Heidi Kumao Named Faculty Fellow at Institute for the Humanities

The Institute for the Humanities at U‑M has awarded fellowships for the 2019 – 20 academic year to nine faculty members, including Stamps professor Heidi Kumao. 

The Faculty Fellowship Program at the Institute for the Humanities provides faculty members with a release from teaching and service duties to pursue their research interests. Fellows are in residence at the Institute for the full academic year, becoming members of a vibrant interdisciplinary community of creators, scholars, and researchers. Past fellows from the Stamps School include Phoebe Gloeckner and Jim Cogswell. 

During the 2019 – 20 academic year, Professor Heidi Kumao will focus on her project Real and Imagined: Animating the Spaces Between Us. Using experimental animations, pose-able puppets, and sewn drawings, Real and Imagined gives physical form to emotion, memory, and relationship dynamics. By translating these intangible experiences into visual narratives, it challenges viewers to rethink the vocabulary used to tell personal stories. Serving as a bridge between different fields of inquiry, this project explores the intersection of visual storytelling, mechanical sculpture, and cognitive science through a feminist lens. By focusing on representations and experiences of (older) women, it seeks to redress their absence from most art, technology, and popular culture. Work produced during this fellowship year will be exhibited in a solo gallery exhibition in 2020 in New York City.

Institute for the Humanities names fellows for summer and 2019 – 20 | University Record