The Office of Research and Creative Scholarship is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award.
This year’s recipients are Rashin Fahandej, Assistant Professor in Visual and Media Arts, and Dr. Gina Gayle, Assistant Professor of Visual and Multimedia Storytelling in the Journalism Department. Professor Fahandej is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and the public in generating social change. She will use the Mann Stearns Award to support a summer exhibition in San Francisco of A Father’s Lullaby— a VR-based series of interactive public installations and community engaged workshops that highlight the role of men in raising children, and the impact of their absences on families due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Dr. Gayle is a photojournalist, educator, and researcher with interests in media credibility, the future of photojournalism, and digital media entrepreneurship. Her father, the late James F. Gayle, was a pioneering photojournalist and one of a very few Black photographers documenting Black history in Cleveland and the country during the 1960’s. The Mann Stearns award will support her efforts to preserve, catalog, and archive Mr. Gayle’s work, which will culminate in multimedia installations in the Cleveland neighborhoods and Black communities that Gayle photographed.
About the Mann Stearns Award: Several years ago, the late Dr. Norman Stearns and Irma Mann Stearns established a distinguished faculty award in their name to honor a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in recognition of outstanding scholarly or creative achievement. A $3,000 award is presented annually to at least one applicant. This funding may be used to enhance an ongoing project or for the development of a new scholarly or creative endeavor. Travel is strongly encouraged to be a part of the project activity.