2024-2025 Imagining America / Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: connect@imaginingamerica.org

Announcing the 2024-2025 Imagining America Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows 

Davis, California — Imagining America is proud to announce the cohort of 2024-2025 IA/JGS Fellows. These eight undergraduate students from IA Member campuses were selected for their creative use of art to uplift diverse stories, create connection, and build community. 

The goals of the national IA/JGS Fellows Program are to elevate photography and digital media as pathways for undergraduate students to pursue their careers and to make a difference in their communities. The program specifically aims to support students for whom economic and family circumstances render such career pathways particularly challenging.

Fellows receive a $2,000 tuition scholarship, mentorship, and financial support for a community project. They will attend Imagining America’s Engaged Arts Summit at UC Davis in Fall 2024, participate in regular virtual learning exchanges, and be connected to the consortium’s national network of scholars, artists, and community organizers. 

Please join us in celebrating the 2024-2025 IA/JGS Fellows:

Jordan Cook
Junior, Mass Communications / Journalism, Towson University

Keezia Lynne Dotimas
Senior, Art and Architecture, Vanderbilt University

Aidan Hatch
Senior, Design, University of California, Davis 

Kaitlyn Murray
Junior, Art, Xavier University of Louisiana

Jadzia Pho
Junior, Design, University of California Davis 

Sadir Rahman
Senior, Philosophy, Politics, and Law, University of Southern California 

Sakina Saidi
Junior, Physics and Mathematics, Bates College 

Martina Scarpa
Senior, Studio Art / Women’s & Gender Studies, Providence College

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The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.

The Joy of Giving Something, Inc. (JGS), is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the photographic arts and established in 1988 by the late Howard Stein. In 2010, Director of Outreach and Education Wayne Maugans approached IA about expanding support for community-engaged visual arts students as a way to encourage them to pursue post-secondary education and find a life path. Stein saw the visual arts as a potential career for young adults. The IA/JGS Fellows Program is a generous part of Stein’s legacy.