Swensen Scholarship (Est. 2020)
The Swensen Scholarship, given in honor of David Swensen PH.D. ’80, is awarded to Yale undergraduates who excel both in the classroom and in athletics or the arts. Recipients, known as the Swensen Scholars, are awarded funding to practice the highest caliber training in their selected field. Swensen Scholars will become a cohort of achievers recognized as the epitome of Yale and the importance of curricular and extra-curricular excellence as integral parts of a liberal arts education.
2025
Kai Chen, Pierson College
Kai is a singular artist who I see going on to make important work in the visual arts, as they clearly have something to say, and are not afraid to push the gauzy borders, boundaries and edges of the medium of lens-based still photography, experimenting with analog and digital means interchangeably, with presentations of form in print as well as transparencies. The quivering world depicted is a fantastical one, full of blurriness, psychedelic colors, figures from a fantasy world, using the body as landscape, and optical effects as a means of travel through time and space. The work is hard to describe, because the visual effects must be seen to be believed. Kai is someone whose visual language is wonderfully idiosyncratic and specific to them, while at the same time existing organically within the broader realm of queer voices in the contemporary and historical art worlds. Kai is one of the rare undergraduates at Yale who seems to be a real Artist with a capital A, inside and out. - Lisa Kereszi, Assistant Director in Photography, Yale School of Art
Cynthia Lin, Grace Hopper College
In the Advanced Photography Project Seminar course this Spring, Cynthia continued an exploration of the themes of displacement and diaspora from a three-dimensional project she started in the course, Picturing at the Peabody, last Fall. Into her interdisciplinary creative work, she has incorporated family material with items from the historical archive, and even brought regional food and fabrics into her installations. While working together, the class had the privilege of experiencing the moving experimental film she is working on for her Film Studies coursework, as well as a brilliant and moving short story written in response to a “found photo” assignment. She is a true interdisciplinary, cross-pollinating force of nature, able to work across mediums seemingly effortlessly, but with an incredible amount of sincerity and humility. - Lisa Kereszi, Senior Critic and Assistant Director in Photography, Yale School of Art
2024
Natalie Brown, Timothy Dwight College
Cleo Maloney, Silliman College
Alexander Laurent Rubalcava, Timothy Dwight College
2023
Chiara Hardy, Grace Hopper College
Olivia Marwell, Jonathan Edwards College
Jeffrey Steele, Ezra Stiles College
Michael Wang, Silliman College
2022
2021
Merritt Barnwell, Saybrook College
2020