2022-2023 CSW|Streisand Center Award Recipients
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022-2023 CSW|Streisand Center Awards and Fellowships!
CSW|Streisand Center is proud to celebrate the achievements of UCLA awards recipients who conduct groundbreaking research and activism around issues related to women and gender. The 2022-2023 recipients will be honored during the 2023 Awards Celebration on May 19, 2023.
View photos from the event (Facebook)
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.
Wei Si Nic Yiu / 姚煒詩 (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender Studies, who also received a master of arts in gender studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Their current research project explores what a concept of quiet could mean to queering Asian cultures of resistance. Their work is informed and inspired by their own experiences of migration as a queer Asian in Hong Kong, Beijing, Toronto, and now Los Angeles. Their research is impossible without the visionary world-making capacity of Black feminist and queer-of-color critique scholarship. They are a core member of the Black Feminism Initiative at the Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center.
Sean Sugai (he/him/his) is a first-generation college student double majoring in human biology and society and anthropology with a minor in public health. Born and raised in Waipahu and Pearl City, Hawai’i, Sean researches the US empire in the Pacific to understand how the liberation of people must be situated within the liberation of lands, skies, and oceans. He is also committed to queer liberation in the Pacific through archipelagic feminisms and Afro-Asian-Indigenous relationalities to challenge gendered and racial colonial violence against non-normative bodies.
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.
Jenny Lopez is a third-year transfer student, feminist scholar, and activist. Lopez is a member of the UCLA College Honors Program and a double major in gender studies and communications. Her discipline focuses on the values of community, diversity, and resilience. As she pursues higher education and creates more work as a scholar, she will continue to expand on the concepts and research taught in the fields of gender studies and communications throughout her career and academic journey.
Dana Salah is a first-generation, non-traditional undergraduate student majoring in gender studies. Dana grew up in Northeast Kansas and Bahrain and moved to Los Angeles in 2006 when she was eighteen years old. During her initial attempt at finishing her four-year degree, Dana dropped out of college to get a second job due to the 2008 financial crisis. Eleven years later, she re-enrolled at Santa Monica College and transferred to UCLA in the fall of 2021. Dana will graduate in June 2023 with her bachelor’s degree.
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.
Thalia Ertman is a PhD student in the UCLA History Department specializing in US feminist history. Her work examines feminist anti- nuclear activists in the 1970s–1990s and how conceptions of bodily autonomy shaped their organizing. She is particularly interested in instances of localized actions against nuclear weapons and power that were organized around concerns about women’s bodies. Thalia received her BA in history and Chinese language from the University of Southern California in 2014 and a dual MA/MSc in international history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2017.
Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish history. Her work explores diasporic memory and transmission, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews alongside the poet’s own family histories. Poetry publication venues include poets.org, Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, and JuxtaProse, and prose publications include The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, and Comedia Performance.
Taryn Marcelino is a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Their research interests include visual studies, queer of color critique, and contemporary French cultural studies. Their current research focuses on the memory of slavery through cultural artifacts and archives in France and its implications on the discourse of white supremacy and abolition in the contemporary. The Penny Kanner award will fund their archival research in Nantes, France. They hold a bachelor’s degree in sociology-international studies with a minor in French literature from UC San Diego.
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.
Anna Fiastro is a doctoral student at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Her research focuses on sexual and reproductive health, exploring opportunities to expand access to abortion care through the implementation of new technologies, provider practices, and health policies. She has experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods as well as implementation science approaches. Ms. Fiastro worked at the Los Angeles Department of Health Services, was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Brazil, and completed her MPH and master of environmental management at Yale University.
Justine Sargent is a fourth-year English major and Film/Television minor. Her English departmental honors thesis focuses on the relationship between medicine and sexuality in Victorian vampire fiction, which she presented recently at the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Symposium. She is the president of UCLA’s English Honor Society and is a UCLA/Keck Humanistic Inquiry Undergraduate Research Fellow, as well as involved with the LGBTQ Campus Resource Center and Q-Scholars. After graduating this spring, Justine will be interning for Getty Publications. She hopes to pursue a PhD in English. Image Credits: Diana Sargsyan.
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.
