Dance professor, art alumna awarded ASC fellowships

Tamara Williams, associate professor of dance, and Carolina Quintana Ocampo ’21 are among the 2025 cohort of the Arts & Science Council’s Emerging Creator and Creative Renewal Fellowship recipients.

Williams will use a Creative Renewal Fellowship grant of $15,000 to augment her dance research and performance practice with the study of Yoruba drumming. She will travel to Africa this summer to study in Benin and Nigeria, returning in December. Throughout the school year, she will travel to Atlanta to study with Yoruba traditionalists who are masters of the West African percussive rhythms and songs.

Quintana will use her $10,000 Emerging Creators Fellowship to explore new mediums for an upcoming short film.

“I’ll be using these funds to explore different storytelling methods by taking online classes and leaning into my scrapbooking passion,” she said. “This is to push the main theme of the film, which is exploring Latino American identity and finding one’s place between definitions. I also plan to travel to different workshops and expos in order to gain traction and potentially find a team of artists to help me make the film in the future.” 

Quintana, an honors student and Martin Scholar, completed a BFA in Art with a concentration in Illustration. She expanded her honors thesis project, an animated short “Mi Modo,” for presentation last fall in the Department of Art and Art History’s 60th anniversary exhibition, “Generations.” In March, she screened her new animated short, “Salpimienta,” at the Charlotte Latino Film Festival.

Read more on the College of Arts + Architecture website.