A journalist and filmmaker-turned-assistant professor and an award-winning flutist and bandleader who teaches music have earned Guggenheim Fellowships to pursue their arts.
Mamadou Dia and Nicole Mitchell, both from the University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of the Arts & Sciences, are among the 171 American and Canadian scholars, writers, artists and scientists recognized this year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. They were selected from a nearly 2,500 applicants.
Both Dia and Mitchell are recent additions to UVA faculty.
“UVA is committed to being an academic home for artists, teachers and researchers who push the boundaries of their art and scholarly work,” Provost Ian Baucom said. “Professor Mitchell and professor Dia each bring great talent and creativity to the Grounds, and I look forward to seeing and hearing the work they will produce with the support of their Guggenheim Fellowships.”
Dia is an award-winning film director from Senegal, a screenwriter and former journalist who now teaches as an assistant professor of practice in the departments of French and Media Studies.
Before transitioning to making feature films, Dia was a newspaper and video journalist based in Dakar, Senegal, working for Agence France-Presse and other international news agencies in Africa and Europe. Completing his third year on UVA’s faculty, Dia first moved to the United States to complete his Master of Fine Arts in writing and directing at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts.
“In the end, I always find a way to tell stories with images. Filmmaking allows me to bring more complexity and nuance to the stories I want to tell,” said Dia, co-founder of the production company Joyedidi with his business partner, Maba Ba. “I’m not interested in superheroes or stories of ‘super resilient’ people who come from nothing and climb to the top of the world. I like to make movies about people who are normal people who are heroes of their own lives.”
Dia said he will use his Guggenheim Fellowship funds to support research for his ambitious new feature-length project, a period film based in part on the life of African American photographer Augustus Washington.
The son of a former slave, Washington embraced the abolitionist movement and was one of the few African American daguerreotypists, early photographers who produced their work on silver or silver-covered copper plates. Washington moved to the West African nation of Liberia with his wife and two small children in late 1853 and eventually opened daguerrean studios in Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Senegal, as well as Liberia.
Andrea Press, UVA’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology, said that the Department of Media Studies faculty are extremely proud to have Dia as a colleague.