Joana Chavez is a first-generation student raised in the Inland Empire. She attended Mt. San Jacinto College and transferred to UCR where she got her BA in ethnic studies and Spanish in 2017. She is currently a PhD candidate in Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher for the archives division of the Million Dollar Hoods Project, a community-driven and multidisciplinary initiative documenting the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship and the Cota Robles Fellowship. Her research analyzes gendered carceral spaces and uses testimonios to uplift the voices of young women of color in these spaces.
Zizi Li (she/they) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her primary research interests include digital media, feminist media studies, and labor and infrastructure studies. Their dissertation examines gendered work and infrastructure in the fashion lifestyle influencer ecosystem. Outside of her dissertation, Zizi has also written about transnational women mediamakers, as well as Indigenous filmmaking in the US and China. Their works have been published in Television and New Media, Wide Screen, Hyperrhiz, and Flow.
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.
Karime Parodi Ambel is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in Latin American courts, current trends in gender-sensitive judging and access to justice. Her dissertation tackles the extent to which the Chilean Supreme Court’s “gender sensitive-judging” initiatives have impacted Chilean legal actors’ practices. She explores this question ethnographically by focusing on criminal courts and looking at domestic violence and sexual assault trials. Furthermore, she examines the experiences of victims of gendered crimes with the criminal justice system, and the inherent paradoxes of projects that aim to turn the state “gender-sensitive.”
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.
Ebony Oldham (they/them) is a longtime organizer and cultural curator from Northeast Portland based in Los Angeles, California. As a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Gender Studies and co-chair of the Black Feminism Initiative at UCLA, Ebony’s work draws on Black feminist theory and critiques of humanism; theorizations of anti-Blackness and anti-fatness; metrics of size, capacity and volume; technologies of gender; and crip-of-color critique.
Pharren D. Miller (she/her) is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology whose research interests include: Black feminist theory, Black girlhood studies, education, carceral studies, ethnography, and comparative history. Pharren currently uses ethnographic and in- depth interview methods to examine how gendered anti-Blackness impacts Black girlhood in schools and how abolition can be understood and defined in the space of a school. Theoretically, her work draws on Black feminist thought and afterlives of slavery to make a larger argument about anti-Blackness and Black girlhood.
Travel Grants
Funded through donations from friends and supporters of the Center for the Study of Women, CSW|Streisand Center 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.
Lauren Baczewski (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in human development and psychology in the School of Education. Her work lies at the intersection of disability, mental health, and LGBTQ+ experience. Lauren’s dissertation explores the lived experience of Autistic LGBTQ+ young adults with the mental healthcare system in the US. She is passionate about using community-partnered research methods to understand and uplift the experiences of the disabled queer community. In her free time, she enjoys exploring the LA food scene with her partner, hiking, and reading fiction/fantasy novels.
Sonya Brooks is a Ph.D. 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.
Joana Chavez is a first-generation student raised in the Inland Empire. She attended Mt. San Jacinto College and transferred to UCR where she got her BA in ethnic studies and Spanish in 2017. She is currently a PhD candidate in Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher for the archives division of the Million Dollar Hoods Project, a community-driven and multidisciplinary initiative documenting the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship and the Cota Robles Fellowship. Her research analyzes gendered carceral spaces and uses testimonios to uplift the voices of young women of color in these spaces.
Abbie Cohen (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Schooling Division at UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies. As a critical participatory qualitative researcher, Abbie analyzes concepts of gender, race, democracy, power, and capital in educational institutions. Previously, she has worked as a teacher in Medellín, Colombia, a non-profit administrator in Denver, Colorado, and as a community partnerships director at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Throughout her differing roles and ranging geographical locations, Abbie works to build bridges between people, organizations, and communities.
Trinity Gabato (she/her) is a third-generation Filipina and Vietnamese American from Alameda, California. She received her bachelor’s in sociology and film with a minor in Asian American studies from Claremont Mckenna College. While in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department, Trinity will research the importance of gendered memory and storytelling in order to complicate narratives of the US empire. Trinity likes to eat ice cream (Jeni’s is her fave), binge-watch reality TV, and hang out with her sixteen-year-old cat.
