Project on Death in America Awards 1 Million Dollars to the Arts and Humanities
NEW YORK, NY—The OSI Project on Death in America has committed 1 million dollars for funding in the arts and humanities. In the fourth cycle of grants in this initiative PDIA has awarded three fellowships, totaling $137,350. "The arts and humanities is a powerful tool in understanding and conveying meaning to illness, disability and death," said Kathleen Foley, M.D, director of the Project on Death in America. "This groundbreaking grants program is part of PDIA’s mission to transform the culture of death and dying."
"By supporting these fellowships in photojournalism, art, and literature, PDIA hopes to evoke and deepen our understanding of the meaning and experience of suffering, dying, and bereavement," said David Rothman, Ph.D., program director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative.
Fellowships have been awarded to the following individuals to complete these works in progress:
- Filmmaker Thomas Cole
Anatomy & Humanity: Conversations with Donors and Dissectors This film explores the relationship between willed body donors and medical student dissectors. In moving interviews, donors share their life stories, explain their decision to donate their bodies, and express their hopes for future learning. Medical students describe the emotional, moral, and spiritual struggles that accompany this sanctioned violation of the interior space of another’s body.
- Photographer Meryl Levin
The dissection of a human body challenges all that we understand about life and death. Anatomy of Anatomy, a book and traveling exhibition, combines photographs of a group of medical students during their dissection of cadavers in gross anatomy class with excerpts from journals they kept during the course.
- Filmmaker Eugene Richards
This past year Eugene Richards, supported in part from a grant from PDIA, finished but, the day came, a film that documented the journey of an independent 92 year old Nebraska farmer to a nursing home. His new grant will help support two films now in production: Long as I Remember and All That’s Sacred. Long as I Remember will take the viewer inside Good Samaritan, the same nursing home the aged farmer wished with all his heart to avoid. The film will be a documentation of the lives of the residents there, touching at first on the events and decision-making that preceded their placement. All That’s Sacred was inspired by the death last year of Richards’ father-in-law. It will be a study of the effect of one person’s death on the fabric of a whole community.
The Open Society Institute is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open societies around the world, by developing its own programs and through grants to others.