Fellowship to support artistic activism in India
Meredith Starkman, the 2016 recipient of the Wallenberg Fellowship, plans on using the arts as tools for improving people’s lives and promoting social justice in India. The award is given each spring to a graduating senior with exceptional promise and accomplishment who is committed to service and the public good.
The fellowship provides graduating seniors with $25,000 to carry out an independent project of learning or exploration anywhere in the world during the year after graduation. Starkman plans to go to India to work with groups that use music, dance, theatre and the visual arts to improve the lives of people living along the margins of society.
A theatre performance major, Starkman initially became intrigued with this idea while taking a class called “Theatre and Incarceration” that offered theater workshops once a week at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only women’s prison in the state. “It was totally life changing,” she said. “It really taught me that theater isn’t one thing, and it isn’t supposed to be done in one way and that you can ask questions in a purposeful way—in a way I’d say answers them without answering them.”
After the course ended, she joined a small group of students who traveled to Rio de Janeiro to study how art can impact oppressive systems of power. The group also participated in workshops in prisons and slums in a program funded by U-M’s Brazil Initiative.
The Wallenberg Fellowship honors one of U-M’s most illustrious graduates: Raoul Wallenberg, who graduated with a degree in architecture in 1935. As a Swedish diplomat during World War II, he saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary, using safe houses and creating special passports for them.
“The way he approached helping people was so powerful and effective, because he didn’t do it for himself,” Starkman said. “I think it was always with other people in mind and always coming from a place of listening and then from a place of giving. I am humbled that the fellowship I have received is in his name.”
