From top left: Emily Rice, Spencer Hart-Thompson, and Madeline Riddick-Seals. From bottom left: James Gold, Kimly Mengyin Wang, and Tommy Vines.

Theatre

Meet the 2024 CFA Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Awards Recipients

CFA’s annual event celebrates outstanding students and helps launch their artistic careers

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 (Wheelock’55, Hon.’86). Each spring, students completing their last semester of graduate or undergraduate studies are eligible to compete for the award. Finalists are chosen based on the students’ submitted proposals detailing how they would use the award to launch their careers, their concern for social issues, and their take on the artist’s role in contemporary society. Each of the finalists receives $2,500 and the final award winner receives a total of $20,000.

This year’s Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Award reception will be held on Monday, April 22 at 1:30pm in the CFA Student Lounge (Room 102), where the recipients are celebrated and the grand prize winner is announced.

Special thanks to this year’s Kahn Awards jurors, Gabriel Cobas, Chief Facilities Officer at Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras; Maya French, Founder & co-Artistic Director of Palaver Strings; Elana Harris, Interim Managing Director at BU Arts Initiative; and Rachael Warren, Resident Company Member, Literary Affiliate, Teaching Artist, and MFA Faculty, Singing at Trinity Rep.

Let’s get to know the 2024 Kahn Awards recipients. They are unstoppable forces, ready to make change as they enter the professional world of the arts.

School of Music

Spencer Hart-Thompson (CFA’24), BA Music

Spencer Hart-Thompson‘s research focuses on creating student-oriented accommodations and pedagogies for physically disabled students, in order to promote equitability in music education. Spencer is also a physically disabled musician and composer, where he implements his own disability-oriented approach to music creation. After graduating, he aspires to continue his work as a singer-songwriter and disability advocate in music education and beyond.

Spencer’s project, “Music Through the Scope of Disability” is a social awareness musical tour organized, written, and performed by Spencer. As a disabled music student, Spencer’s goal is to create a performance that will provide his audience with an immersive experience into the music creation process through the lens of a student with disabilities. The performance aims to spread awareness regarding musicians with disabilities and discuss the disabled experience. Spencer and his project were featured in BU Today in the fall of 2023.

read bu today feature

Kimly Mengyin Wang (CFA’24), DMA Collaborative Piano

Pianist Kimly Mengyin Wang, currently pursuing a doctoral degree at Boston University under the tutelage of Shiela Kibbe, has a distinguished record as a performing artist, educator, and content creator. Born in China and educated in Germany and Canada, she holds degrees in Collaborative Piano and Solo Piano Performance from the University of Western Ontario, and a performance diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music.

Kimly has performed in North America, Europe, and China, and won awards at the KAWAI Music and Germany Youth Music Competitions. She’s passionate about vocal repertoire, evident in her roles as vocal coach and répétiteur at various institutions. Kimly champions cross-cultural education, having worked in China, and now leading the music department at Elton Academy in Toronto, guiding international students towards prestigious music institutions.

School of Theatre

Madeline Riddick-Seals (CFA’24), BFA Theatre Arts, Design & Production

Grand Prize Winner

Madeline Riddick-Seals is a theatre artist from Atlanta, Georgia dedicated to bridging her academic and artistic interests. In her time at Boston University, she has accumulated 14 credits as both a designer and director. Recent credits include scene designing F*cking A by suzan lori parks, and Little Row Boat; or, Conjecture by Kirsten Greenidge as well as directing various plays written by her peers.

Her current artistic practice explores the intersections of architecture, performance, memory, and ephemerality. Rooted in Black Southern tradition, she questions how art becomes an anti-colonial tool of cultural preservation and representation. This interest has culminated in a thesis project conducted through Kilachand Honors College that quilts research with oral history and artistic interpretations of her family’s homeplace in Alabama. She, simultaneously, began her journey in curatorial work while interning with the Department of Contemporary Art at the MFA Boston. After receiving her BFA in Theatre Arts with a minor in Art History this May, Madeline will continue on to work with the Live Arts Department at the MET Museum. At the MET she wishes to further her experience in the museum field and investigate the seam between curation and performance.  

Tommy Vines (CFA’24), BFA Theatre Arts, Performance

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Tommy Vines is a passionate and driven actor, playwright, screenwriter, movement artist, director, producer, and theatre maker. Tommy describes themself as “an existential, authentic, and joyous multi-hyphenate artist with 11+ years of experience dedicated to creating bold, visceral work. My work seeks to bring audiences into the present moment with me so we can be saved through the unyielding, beautiful, and demanding surrender to performance. I am interested in investigating theatre, experimenting with artistic forms, creating in as many different ways as I can, and having fun while doing it all.”

Tommy made their film debut as the lead (Dora) in Emmy-Nominated director Kate Novack’s Hysterical Girl. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award and was published by The New York Times Op-Docs. It was nominated for Best Short of the Year by the International Documentary Association and was a nominee for Best International Film at the Norwich Film Festival. In November 2023, Tommy made their professional regional theatrical debut with Actors’ Shakespeare Project (Teenage Greek Chorus) in How I Learned To Drive by Paula Vogel.

