2021-2022 CSW Student Award Recipients
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021-2022 CSW Student Awards and Fellowships!
CSW is proud to celebrate the achievements of UCLA graduate and undergraduate students who conduct groundbreaking research and activism around issues related to women and gender. The 2021-2022 recipients will be honored during the 2022 Awards Celebration on May 18, 2022.
Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship
Funded by the late Penny Kanner, a longtime CSW Research Affiliate, this Fellowship helps fund an exceptional dissertation research project pertaining to women or gender that uses historical materials and methods.
Alexis Rae Coopersmith
Alexis began her career as a first-generation college student attending community college in Sacramento, California, before transferring to UC San Diego. There, she began writing about politics in sub-Saharan Africa for an undergraduate journal and conducted an honors thesis on women’s representation in the region. As a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA, she researches political violence, war, and its impacts on women in politics in East Africa. She has taught courses on the sociology of violence, women in war, and mass violence in the modern world.
Rebecca Waxman
Rebecca Waxman is a PhD student at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia with a concentration in Gender Studies. Her work aims to connect occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in modern South Asia, looking at continuities and discontinuities in Indian social, political, and feminist histories across the colonial/postcolonial divide. She earned her BA with Honors in History from Wesleyan University in 2016. Her writing has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations, forthcoming.
Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Graduate and Undergraduate Awards
Funded by Mrs. Jean Stone and named for the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, the Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Award recognizes an outstanding research report, thesis, or article related to women and health or women in health-related endeavors.
Jordan Parker (Graduate Award Recipient)
Jordan Parker is a doctoral student in Health Psychology at UCLA. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Psychology and a minor in African and African American Studies. Her graduate research seeks to apply an intersectionality framework to the psychological study of body image and eating behaviors in Black women. For example, she is particularly interested in how experiences of gendered racism or gendered colorism affect body image, how they may subsequently influence eating behaviors, and how they longitudinally contribute to disordered eating and related health disparities.
Mira Joan Qureshi (Undergraduate Award Recipient)
Mira Qureshi is a fourth-year UCLA student who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Human Biology and Society with a minor in Global Health. She works as an undergraduate researcher at Dr. Wagman’s lab under UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health where she is passionate about examining the barriers women have in obtaining sexual and reproductive health services. Mira is also the president of The Global Uplift Project club at UCLA where she has funded initiatives such as a reusable menstrual kit project in Kenya and a birthing center in Nepal, in order to increase women’s access to sexual and reproductive health services.
Jean Stone Dissertation Research Fellowship
Jean Stone cared deeply about the graduate students whose research embodied the promise of the next generation of feminist scholars. The Jean Stone Research Dissertation Fellowship provides support for a doctoral student engaged in research focusing on women and/or gender.
Amira Hassnaoui
Born and raised in Tunis, Tunisia, Amira Hassnaoui is a PhD candidate in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Her work aims to demystify trance healing music rituals practiced by Black Tunisians. She incorporates film and photography in her research, and she aspires to create a hybrid project that features a museum exhibition of the material culture of these idioms. She received a MA in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University in 2017, where she was President of the Graduate Student Senate and the Graduate Women’s Caucus.
Alana de Hinojosa
Alana de Hinojosa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. She is a Ford Foundation and IUPLR/Mellon Fellow whose research is concerned with histories of displacement, diaspora, and refusal and what these have to do with the meandering Río Grande that caused the century-long Chamizal Land Dispute along the El Paso-Cd. Juarez borderlands. Alana’s attention rests on those who are often removed from this land dispute’s official record—those often deemed irrelevant or inconvenient to the telling of this story. This means she emphasizes the stories of el Chamizal’s diverse marginalized stakeholders, including an ongoing legacy of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American Chamizal women who have led and organized multiple generations of Chamizal communities to rebel against forced displacement, dispossession, and uneven development.
Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship
Funded by Jean Stone and named in honor of her daughter, the Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship supports research that focuses on women and the law with preference given to research on women in the criminal/legal justice system.
