Meet the 2025 Big Idea Award Applicants
Sustainability, storytelling, communal experiences, and economic inequality are just some of the topics that Stamps Seniors are taking on in their proposed 2025 Big Idea Award (BIA) submissions.
The students are channeling the words of school namesake Penny W. Stamps, who challenged students in her April 2018 commencement speech by asking “What’s your big idea? What are you willing to spend your moral capital, your intellectual capital, your sweat equity in pursuing outside the walls of the University of Michigan? You have your artistic skills, now develop your ideas — your big idea,” she said. “Imagination has no limits.”
The BIA was established to honor Penny, and it provides one Stamps senior or team of eligible Stampers with $25,000 to help launch a major, ambitious project after graduation.
A committee of external panelists representing a wide range of expertise will determine the winner of the award, who will be announced as part of the Stamps Commencement celebration on Friday, May 2.
“We received a record number of submissions this year, and I’ve been so impressed by the caliber of creativity and thoughtfulness our students have shown,” said Veronica Vergoth, Senior Assistant Dean for Admissions and Student Services. “Each applicant is to be commended for their researched approach that produced these big, innovative ideas.”
In their own words, the applicants describe their Big Ideas below.
Amanda Brodzik: Community Threads: A Collaborative Textile Project
This project will engage Metro Detroit communities in an ongoing series of fiber arts workshops focused on sustainability and creative reuse. Hosted at local libraries, participants will learn to transform recycled fibers into meaningful textile pieces, highlighting the value of repurposing materials. The project will culminate in a large-scale collaborative textile artwork, publicly exhibited to foster community connection and raise awareness around sustainable practices in the arts.
Sophia Cao: Paper Street
Paper Street is a coming of age graphic novel and multimedia animated film which follows Josie Tang, a 13 year old Chinese American girl, and her summer break trying to be a cool kid. Packed with laughs, heated arguments, and middle school drama, Paper Street takes a humorous approach to exploring different types of relationships as well as cultural and generational differences. Screenings of the film will be shown at schools and at film festivals, along with workshops where youth are encouraged to share their own stories.
Molly Cesanek: The Power of Perspective: Reflections from a War-Touched Life
I was chasing an Olympic dream with Team USA until war shattered my world. When Ukraine fell under siege, my aspirations melted into insignificance. My partner, a Ukrainian, stood safe beside me, while his family faced the unthinkable. This project unveils the raw stories of those forever altered by conflict, amplifying silenced voices and urging us to confront the urgent human cost of war. This documentary is not just a project; it is a vital exploration of resilience and hope, igniting essential conversations about the human cost of war and inspiring a shared journey toward healing.
Aryan Chaudhry: Kahani — Bridging communities through cross-cultural storytelling and fashion
Kahani is a platform that fosters cultural exchange through storytelling and fashion. By hosting quarterly gatherings featuring diverse voices, it creates space for conversations about identity, representation, and belonging. These discussions inspire a seasonal apparel line, designed in collaboration with cultural artists, to bring these narratives into everyday life. Through wearable art, Kahani bridges cultural gaps, challenges misrepresentation, and redefines the American identity by making untold stories seen, heard, and shared.
Clara Christopherson: Invasive Aquatic Education Minnesota
Invasive aquatic species have altered ecosystems across the world including my home-state, Minnesota. Notorious species, such as zebra mussels have run rampant across waterways all over Minnesota. My Big Idea is to promote awareness and prevention for invasive aquatic species across Minnesota by creating educational, yet joyful, materials that can be simultaneously engaging for young children and adults. After all it is truly water that brings Minnesota together — economically, socially, and culturally. Let’s make your next trip to a lake go from “ouch!” to “ahh~” :)
Samuel Joseph Adkins and Scott Wallace Smith: Dark Kastle
Dark Kastle is a three-issue collaborative comic and art magazine blending philosophy, comedy, fantasy, and horror. Each issue is paired with a launch event to promote the work and foster community. Set in the surreal Dark Kastle, the magazine serves as an allegory for the physical-digital world, providing a tangible alternative to screen-based media emphasizing traditional hand-drawn artwork and illustrations. We create space to counter digital alienation and offer a new platform to explore hyperreality with our emphasis on physical media and event-based promotion.
Hugh Jacks: A 21st Century Digital Grange
The nineteenth-century grange movement helped farmers in New England build communities and compete against corporate middlemen and agricultural monopolies. A twenty-first-century digital grange seeks to use Two Scholars Farm as a test model to create a suite of digital tools for small farms to create, visualize, and collaborate in their local food system. Specifically, these tools will aid in managing the production, distribution, and marketing of local farm products while creating a platform for collaboration and cooperation between other local farms in the region.
Grace Jermstad: The Lakeshore Collective: Reclaiming and Reimagining our Great Lakes
The Lakeshore Collective is a mobile, public community space designed to connect people with the Great Lakes while fostering sustainability. Built from recycled materials, including litter collected from local beaches, the space will feature eco-friendly furniture, educational resources, and areas for relaxation. Beyond its physical presence, the project will spark community-driven environmental change through clean-up events, educational workshops, and thought-provoking design that encourages reflection on human impact.
Razaan Killawi: Min Ayadina: From Our Hands to the Future
I will create a project that provides members of the Arab diaspora with meaningful ways to reconnect with their heritage, elders, and community. Min Ayadina, meaning “from our hands,” creates a space for intergenerational learning, healing, and cultural preservation. Through hands-on workshops in pickling, baking maamoul, embroidery, and Arabic calligraphy, participants engage in cultural exchange while preserving endangered traditions. Documenting these moments through film and photography will create an accessible digital archive, ensuring these practices and stories endure.