Nohely Guzman is a Bolivian feminist and anti-colonial student and organizer. She is the co-founder of Jasy Renyhê, an ecofeminist organization based in La Paz, Bolivia. Nohely has a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently doing a PhD in geography at UCLA. Stemming from six years of collaborative work with Amazonian indigenous communities of the TIM territory, Nohely’s research interrogates the intimate geopolitics of Amazonian indigenous women and girls on whose territories Chinese capital is settling.
Brenda Selena Lara (she/they/ella) is a doctoral candidate at UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Born and raised in Huntington Park, California, Brenda is a first-generation student, raised by a strong, hardworking Mexican mother who taught her feminist values. Her upbringing influences her historical and theoretical research analyzing LGBTQ+ Latinxs’ lives, knowledge, deaths, and cultural depictions. Lara’s projects have been awarded the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Fellowship, UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.
Rebekka Michaelsen is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA specializing in the United States with a concentration in gender studies. Her scholarship broadly examines intersections of gender, race, age, and disability to explore how public health and disability discourses have impacted ongoing movements for civil rights and sovereignty. Her dissertation investigates the historical roots of contemporary mental health and carceral crises by aiming to recover Black and Indigenous women’s experiences in early-twentieth-century federal insane asylums. She earned her MA in history from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2019.
Pallavi Rudraraju (they/them) is a first-year MA student in Asian American studies at UCLA studying how transgender and non-binary South Asian American dancers find gender liberation and euphoria through classical Indian dance. Prior to their time at UCLA, they served as the youth well-being manager at the Human Rights Campaign, and the Virginia Middle School Program Coordinator at Asian American LEAD. Pallavi received their bachelor’s in Asian & Pacific Islander American studies and world performing arts and cultures from the College of William & Mary in 2017. In their spare time, they enjoy dancing, singing, lifting, and watching anime.
Supraja Saravanakumar is a first-year MPH student in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She is currently a Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Fellow at the MCH Center of Excellence, with interests in lowering maternal and child mortality, and increasing access to sexual assault services, especially for women and children from communities of color. She is a certified domestic violence and sexual assault counselor at Peace over Violence. Her long-term goal lies in providing free medical services for the unhoused population.
Laura Smith is a PhD student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. She draws on dance studies and history of medicine to research constructions of disability, gender, and race in 19th-century France. Her archival research project on the women institutionalized at Hôpital Salpêtrière during the late 1800s explores how performance helped legitimize the emerging field of psychiatry and how performances of dance and gender were used to measure the effectiveness of newly codified medical treatments and diagnosis.
Jordan Thomas is a doctoral student in clinical psychology. She earned her BA from Connecticut College and previously worked in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. Jordan’s research examines women’s health across the reproductive life cycle with emphasis on the impact of adversity and trauma exposure on sexual health and intimate relationships. She is interested in interventions that promote sexual and reproductive health at both the individual level (i.e., clinical intervention) and population (i.e., policy) level. Clinically, Jordan specializes in trauma/PTSD and couples therapy.
Yun-Pu Yang is a PhD candidate in theater and performance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include East Asian theater (particularly from Taiwan and China), gender and sexuality, sinophone studies, and digital humanities. She is writing her dissertation titled “The Eroticism of Peking Opera Kunsheng over the Twentieth Century.” She is a CUTF fellow and the recipient of the Full Scholarship for Overseas Study awarded by the Taiwanese Government’s Ministry of Education and a dissertation fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
Streisand Scholars
Maria Winters grew up in San Pedro, California, on the Port of Los Angeles where her love of the ocean and beaches originated. She received her bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering from UC San Diego, where courses at Scripps Institution of Oceanography inspired her to dedicate her career to addressing climate change. She is currently completing her PhD in the UCLA Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with Dr. Timu Gallien in the Coastal Flood Lab. Her research focuses on observing and modeling anthropogenic dunes and living shorelines in Southern California.
Marie-Pierre (MP) Delisle is a triple Bruin with her BS, MS, and soon PhD from UCLA in civil and environmental engineering. MP’s research advances the fundamental understanding of coastal processes and will improve coastal risk assessment and planning, and protect coastal communities from impending threats. After graduating, she’ll become a postdoctoral investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. MP is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and leads the Early Career Professionals Affinity Group within the Society for Women Engineers. In her spare time, you’ll find MP training for her next marathon.