Monica Ramsy
Monica (she/they) is a sociology doctoral candidate at UCLA focusing on law, gender, and carcerality. Their research examines the intersection between the implementation of US restorative and transformative justice responses to gender-based violence and race, gender, and (dis)ability. Monica received their JD from Berkeley Law and BA in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Following law school, Monica worked as a deportation defense attorney at Asian Law Caucus, focusing on cases challenging the deportation of immigrant communities targeted for policing and immigration enforcement.
Constance Coiner Graduate and Undergraduate Awards
These awards honor the lives of Dr. Constance Coiner, 48, and her daughter, Ana Duarte-Coiner, 12, who perished on TWA flight #800 in June of 1996. Made possible through donations of family and friends, these awards support research on feminist and working-class issues, and honor excellence in teaching and a commitment to teaching as activism.
Krystal Ledesma (Graduate Award Recipient)
Krystal Ledesma is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies. Her research areas include Classic Hollywood, archival research, and Mexican American/Chicana/o images in film. She’s interested in the relationship between 1940s Mexican American/Chicana/o activism, events such as the Sleepy Lagoon Murder and Zoot Suit Riots, the Hollywood Left and the representation of Mexican American/Chicana/os on-screen. In 2019 she served as a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Project intern at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Film Archive.
Lucia Santina Ribisi (Undergraduate Award Recipient)
As a feminist environmental media scholar, activist, and artist, Lucia Santina Ribisi investigates effective ways to influence public discourse about justice. On the frontlines of environmental justice, they have lived in Giant Redwood tree tops to defend forests from ecocide. On the frontlines of reproductive justice, they are a consent educator and doula. Their live performances, lectures, writing, and videos blend stories of troubled ecologies with meditations on collective healing for creatures and ecosystems. Community and care are essential to the sustainability of their activist art practice and they love mentoring teens.
Brooklyn Oxandaboure (Undergraduate Award Recipient)
Brooklyn Oxandaboure is a third year undergraduate student majoring in Gender Studies with a double minor in Labor Studies and Community Engagement and Social Change. She is a native to the San Bernardino area, and her interest in community organizing stems from her experiences in her hometown. She is currently researching the gendered dynamics of knowledge production among Latin American liberation theologists after the Second Vatican Council. Brooklyn hopes to continue her education, and ultimately join the professoriate, while continuing her community-engaged work in working-class communities.
Renaissance Awards
A former CSW Research Affiliate, Dr. Myrna Hant received her PhD in Higher Education from UCLA. Dr. Hant created and funds the Myrna Hant Renaissance Award, which is a scholarship that rewards the rebirth of academic aspirations among women whose college careers were interrupted or delayed by family and/or career obligations and encourages achievement in the pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at UCLA. The Holly J. Mitchell Renaissance Award is sponsored by CSW in honor of our 2021 Distinguished Leader in Feminism awardee, Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell.
Serena McCullough (Holly J. Mitchell Renaissance Award Recipient)
Serena N. McCullough is graduating Summa Cum Laude from UCLA with a BA in History and a minor in Philosophy, focusing on the impact created by powerful and influential women both politically and socially throughout history. As a leader in Toastmasters, she has been able to assist other young women to learn and improve their leadership and communication skills. Her ultimate goal is to help other women create a positive and lasting influence on our society. Serena hopes to expand her efforts as she continues her education in jurisprudence.
Cole Lopez (Myrna Hant Renaissance Award Recipient)
Cole Lopez is a queer, single parent to two young children, Daniel and Calista. They originally left college due to an abusive relationship and moved to Avignon, France for five years where they ran their own used bookstore. Upon returning to the United States to flee the relationship, they re-enrolled in college and eventually transferred from Los Angles Pierce College to UCLA where they earned a degree in Gender Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies. They currently work as an artist/writer for OutWrite Magazine and were accepted into UCLA’s doctoral program.
Janine O’Barr (Myrna Hant Renaissance Award Recipient)
Janine O’Barr came to UCLA as a third-year transfer student and is majoring in sociology. Her interests include social psychology, gender stereotypes, and children’s behavior. After she graduates in 2023, she would like to work in counseling in an educational setting. She also enjoys beach days when it is cold outside.