Select artistic credits include: i love you and i always will or charlie’s play (Writer, Director, Producer, and Lead Actor); The Trojan Women/Lysistrata (Devising Ensemble); The Hot L Baltimore (Jackie); Opulence (April); True Love Needs No Tricks (Arlecchino); Aurora Borealis ’22 & ’23 (Movement Artist); Miss Fortune (Betty); salome. (King Herod); Thumbelina (Sprocket the Toad); Satan At Walmart (Bucky); Mercury (Heather).

Tommy has written nine plays and is currently working on writing the first season of a new television series. They are proud alum of LaGuardia High School Drama, Accademia dell’Arte Physical Theater, and the Manhattan Film Institute.

School of Visual Arts

James Gold (CFA’24), MFA Painting

James Gold is an artist currently pursuing his MFA in Painting at Boston University, set to graduate in May 2024. He earned his BFA from Cooper Union, has received a Fulbright Research Grant to Italy, and has an upcoming residency at Mass MOCA. His paintings portray fragments of hypothetical archaeology, blending traditional techniques with the hyperreality of digital imagery. Through meticulous layering of materials and research into diverse subjects including the language of symbols, neuroscience, and the history of design, Gold creates compositions that prompt viewers to rethink the physicality of our contemporary world.

Words from James:

“At once ancient and futuristic, my paintings depict fragments of hypothetical archaeology. Their lustrous surfaces are created with traditional painting techniques, yet are influenced by the hyperreality of digital imagery, occupying a space between fact and fable. In my recent work, a papyrus scroll unfurls like a flag against a glowing coral background, an illusionistic black-and-white mosaic reveals swirling silhouetted artifacts, and an array of floating golden fragments on an electric-blue background suggests cartographic contours of islands and oceans. The cropped compositions imply that each painted object might extend infinitely beyond the edges…

…My studio is an alchemical laboratory where I explore the sensuality of diverse materials. Starting with a sandy-textured pigmented gesso, I layer India ink, egg tempera, and sign-painting enamel in a range of shimmering colors, using stamps, brushes, abrasives, and calligraphy pens to realize objects that appear found, even to me. Viewers are invited into a world of “willing suspension of disbelief” as color and form become trompe l’oeil fragments of marble, tapestry, and papyrus. I create my paintings with love and care, and as I foreground an imagined future, I invite viewers to rethink the physicality of our contemporary world.

Each painting grows out of in-depth research and prompts investigations into an ever-expanding web of topics. As I read about archaeology, the history of design, neuroscience, geology, and the language of symbols, I gather and condense information into the surfaces of my paintings, driven by a desire to freely share the excitement of my discovery with viewers. This cycle of expansion (through learning) and compression (through making) allows me to cast a wide net, as I explore the question: What does our historical imagination look like?

see more of james’ paintings

Emily Rice (CFA’24), MFA Print Media & Photography

Emily Taylor Rice is an artist and an educator with a BS and MA in Art Education. She is a 2024 MFA candidate in Print Media + Photography at Boston University College of Fine Arts. Her teaching experience includes K-12 art education both nationally and internationally in addition to leading printmaking workshops at Boston University.

Rice has exhibited her work at Boston University including Commonwealth Gallery, 808 Gallery, 1 Silber Way Gallery, and Rough Walls Gallery. Other exhibitions include VanDernoot Gallery, Roberts Gallery, Piano Craft Gallery, and Griffin Museum of Photography at Lafayette City Center Passageway, Boston, MA; the American International School of Kuwait; Indiana New Growth Arts Festival, Kipp Gallery, Indiana, PA; the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, DC; and internationally in Shanghai, China; Split, Croatia; and Kasterlee, Belgium. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Flemish Ministry of Culture in Belgium.

Rice has curated and co-curated exhibitions in Boston, MA, and has juried art competitions such as the YCIS Puxi Community Photography Competition in Shanghai, China. Her artist residencies include Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO, and the Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee, Belgium. Rice has garnered a variety of awards and honors for her scholarship and is a United States National Art Award Winner. She maintains a studio in Boston, Massachusetts.

Words from Emily:

The complicated narratives and often serious realities surrounding mental health and substance use disorders are what lie at the heart of my work. I navigate and reflect on the emotional geography that surrounds these experiences through the personal lens of alcoholism. Through photographs, monotype prints, collages, and silkscreen prints on found textiles, I aim to emphasize the force and oppression of addiction while acknowledging the release that can be found through acceptance and the choice of recovery.

Through abstraction and symbolism, I create visual metaphors that illustrate emotional complexity, struggle, growth, and strength. The concepts of time and memory are incorporated into my work through repetition and pattern. Processes of embossing and printing leave their traces, similar to how emotional upheavals leave scars that cannot be erased. Pigments collide with but also delicately caress surfaces, emulating feelings of both desperation and relief. I use printmaking as an artistic means of communication and as a form of activism. Addiction does not discriminate and I aim to provoke thoughtful responses, fostering empathy and understanding.

There is beauty in damage. Raw edges, breakage, and disruption in my pieces invite an examination of the painful aspects of addiction while rebuilding the works through sewing and collage allows for a new narrative to emerge. This interplay between deconstruction and reconstruction speaks to the space between dying and living. I highlight the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual transformations that can take place from addiction to recovery. Often an uncomfortable subject, I strive to dismantle assumptions and break down barriers to initiate truthful and constructive dialogue.

read about past years’ recipients