Marianela Vega Oroza

RTF MFA Student Marianela Vega Oroza, a 2007-2008 Jesse Jones Fellow in the UT Austin College of Communication, has been selected by the Cultural Center of Barcelona, Spain, for their program called “El Artista del mes” (“The artist of the month”). A selection of her documentary work will be shown at their gallery throughout the month of December 2007.

Shara Lange

Shara, UT RTF MFA alum, was awarded a Fulbright to make the documentary The Dressmakers. The project will commence in September, 2007.

The Dressmakers, envisioned as an hour-long documentary, contrasts the slow pace of artisanal clothes-making with the fast pace of the competitive textiles industry in Morocco, inviting a re-examination of the values represented by the clothing that people wear.

The Dressmakers tells the story of two women, each in a different sector of the Morroccan textiles industry, documents their work, and reveals the personal impact of globalization on women in a developing country.

Shara was also awarded a Critical Language Enhancement Award to study Arabic in conjunction with the Fulbright Fellowship.

More about Shara and her work.

Hala Aboudaher

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Photojournalism major Hala Aboudaher was selected as the first recipient of the Helen M. Powell Traveling fellowship, awarded by the Journalism School at UT Austin. Hala traveled to Mozambique with a church group, during the summer of 2007, to document the effects of AIDS on children and families.

Eli Kaplan

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Photojournalism student Eli Kaplan won a prestigious Student Work award from PDN (Photo District News). This award, announced in May in the PDN Photo Annual 2007, honored Eli for his work documenting the decline of cattle ranching in McDade, Texas. The project, entitled, “Dry Spell: End of an Agricultural Lineage,” was completed in Professor Eli Reed’s Introduction to Photojournalism class.