Hamblet Jurors 2023

The annual Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award Competition is juried by three artist/educators from outside the Vanderbilt University campus. Each year these jurors is given the difficult task of reviewing grant proposals, thesis exhibitions, and conducting interveiws with senior art major students who have selected to compete for the two awards. The 2023 Hamblet Award Jurors are Pamela Longobardi, Michelle Eistrup, and Hồng-Ân Trương.

Pamela Longobardi
Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and Delaware’s female diving champion, connected her from an early age to water life. After discovering mountains of plastic on remote Hawai’ian shores in 2006, she founded the Drifters Project, centralizing the artist as culture worker/activist/researcher. Now a global collaborative entity, Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situated it as social sculpture.  Her multidisciplinary studio-based and collaborative social practice ranges from paintings, collage, photography, large-scale sculpture, installation, public actions, and performance.   Winner of the prestigious Hudgens Prize, Longobardi was featured in National Geographic, SIERRA magazine, Weather Channel, multiple films and in exhibitions around the world.  As Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature and Naturalist she co-leads expeditions to remote locations around the world. She lives in Atlanta, GA, and is Regent’s Professor at Georgia State University.  A 15+ year survey of her work ‘Ocean Gleaning’ was shown at the Baker Museum in Naples, FL in 2022 with a book published by Fall Line Press.

Michelle Eistrup
Michelle Eistrup is a visual artist, and initiator of artistic collaborations who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Eistrup’s art incorporates themes of identity, corporeality, faith, memory, and post-colonialism, where her transnational background (Danish, Jamaican, American) is sometimes a point of departure. She traverses varied artistic expressions that include photography, drawing, video, sound, and performance, all integrated in practice led by the spirit and a strong belief in collectivity’s transformative potential. Rooted in a vibrant global arts community, she has exhibited internationally and organized events that facilitate in-depth dialogue and research between artists, writers, and curators, for the overall purpose of encouraging a more integrated, sensitive, and equitable creative exchange.

Hồng-Ân Trương

Hồng-Ân Trương uses photography, video, and sound to explore immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the ICP (NY), the Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, NC), The Kitchen (NY), Nhà Sàn (Hanoi), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Phillips Collection (Washington D.C), and the Museum of Modern Art (NY). Her work was included in the New Orleans triennial Prospect.4 in 2018. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019-2020, the Capp St. Artist in Residence at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in 2020, and a MacDowell Residency Fellow in 2022. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Shifter Magazine, and most recently in Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts, published by Paper Monument in 2021, and in American Art in Asia: Artistic Practice and Theoretical Divergence, edited by Michelle Lim and Kyunghee Pyun, published by Routledge in 2022. She recently launched two web-based projects during the pandemic, Return to the Source, with denisse andrade, and We Listen Nearby, as part of her Wattis residency. Hồng-Ân lives in Durham, North Carolina where she is an activist and a teacher. She is Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.