Black Feminism Initiative (BFI) Graduate Fellowships
The CSW Black Feminism Initiative (BFI) has established two fellowships to support intellectual work that centers black feminist frameworks of analysis. These fellowships honor and continue the work of Dr. Alisa Bierria, whose scholarship explores race, gendered violence, and anticarceral approaches to justice, and the work of Mariame Kaba, a writer and activist renowned for her organizing and leadership around prison abolition, gendered interpersonal and state violence, and transformative justice.
Sonya Brooks
Sonya Brooks is a PhD student who is a passionate advocate for the health and well-being of Black girls. Her research lies at the intersections of education and the impact that intergenerational oral stories and narratives have on their academic and health outcomes. Brooks graduated from UCLA in 2019 and from Brown University in 2021 and was chosen to be the 2021 Graduate Commencement Speaker. Sonya is known for her engaging and energetic personality and loves reading, gardening, roller skating, and most of all, her faith and her three children.
Jeanette Charles
Jeanette Charles is a proud daughter of the Haitian Diaspora raised by working-class Black and Brown Los Angeles. She is a Black internationalist and anti-imperialist scholar pursuing her PhD in History. Her work seeks to build bridges with movements globally and document their revolutionary legacies. Her focus is on the African Diaspora with an emphasis on grassroots movements, religion, and political economy. She is a long-time solidarity organizer, independent journalist, human rights advocate, popular educator, and delegation coordinator. She is also a certified coach and founder of Ìyá Global.
Dominique Montgomery
Dominique Mikell Montgomery, a scholar deeply committed to highlighting the historical and present-day lived experiences and acts of resistance of Black families in the United States, is currently a doctoral candidate in social welfare within the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Dominique’s research interests include the experiences of individuals and families impacted by the child welfare system, Black studies, and participatory research methods. Her dissertation aims to utilize literature from the womanist cannon as a foundation upon which youth in foster care can redefine wellness.
Travel Grants
Funded through donations from friends and supporters of the Center for the Study of Women, CSW Travel Grants assist graduate and undergraduate UCLA students with travel expenses related to academic or professional conference presentations and field research on women, gender, and sexuality.
Fall 2021 Travel Grants
Jeanette Charles
Jeanette Charles is a proud daughter of the Haitian Diaspora raised by working-class Black and Brown Los Angeles. She is a Black internationalist and anti-imperialist scholar pursuing her PhD in History. Her work seeks to build bridges with movements globally and document their revolutionary legacies. Her focus is on the African Diaspora with an emphasis on grassroots movements, religion, and political economy. She is a long-time solidarity organizer, independent journalist, human rights advocate, popular educator, and delegation coordinator. She is also a certified coach and founder of Ìyá Global.
Nicola Chavez Courtright
Nicola Chávez Courtright (she/they) is a PhD student in the Anthropology, Psychocultural/Medical Track. They are interested in political emotions among LGBTQI social movements in El Salvador and how these collectives mobilize historical memory to imagine new political horizons. Nicola is one of the founders of AMATE, El Salvador’s first LGBTQI archive. Their work has appeared in GLQ, Cultural Anthropology, Buzzfeed News and NACLA, among others.
Jessica Fremland
Jessica Fremland (she/her(s)) is a Wahpetunwan (Wah-pay-too-wahn) Dakota scholar in her third year of UCLA’s Gender Studies PhD program. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Minnesota, and a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Her current research draws on Dakota feminist traditions and theorizations to illuminate performance, crafting, and embodied sensory aesthetics as important sites of decolonial struggle. These cultural forms highlight both the endurance of gendered forms of colonial violence and the unrelenting tactics of resistance and worlding engaged by Dakota women and two-spirit relatives.
Alana de Hinojosa
Alana de Hinojosa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. She is a Ford Foundation and IUPLR/Mellon Fellow whose research is concerned with histories of displacement, diaspora, and refusal and what these have to do with the meandering Río Grande that caused the century-long Chamizal Land Dispute along the El Paso-Cd. Juarez borderlands. Alana’s attention rests on those who are often removed from this land dispute’s official record—those often deemed irrelevant or inconvenient to the telling of this story. This means she emphasizes the stories of el Chamizal’s diverse marginalized stakeholders, including an ongoing legacy of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American Chamizal women who have led and organized multiple generations of Chamizal communities to rebel against forced displacement, dispossession, and uneven development.
