2006 Awardee Sheetal Gandhi

Kathryn Karipides Profile and Images

About The Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance

Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance Awards Announcement

Cleveland Arts Prize is pleased to announce the first winners of the Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance. The scholarship, open to students nationally, was designed to assist students between undergraduate and graduate school with opportunities for summer dance study. Ms. Karipides spent three summers at Connecticut College, studying intensively with some of the greatest modern dance artists of the time: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Lucas Hoving, Jose Limon, and Louis Horst, and remembers those summers as "transformative" times in her artistic development. It was her wish to help aspiring dancers in this way.

The 2006 Scholarship will be awarded to Sheetal Gandhi of Walnut Creek, California. Ms. Gandhi is a graduate of the University of California Irvine and will attend University of California Los Angeles Master of Fine Arts Department of World Arts and Cultures. During the summer, she will augment her training in the modern dance idiom cross culturally by studying Balinese music and dance at the Cudamani School in southern Ubud, Bali.

As a special inaugural event an additional scholarship will be awarded to Robin Anderson of Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of Lewis & Clark College and a student at The Ohio State University, Ms. Anderson will attend a portion of ImPuls Tanz, the leading European dance festival held in Vienna, Austria. Ms. Anderson will participate in a workshop led by London-based Wendy Houston. Houston is a multi-media artist that brings to together film, text and song in modern dance based performances.

The jury consisted of:

Nusha Martynuk
Professor and Director of Dance, Theatre and Dance Program, Oberlin College

Kora Radella
Freelance Choreographer/Adjunct Dance Faculty,
Kenyon College

Susan Van Pelt Petry, Assistant Dean, College of the Arts,
Ohio State University.

The board and staff of the Cleveland Arts Prize are grateful to the many generous contributors who have made this perpetual gift to the dance world possible. Kathryn Karipides is a Cleveland treasure who has inspired countless others to embrace her passionate love of dance. It is impossible to calculate the number of young lives she has positively shaped over a teaching career that spanned more than four decades.

"Special thanks to this year's jurors and Dr. Mark George of The Cleveland Institute of Music's Distance Learning Program for his facilitation of the jury's videoconference."