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The Daily Hub

A roundup of ideas and projects from around the Institute

  • Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, MFA Communications Design ’15, created illustrations and animations for Bravespace, a compilation released this month by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. It includes original songs, sounds, and meditations created by Asian American women and non-binary artists and musicians.

  • Lilian Thomas Burwell, who studied art education at Pratt from 1944 to 1946, was featured in a New York Times article on the oldest one percent of the workforce. At 95, she recently had an exhibition and discussed her long career as an art teacher: “I said to myself, ‘I’m really somebody.’ Not because of who I am. But because of who I made.”

  • Nick Higgins, MSLIS ’08, Karen Keys, MSLIS ’07, and Leigh Hurwitz, MSLIS ’13, are Library Journal Librarians of the Year for their work at the Brooklyn Public Library to fight book banning efforts across the country. Higgins, the chief librarian, said: “We wanted to resituate that conversation about freedom to read and intellectual freedom where it belongs, in public libraries and in schools.”

  • School of Information students in Projects in Digital Archives made significant additions to the Lesbian Herstory Archives online collections, including the restoration of a 1980 film strip that is one of the early uses of multimedia to teach people about LGBTQ+ communities.

  • Animation pioneer Bessie Mae Kelley, who enrolled at Pratt to study art in 1910, has been newly recognized as one of the first women to hand-draw films, work that had long been overlooked. Recent research on her legacy was highlighted by NPR and the New York Times.

  • Ron Shiffman, professor emeritus in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), was interviewed on WBAI radio about his over 50 years of planning work in New York City neighborhoods, including as a co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development.

  • Dezeen highlighted a Staten Island animal shelter designed by Garrison Architects led by James Garrison, adjunct professor in Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD), that involves locally made materials and animal-friendly features: “Animal shelters are interesting buildings—they reflect broadly our values and relationship to nature.”

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