2019 Recipients

Leah Ives (BFA ’07, dance)

Ives currently performs and teaches with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Since joining in 2014 she has performed a total of 20 pieces of repertory in over 15 countries. Venues include Lincoln Center, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Théâtre National de Chaillot, and the Tate Modern. She worked with filmmaker Thierry De Mey on his installation Solid Traces, which transformed Brown’s Set and Reset into a solid sculpture. Ives has staged a Set and Reset Set Reset on students in Brooklyn, and she is scheduled for the same project with the Venice Biennale College Danza in summer 2019.

Other work has included the character-driven explorations of Sarah A.O. Rosner’s Barrish and Etle and the Anders. She appears in Francis Ha, choreographed by The Median Movement. She has also worked with Elizabeth Dishman, Megan Chu, The Leopold Group, and Peter Sparling Dance Company. Between 2008-2016 she helped lead several creative workshops for incarcerated women with Avodah Dance. Leah most recently worked with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and director Ivo van Hove on their development lab of West Side Story. She is currently guest choreographer for the students at Manhattanville College.

Austin Wulliman (BM ’06, violin)

Praised as a “gifted, adventuresome violinist” by the Chicago Tribune and as a “remarkable, unbelievable violinist/violist extraordinaire” by the syndicated radio program Relevant Tones, Wulliman has gained critical and audience attention through his “wide technical range and interpretive daring” (New Music Box) as a soloist and chamber musician. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Austin searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world.

As violinist in the JACK Quartet, hailed as “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times, Austin has played in such renowned venues as Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and the Wiener Konzerthaus, and featured on such festivals as Tanglewood, Ojai, Spoleto, and Lucerne. Work with JACK has included premieres by John Luther Adams, Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Clara Iannotta, Tyshawn Sorey, and John Zorn, as well as collaborations with the likes of Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann, George Lewis, and Julia Wolfe.  He has received awards from Musical America (JACK Quartet “2019 Ensemble of the Year”), the Darmstadt Ferienkurse Kranichstein Prize (Ensemble Dal Niente, 2012), and was presented with Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2019.

Equally in demand as an educator, Austin serves on faculty at the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence. He has taught violin and musicianship on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Lucerne Festival Academy, and New Music on the Point in Vermont. Additionally, he has given guest instruction and presentations at such institutions as the Curtis Institute, The Juilliard School, New World Symphony, and Northwestern University.

Angela Lewis (BFA ’00, theatre)

Lewis has garnered many roles in some of New York’s most illustrious off-Broadway play productions and award-winning drama television series. Angela has just completed her third season as “Aunt Louie” on the FX series Snowfall, created by award-winning director John Singleton, which follows the rise of crack cocaine in 1980s Los Angeles.

Apart from her series regular role on Snowfall, Lewis takes the lead in a sci-fi thriller, Let them Die Like Lovers. She has appeared in a recurring role on TNT’s The Last Ship, a supporting role in Chris Rocks’ comedy feature Top Five, and an Ariel Castro-inspired role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Some of her guest star credits include Code Black, The Big C, and The Good Wife.

Lewis also has an extensive theatrical background which includes The Public Theatre’s The Brother/Sister Plays, Yale Repertory Theatre’s Good Goods, and MCC Theatre’s Don’t Go Gentle. She is a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company. Perhaps her most coveted role was that of “Annie” in La Jolla Playhouse and Playwrights Horizons’ Milk Like Sugar. The Los Angeles Times called her “marvelous…devastating at [her] climactic face-off,” and she earned an AUDELCO Award nomination for the role.

Born and raised in Detroit, Lewis has always had a passion for exploring humanity through the arts.