Kourtney Kawano
Kourtney Kawano (she/her) is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) wahine (woman). She is a second-year doctoral student in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education division of UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. She draws upon her experiences as a former high-school English teacher to explore the potential of Native Hawaiian culture-based education efforts to cultivate pathways for praxis and sovereignty. Additionally, Kourtney seeks to advance scholarship on Kanaka ʻŌiwi identity development through conceptualizations of a Native Hawaiian feminist epistemology and Kanaka ʻŌiwi critical race theory.
Kira Maszewski
Kira Maszewski grew up in Stockton, CA and went to UCLA for undergrad where she completed a degree in biology. She is currently a graduate student in the department of African American Studies. As a graduate student, she is conducting research regarding nutrition and Black women’s heart health. In July, she will be attending UCSF School of Medicine as a member of the class of 2026.
Slaveya Minkova
Slaveya Minkova is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where she also received her MA degree in 2018. Previously she attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she received a BFA in Film/Video/New Media in 2013. Her current research examines the complexities of postsocialist aesthetics within globalized film industries in South East Europe. Her dissertation project considers the relationship between film studio and city, the geopolitics of international/ transnational sets, and the material conditions of digital media labor.
Spring 2022 Travel Grants
Dani Heffernan
Dani Heffernan is a graduate student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA. Her research focuses on language ideologies, gender, voice, and identity, with a specific interest in trans-feminine speakers’ voice modification practices. While at UCLA, she has received a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellowship and a Graduate Research Mentorship fellowship. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Dani worked as a media relations and communications strategist with nonprofit organizations addressing LGBTQ+ media representation and climate justice. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Hunter College.
Charlotte Abel
Charlotte is a medical sociology PhD candidate in the sociology department. Her research is at the intersection of reproductive health care, motherhood, and disaster response. She has four current projects- one examining the effects of COVID-19 on biomedicalized childbirth and reproductive future prospections, a collaboration with Dr. Desi Small Rodriguez analyzing COVID-19’s effects on reproduction for Indigenous mothers, and a project that examines doctor/patient interactions and resident/attending training in a reproductive psychiatric care facility. She is also birthworker serving the LA area.
Anna Watts
Anna Watts is an MFA playwriting candidate at UCLA with a BFA in acting from Hofstra University. Her first play, Stalling, awarded her the Highest Honor Distinction at Hofstra, and has had two staged readings and a workshop in NYC. Anna’s play Two is A Prime Number has had workshops at Dixon Place and Theater For The New City. Anna was a finalist for “best play”, for The One Minute Play Festival, at the LIC One Act Theater Festival. Anna is a recipient of the Fine Arts Trust Award, funding research in Nepal for her play Because It’s There. Anna just wrapped her first short film, “Tits, Ass, and Brains”.
Sara Schiff
Sara Schiff (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program at UCLA. She earned her B.S. from Tufts University and previously worked in the University of Southern California’s Health, Emotion, and Addiction lab. Sara’s research examines risk and protective factors for the development of conduct problems (e.g., aggression, delinquency) in girls as, historically, much of the literature on conduct problem development focuses on boys. In particular, she is interested in the connection between positive and negative peer relationship factors and the emergence of conduct problems throughout adolescence.
Gabriela Valencia
Gabriela Corona Valencia is a PhD candidate and doctoral student instructor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Her research highlights how the socialization of objectification is linked to eugenicist educational practices of control, containment, and surveillance that have affected Latina women’s access to their sexual citizenship throughout time, space, and place. Before her doctoral academic journey, Gabriela obtained her BA in Chicana/o studies with a minor in Anthropology from CSU Dominguez Hills and her MA from the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.
Oraison Larmon
Oraison H. Larmon is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Larmon’s research centers around bodies, records and archives with specific focus on twentieth century performance art in the Americas. Their dissertation “Trans- Figural Records*: Trans Bodies Across, Through and Beyond Archives” examines trans visual artists who create performances about gender variant bodies that have been excluded from archives. Previously, Larmon worked as an archivist at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (New York University)—a network of artists, scholars and activists from across the Americas who address social justice issues through performance research.
