident artist with the Nassau Literary Review and a writer for the Princeton Triangle Club and All-Nighter.
Carbonnier has received several awards from the Department of English, most recently the 2024 Alan S. Downer Award. She also won this year’s Lewis Center’s Francis LeMoyne Page Theater Award and was recognized by the center for outstanding work her freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years.
Collin Riggins
Riggins graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in African American studies and a certificate in visual arts. A cinematographer and concept artist, he also served as a media and communications assistant for the Department of African American Studies, an undergraduate teaching assistant for guest lecturer Majora Carter’s “The Reclamation Studio,” and a co-host of the AAS Podcast.
For his Dale project, “Cotton Stains,” Riggins is producing a collection of black-and-white analog photographs of black cotton farmers. He is also working to develop a public art studio in Garysburg, North Carolina, to support creatives in the area.
In his Dale Prize application essay, Riggins described his first contact in 2022 with Julius Tillery, a fifth-generation cotton grower and founder of BlackCotton—a connection that would later serve as the backbone of his dissertation research.
After making many trips to Garysburg, where Tillery is based, Riggins invited his great-grandmother, who grew up harvesting in the region, to visit the same fields. Riggins said her positive, emotional reaction was a testament to how these communities “have paved the way for empowering relationships with cotton that fundamentally complicate how the plant — and agriculture — is often understood in our collective memory.”
“I saw the spiritual potential in challenging painful memories that fuel our oppression. This reclaiming, of cotton and its memory, is exactly what I aim to accomplish as a Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellow,” Riggins wrote in his Dale essay.
By showing these underrepresented realities in and around North Carolina, and attending to their many complexities, Riggins aims to “celebrate cotton culture through the camera,” he wrote.
In her letter of recommendation for the award, Autumn Womack, associate professor of African American studies and English, praised Riggins’ proposal as an outgrowth of his years of research on the relationship between African Americans and cotton.
“When Collin describes Cotton Stain as a visual monograph that intervenes in the historical narratives of race and cotton by ‘resisting dominant capitulations of cotton to hunt its memory in all its depths,’ I hear him describe the work of creating a counter-archive. ” Womack said. “Collin always understands artists, creators and community members as theorists about their own lives and futures.”
Riggins said the Garysburg studio will create arts infrastructure in the Northampton County area by providing young artists with creative programming and opportunities.
On campus, Riggins served in the Department of African American Studies Undergraduate Council, as a research assistant at the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, and as a College Counselor at Forbes College. He also co-founded the Black Arts Collective with Class of 2023 graduate Omar Jason Farah in 2022.
Riggins has exhibited at numerous campus, non-profit and professional art galleries, and most recently became the first artist-in-residence with Art on the Block NYC in Harlem. He will premiere photographs from “Cotton Stains” at Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in spring 2025 in a joint exhibition, “Blue prints, cotton stains,” with Class of 2024 graduate Max Diallo Jakobsen.
Among his other honors, Riggins won the 2022 University Center for Human Values’ Short Movie Prize and the 2024 Ruth J. Simmons African American Studies Thesis Prize.
