Fulbright Cites RISD as a Top Producer of Scholars
03/22/2013
RISD has emerged as a top producer of students who qualify for Fulbright grants, according to the US government’s leading sponsor of international exchanges. Seven recent graduates won Fulbrights for 2010–11, putting the college at the top of the list of Specialized Institutions with a strong record of educating highly qualified candidates. With one of every three RISD applicants winning this year, Fulbright recognized RISD for being a more prolific producer of scholars than such other art schools as Cranbrook, MICA, Julliard and Pratt, among others.
The successes of the top-producing colleges and universities is highlighted in the October 25 online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. This news is especially “exciting for the design world,” Metropolisnoted on its blog. “After a year of bolstering their creativity through comprehensive and sometimes radical research projects, …the chosen seven from RISD offer exciting prospects for the design world, as well as to society at large.”
This year’s “chosen seven” include Louie Rigano 10 ID, who is maintaining a great blog during his year in Japan, where he’s focusing on the design and fabrication of functional objects that reference wabi sabi philosophy. During his year in Australia, Matthew Perez MFA 10 GL is researching shape-induced stress factors in annealed glass and creating a new body of work. And Andrew Bearnot 09 GL, a RISD/Brown dual degree student who majored in Glass and Engineering, is in Sweden and Denmark exploring the relationship between tradition and innovation in contemporary Scandinavian glassmaking (he also won an American-Scandinavian Fellowship to support his research).
AlumniGigi Gatewood MFA 09 PH, Michael Hahn 08 ID, Sloan Kulper MID 06and Lindsey Meyer MArch 06 have also won Fulbrights to study in Trinidad/Tobago, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Morocco, respectively. Overall, 19 Fulbright applicants from RISD have won funding in the past five years, with a total of more than 50 RISD Fulbright winners in the past 15 years.
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