Click on the arrows above to scroll through paintings by Kahn Award winner Julia Fernandez-Pol. Click below on the audio player to hear Edgar Ernesto Ramirez perform in The Barber of Seville.

Each year, three College of Fine Arts graduates are awarded $10,000 to help kick-start their respective careers in the visual arts, theater, and music. This year’s Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Awards were given to school of visual arts grad Julia Fernandez-Pol (CFA’08), for painting; school of theatre grad Blair Lewin (CFA’08), for acting; and the Opera Institute’s Edgar Ernesto Ramirez (CFA’08), for music performance.

Ramirez and Lewin will use the award to launch their careers in New York City, while Fernandez-Pol plans to travel between Argentina and America to continue developing her artistic skills and cultural experiences.

Fernandez-Pol, who previously won CFA’s Constantin Alajalov and Visual Art scholarships, has been included in several juried group painting shows in Boston, including Her Art: A Celebration of Women Artists in Boston; Boston Young Contemporaries; and Contemporary Absurdity.

Ramírez has appeared at Boston University as Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi, Alfredo in La Traviata, Lázaro in the world premiere of Before Night Falls, Mr. Owen in Postcards from Morocco, Jonathan Orfeo in Hostage, Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, and Rodolfo in La Bohème. He has also performed at venues including the Palacio de Bellas Artes and Teatro Degollado in México, with companies such as Opera Santa Barbara, UCLA Opera, and Opera in the Ozarks, and at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Ramírez was invited to the Israeli Opera Workshop in Tel-Aviv to be the principal tenor in its spring 2008 productions, and he will perform a debut as Nemorino in Elixir of Love with Sarasota Opera this coming season. He has won first place awards from the Giulio Gari Foundation, the Performing Arts Foundation, and the Profant Foundation. He has also received awards from the Metropolitan Opera Council Auditions, the Léni Fé Bland Foundation, the Opera Reading Club of Hollywood, and the Society of Singers.

Lewin (right) studied at the Piven Theatre Workshop, where she was a member of the Young People’s Company. Her BU credits include The Love of the Nightingale, Tartuffe, The Weavers, Playing for Time, The Stranger, and The Shakespeare Project, and she has danced in Aurora Borealis. During a semester of training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she acted in Antony and Cleopatra and The Country Wife. She also appeared in CFA’s 2008 InCite Arts Festival’s recent production of Sow and Weep at the Helen Mills Theater in New York.

The Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Award Fund was established in 1985 with an endowed contribution of $1 million from Esther Kahn (SED’55, Hon.’86). Each spring, students completing their last semester of graduate or undergraduate studies are eligible to compete for the award. Deborah Kahn and Linda Green, the daughters of the late Esther and Albert Kahn, along with a faculty panel from CFA, select one winner from each of the three schools at CFA.

Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.

Thumbnail image by Kalman Zabarsky