Barbara Streisand Fellowship
Jessica Cattelino is professor of anthropology and gender studies, and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies Program. She received her PhD from New York University. Cattelino is a scholar of indigenous sovereignty, the cultural politics of nature, and everyday American political processes and imaginations. She is author of High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008), and is currently completing a book titled, Water Ties: An Everglades Ethnography. At CSW, Cattelino has served as the principal investigator on a multi-year research project titled “Gender and Everyday Water Use in Los Angeles Households.” She has also served on the CSW faculty leadership team in various roles over the past several years. Currently, Cattelino serves as chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, the vehicle through which faculty share in the governance and operation of the university.
Erin Debenport is associate professor and vice chair for graduate studies in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the interim director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. A linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on issues of literacy, secrecy, knowledge circulation, and ethics, she works with several Indigenous Pueblo Nations on ongoing language reclamation projects. She holds a PhD in linguistics, an MA in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Lewis & Clark College.
Ju Hui Judy Han (she/they) is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in gender studies at UCLA, where she conducts research and teaches courses on religion, power and (im)mobilities, LGBTQ+ politics, transnational feminist activism, and comics. Her publications appear in numerous journals and edited books in both English and Korean, and she is currently writing about “queer throughlines” and protest repertoires. As part of the Korean Studies Distinguished Speakers Bureau for the Association for Asian Studies, she regularly gives invited talks and public presentations to scholarly and community-based audiences.
Gina Kim, professor in the Department of Film, Television & Digital Media, is one of the few South Korean filmmakers to produce works in Hollywood and her home country. Her award-winning films reimagine cinematic storytelling across different genres and platforms, developing a unique transnational perspective centered on female protagonists. Her five feature-length films and works of video art have screened at more than 150 prestigious international film festivals and venues including Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance, as well as such arts venues as MoMA and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Ananda Marin is an assistant professor in the Department of Education and faculty in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tongva territory). As a learning scientist, she uses video-ethnographic methods and participatory design research to explore questions about the cultural nature of cognition and development. A primary goal of her work is to broaden conceptualizations of learning and teaching in ways that are consequential to the communities she partners with. She has widespread experience designing and learning with communities to cultivate educational contexts that create conditions for more equitable futures.
Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương is associate professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA. Her forthcoming book explores how ideas of human and progressive historiography are used to organize capitalist extraction and political violence affecting people in Vietnam and the diaspora, and how they respond through street protest, work, visual art, literature, and commemoration. Her other research projects explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, activists.
Ellen Scott is associate professor and associate dean at the School of Theater, Film, and Television, UCLA. She is author of Cinema Civil Rights: Race Repression and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (Rutgers, 2015) and is working on two books: Cinema’s Peculiar Institution, a history of the representation of slavery on screen, and Bitter Ironies, Tender Hopes, which explores Black women’s film criticism from the dawn of cinema until the first Black woman made a feature film in 1980.
Paula Tavrow is the director of UCLA’s Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health and adjunct professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She was the founding co-director of the Center of Expertise in Women’s Health and Empowerment at the University of California Global Health Institute, and the director of six Women’s Health and Empowerment Summer Institutes. Dr. Tavrow’s research interests center on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, coerced sex, intimate partner violence screening, early marriage, and the quality of healthcare services. Dr. Tavrow received her AB from Harvard-Radcliffe College, her MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and her MSc and PhD from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Jasmine Nadua Trice is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Film, Television & Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila Film Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is currently working on a second book project on spatial practices in Southeast Asian film organizing, coauthored with Dr. Philippa Lovatt of the University of St. Andrews. The book is based on a collaborative project undertaken with the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas.
Faculty Research Grants
Molly Fox is a biological anthropologist with a research program that explores how women’s social, cultural, and physical environments influence their own biological development and that of their children. She is the founder and PI of the UCLA Biological Anthropology of Motherhood Lab.
Jessica Gipson is professor, incoming Fred H. Bixby Chair, and director of the Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health. As a public health social scientist, Gipson employs mixed- methods data collection and analysis techniques to conduct applied sexual and reproductive health research in the US and internationally. Her research integrates multidisciplinary perspectives and innovative approaches to measure and contextualize sexual and reproductive health decision-making and outcomes, including unintended pregnancy, infertility, contraception and abortion.
