Musician Nadia Sirota’s won the Meadows Prize for her work as a violinist. (Courtesy of chrismcgovern.wordpress.com)
SMU Meadows School of the Arts annually chooses two recipients to be awarded the prestigious Meadows Prize.
The award was first given in Oct. 2009, and two new recipients are annually chosen.
According to Meadows, “recipients of the award are pioneering artists and scholars who posses an emerging international profile, are active in a discipline represented by one of the academic units within Meadows School of the Arts.”
The academic units within Meadows include advertising, art, art history, arts administration, cinema-television, corporate communications, dance, journalism, music and theatre.
The honor is sponsored by the Meadows School and The Meadows School Foundation, each prize winner is awarded pay for a month’s rent in Dallas and a $25,000 stipend.
Additionally, the winners perform in Dallas and work with Meadows students.
This year, the winners are two women, interdisciplinary artist Tania Bruguera, and musician Nadia Sirota.
Sirota has been living in New York as a violist, while balancing an Internet streaming radio show.
“I work with so any different composers and bands and ensembles and groups and most of the time I am sort of identifying as one part of a whole…it’s not that often I get to kind of step back and think about how it is I have put together a career in music via all of these angles,” Sirota said.
She spent six years at Julliard studying and earning a Masters degree.
In addition to performing classical concert music, Sirota’s talents can be heard on recent albums by Grizzly Bear, Jónsi, The National Ratatat, and Arcade Fire’s Grammy-winning album “The Suburbs.”
Her goals towards her upcoming career at SMU are to teach Meadows students the elements of her educational career that she never got a chance to pick up herself.
Matt Albert, the Visiting-artist-on-Residence and Director of Chamber Music at Meadows explained that, “The Meadows Prize is about recognizing people kind of coming into a major career and that’s exactly where Nadia is.”
Nadia is one of the founders of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and released her debut album, “First”, which became New York Times 2009 record of the year.
The second winner, Tania Bruguera is a performance artist who wants to influence politics through her artwork.
Bruguera defines her method through the terms “arte de conducta,” meaning conduct or behavior art, and “arte útil,” which refers to useful art.
She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and studied at Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba.
Bruguera was born in Cuba and has showcased her work worldwide.
A few of the locations where she has exhibited her art include Shanghai, Venice and Sao Paolo.
Currently she is an Assistant Professor at The University of Chicago in their Department of Visual Arts.
Bruguera founded Arte de Conducta, which is a program at her Alma Mater in Havana.
Sirota will be at SMU April 1-14, 2013 and Oct. 7-19 and Bruguera will stay April 7-20, 2013 and Sept. 22-Oct. 5.
