El Nuevo Día writes that the Mellon Foundation approved two grants for the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. One is for students interested in completing a Master’s degree in Cultural Management and Administration and the other is for the development of the program on Afro-Puerto Rican culture, “Puerto Rico Afro: Tiznando el país—Visualidades y Representaciones.”

The Mellon Foundation recently approved two grants for the Río Piedras Campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) for a total of $2,948,000. The first one is for $1,948,000, managed by Professor Pedro Reina Pérez, will support, for five years, a new program to grant students (Mellon-MAGAC Scholarships) who are interested in completing the Master’s degree in Cultural Management and Administration in the School of Humanities. Likewise, it will allow the recruitment of a full-time visiting professor (Mellon MAGAC visiting professor); it will create a seed fund to support high-promise student completion projects; it will help start a fund to support travel for instructors and students; it will partially support the Harvard Puerto Winter Institute, in partnership with Harvard University; and it will finance the updating of electronic equipment and materials.

The second grant—$1,000,000—is for the development of the program “Puerto Rico Afro: Tiznando el país-Visualidades y Representaciones,” housed in the Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Institute (INIM) of the School of General Studies, which has Dr. María Elba Torres Muñoz as principal investigator and project director; associate professor Dr. Janine Santiago as co-director and researcher; Dr. Silene Vargas Díaz as evaluator; and Maritza Rodríguez Nieves as administrator. “Puerto Rico Afro: Tiznando el país- Visualidades y Representaciones” is an initiative in collaboration with the Alliance of Museums of Puerto Rico.

This transdisciplinary research and educational project will help bring education on visual arts, culture, and cinema to various communities, with an emphasis on the decolonial perspective of Afro-descendants, with the aim of presenting an anti-racist paradigm to young students, the community of the elderly, who in many cases have been left behind, and to cultural centers and the towns of the island. This innovative initiative in Puerto Rico puts the UPR-RP and these educators at the forefront of pertinent and transversal education on discourses of race, history, culture, and ethnicities.

For Dr. Angélica Varela Llavona—interim rector of the Río Piedras Campus of the UPR—”these two grants attest to the academic excellence that characterizes the main campus of the University of Puerto Rico and to the confidence with which we are distinguished by an institution of the caliber of the Mellon Foundation, an entity for whose support we are deeply grateful.” [. . .]

Excerpts translated by Ivette Romero. For the full, original article (in Spanish), see https://www.elnuevodia.com/entretenimiento/cultura/notas/the-mellon-foundation-aprueba-millonarias-subvenciones-para-el-recinto-de-rio-piedras-de-la-universidad-de-puerto-rico/

[Photo above by Carlos Giusti.]