Bard Student Grace Miller-Trabold ’26 Awarded Davis Projects for Peace Grant
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Grace Miller-Trabold ’26, a junior art history and visual culture and human rights major at Bard College with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, has been awarded a Projects for Peace Grant for $10,000 by the Davis Foundation. Miller-Trabold’s project, “Connecting Threads: Reciprocity and Gratitude as Pedagogies of Peace in Oaxacan Textile,” will provide resources for youth workshops on Indigenous Oaxacan textile traditions, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Poughkeepsie, New York.“The preservation of these textile traditions, despite colonization and the imperialization of global capitalist markets, exemplify a cultural resilience that is rooted in communal practices which emphasize belonging, presence, and peace,” Miller-Trabold writes in her proposal. “The artistic medium of textile is inherently peacebuilding as it cultivates a multigenerational, community centered experience that is grounded in intentionality, gratitude, and reciprocity.”
Grace will organize and host two weeks of art workshops for youth in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, who will work with the Zapotec community on textile traditions and practices. The small artworks they produce will travel back to the US with Miller-Trabold, who will then facilitate workshops for youth groups in New York to collaborate on these projects at educational institutions in Poughkeepsie, using the same traditional dyeing and weaving traditions, before those collaborative works are returned to Oaxaca. The project aims to create spaces of peace across national borders and across generations in which textile traditions that incorporate ancestral Zapotec ecological knowledge and artistic expertise can be continued and shared.
She “will work closely with farms and gardens in our community to grow plants suitable for use as dyes,” said Paul Mairenthal, the director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program at Bard, where Miller-Trabold developed her project. “Her project is about history, tradition, memory and community building through textiles. It has a lot of great possibilities.”
Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/projects-for-peace
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Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place and Massena properties, Bard’s campus consists of more than 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; advanced degrees through 13 graduate programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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This event was last updated on 03-11-2025
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