Collin Riggins and Juliette Carbonnier
Class of 2024 members Juliette Carbonnier and Collin Riggins are the latest recipients of the Martin A. Dale '53 Fellowship, which funds yearlong independent projects for members of each senior class in the year following their graduation. The two students began their work this summer.
The Dale Fellowship, created by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin Dale, provides a $40,000 grant to spend a year on “an independent project of extraordinary merit that will widen the recipient's experience of the world and significantly enhance the student's personal growth and intellectual development.”
Ten Princeton sophomores also received $7,000 Dale Summer Award stipends for smaller projects they completed over the summer. The 2024 Dale Summer Award recipients are: Ozzie Bayazitoglu, Danielle Bejerano, Laurie Drayton, Oyu Enkhbold, Zehma Herring, Nandini Krishnan, Ammon Love, Simon Marotte, Joe McCauley and Dane Utley.
Juliette Carbonnier
Carbonnier graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in English and certificates in creative writing, music theater and theater. She is a writer, performer, musician and designer whose Princeton credits include theatrical productions at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Theatre Intime and the Princeton Triangle Club.
For her Dale project, she is writing a one-woman play with music inspired by the legacy of her ancestors, some of whom were progressive Yiddish performers, comedians and composers, while others were Holocaust survivors.
Her piece will “explore the dissonances between art and trauma, comedy and tragedy, memory and reality, honoring the past while being true to the present,” Carbonnier said.
She will use tropes and traditions of Yiddish theater — including comedic shtick and songs written by her family members — as inspirations, and hopes to untangle stories from her family's past “to grapple with what it means to yearn for a place that no longer exists and how to instead find home in story and song,” she said.
“Our world is wracked with anger, grief and suffering. It is the privilege, honor and challenge of artists to offer space to mourn, empathize, celebrate, create community, and share hope that we can all slowly, but surely, march towards a better world,” Carbonnier wrote in her Dale application essay.
In her letter of recommendation for the award, Stacy Wolf, professor of theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and American studies, called Carbonnier’s project a “perfect expansion and extension of her time at Princeton, as a student, an artist and a person.”
“It unites her family history with the history of Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. It ties together pathos and humor — a definite marker of Juliette’s style as a writer,” Wolf wrote.
Carbonnier is currently traveling across Central and Eastern Europe for research. She will then examine and translate family documents and sheet music from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. She is learning Yiddish through the Workers Circle, a nonprofit social activist and Yiddish cultural organization there.
For her English thesis at Princeton, Carbonnier wrote, co-produced, co-designed and starred in “Bodywork,” a dark comedy about a young woman with chronic pain who becomes eligible for a new body-swapping surgery. She also wrote a poetry collection, "Funeral Theatrics," through the Program in Creative Writing.
During her time at Princeton, she served as artistic director of Quipfire! Improv Comedy, a resident artist with the Nassau Literary Review and a writer for the Princeton Triangle Club and All-Nighter.
Carbonnier has received several honors from the Department of English, most recently the 2024 Alan S. Downer Prize. She also won this year's Lewis Center’s Francis LeMoyne Page Theater Award and was recognized by the center for outstanding work her first, sophomore, junior and senior years.
Collin Riggins
Riggins graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in African American studies and a certificate in visual arts. A film photographer and conceptual artist, he also served as a media and communications assistant for the Department of African American Studies, an undergraduate course assistant for visiting lecturer Majora Carter’s "The Reclamation Studio," and a co-host of the AAS Podcast.
For his Dale project, “Cotton Stains,” Riggins is producing a collection of black-and-white analog photographs of Black cotton farmers. He is also working to develop a public art studio in Garysburg, North Carolina, to support creatives in the area.
In his application essay for the Dale award, Riggins described first connecting in 2022 with Julius Tillery, a fifth-generation cotton farmer and founder of BlackCotton — a connection that would later serve as the backbone of his thesis research.
After making many trips to Garysburg, where Tillery is based, Riggins invited his great-grandmother, who grew up sharecropping in the region, to visit those same fields. Riggins said her positive, emotional reaction was a testament to how these communities "have pioneered empowering relationships with cotton that fundamentally complicate how the plant — and agriculture — is often understood in our collective memory.”
“I witnessed the spiritual potential of challenging painful memories that encourage our repression. This reclamation, of cotton and its memory, is precisely what I aim to accomplish as a Martin A. Dale '53 Fellow,” Riggins wrote in his Dale application essay.
By showing these underrepresented realities in and around North Carolina, and tending to their many complexities, Riggins aims to “celebrate cotton culture through the camera,” he wrote.
In her letter of recommendation for the award, Autumn Womack, associate professor of African American Studies and English, praised Riggins' proposal as an evolution of his multiyear research on the relationship between African Americans and cotton.
“When Collin describes 'Cotton Stains' as a visual monograph that intervenes into the historical narratives of race and cotton by ‘resisting dominant capitulations of cotton to chase its memory in all its depth,’ I hear him describing the work of creating a counter archive,” Womack said. "Collin always understands artists, makers, and community members as theorists of their own lives and futures.”
Riggins said the Garysburg studio will create arts infrastructure in the greater Northampton County area by providing young artists with creative programming and opportunities.
On campus, Riggins served on the Department of African American Studies undergraduate board of advisers, as a research associate with the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab and as a residential college adviser in Forbes College. He also co-founded the Black Arts Collective with Class of 2023 graduate Omar Jason Farah in 2022.
Riggins has exhibited at numerous campus, nonprofit and professional art galleries, most recently becoming the first artist-in-residence with Art on the Block NYC in Harlem. He will premiere photographs from “Cotton Stains” at Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in spring 2025 in a joint exhibition, “Blue prints, cotton stains,” with Class of 2024 graduate Max Diallo Jakobsen.
Among his other honors, Riggins won the University Center for Human Values' 2022 Short Movie Prize and the 2024 Ruth J. Simmons African American Studies Thesis Prize.