Danielle Kiminyo: The Crown Collective
My project explores Black hair as art and culture, challenging stereotypes and celebrating its beauty. Hair Preparation Series documents rituals like detangling, braiding, and laying edges, highlighting skill and cultural significance. Editorial Hair Series showcases bold, sculptural hairstyles as artistic expressions of beauty and empowerment. Together, these series balance everyday care with high-fashion creativity, redefining perceptions of Black hair and challenging societal expectations of “professional” and “acceptable” styles.
Eva Kubacki: The Community Tallis Weaving Project
I am developing a fiber arts program for Jewish communities around the country to rediscover the transcendence of making ritual items by hand together. The central communal making project will consist of weaving the cloth body of a tallis (prayer shawl), and hold dye and design workshops to make tallesem that are meaningful to each community. The program will include in-person workshops with materials provided, as well as online resources that can facilitate communities holding this program independently.
Madeline Leja: In the Woods
“In the Woods” is a proposed feature-length horror film focusing themes of queer triumph over Christian nationalism. The narrative of the film draws from my own experiences to tell the stories of Claire and Adam, two queer characters struggling to overcome internalized shame caused by the clash between their own queerness and bigoted religious teachings. This shame has literal, physical effects on their bodies, making them appear as monsters to one other. The film ends on a note of uncertainty as both characters find community in each other and leave to face a hostile world together.
Katelyn Ma: Slow and Steady is the Grief
Slow and Steady is an installation and performance consisting of 2 multi-site sculptures that challenge the ways in which political identity is tokenized within University DEI. This piece raises the idea of surveillance as a central element of the cultural/institutional efforts to control populations, communities and ideas. Traditionally, Fu-Dogs are used as guardians; installed so that they are facing each other rather than facing out, it subverts conventional expectations. Video will document the sculptures at four different school campuses who play different roles within DEI.
Rahib Malik: The Ankle Mobility Project
I invented and patented a non-surgical method to improve ankle mobility by gently moving the tibia. This technique creates oscillations in the joint capsule, provides a deep stretch for the surrounding muscles, and allows the ankle to move in all its natural directions. As a child, I was diagnosed with a chronic inflammatory pain condition that left me unable to walk. By focusing on improving my ankle mobility, I went from having a negative range of motion to a normal range of motion — something the best doctors in the state told me was impossible. I want to test and produce this object.
Benjamin Michalsky: Imperial Core
Imperial Core is an art studio which produces commercial objects & public programs critical of consumer culture. It appropriates & subverts mass-manufactured goods & culture to create objects which humorously challenge their nature as commodities. One such product, Buddyeologies, is a blind-box collectible toy series satirizing the commodification of radical political identities. Sustained by the sales of these goods, Imperial Core establishes itself as a communal creative platform, supporting those with shared conceptual interests via exhibitions, studio space, workshops, & funding.
Isabella Minkin: Breaking Bread, Building Bonds
“Breaking Bread, Building Bonds” blends the art of ceramics with the power of mealtime conversations, creating a space for creativity in environments where it’s often absent. This project introduces ceramics and communication skills to middle school students in underserved communities, expanding their artistic horizons while teaching essential lessons in teamwork, communication, and respect for shared spaces. I will collaborate with students from Columbus City Schools and a local ceramics studio to build and personalize bowls, all while exploring the significance of communication at mealtime.
Maddie Vassalo and Miles Hionis: Naming all the Flowers I Could
Naming all the Flowers I Could is a multidisciplinary arts organization that produces, markets, and distributes queer and female led projects. Created through a partnership between Maddie Vassalo and Miles Hionis, we produce time based work in all mediums from theater, to film, to games. We support a rotating door of queer and female artists. While we have a different group of collaborators for every show, the artists we’ve worked with in the past remain close and are always welcomed to come back and do more work with NAF.
Naomi Rodriguez: Rizo Crafts
Rizo Crafts is a community workshop and database that partners with hair salons in Michigan and Miami to host workshops focused on textured hair care, styling techniques, and the use of natural fibers in wig-making and dyeing. These techniques are rooted in sustainable practices from Caribbean Afro-Indigenous communities. The initiative will grow into an accessible digital platform for community dialogue, workshops, and activism, addressing cultural divides in the U.S. and empowering the African Diaspora. By threading shared experiences, this will foster a space for diverse communities.
Yasmine Safadi and Julien Totsky: Forge the Future
Forge the Future is a mobile jewelry and fibers studio that provides accessible workshops for people of all ages to make wearable art. We aim to leverage our educational and material privileges to share the joy of wearing something you have made. We are both Michiganders planning to stay in the Southeast. The specificity of jewelry makes it intimidating for many smaller organizations, so we will form sustained partnerships with established artists to expand existing capacity. Forge the Future is an extension of both of our practices and we will be learning and growing with our awareness.
Lidya Sanchez: Monsters!
“Monsters!” will be a series of wildlife documentary style pop up books, gathering monsters tales that have emerged from environmental catastrophe. Fantastical creatures from popular literature will be used to remind young readers of their cautionary roots and will be a segue into climate change conversations. The intention of the project is to provoke environmental curiosity in younger generations as their lives are likely to experience the effects of climate change for the longest.
Rin Sharpe: Startales
Startales will be an animated pilot episode for a series that follows the stars and constellations on a journey across our Night Sky. Inspired by the Earth’s Precession, Startales tells the story of Polaris and her journey of when she first became a North Star. In the story, Polaris is a star who has poor navigational skills, the fear of being lost, and a former North Star who has it out for her. Polaris will have to find a way to navigate through it all as she tries to find the Twelve Zodiacs. Startales seeks to explore themes of expectations, overcoming one’s fear, and learning disabilities.
Annika Smits: Art Camp
One of my favorite experiences growing up was being able to go to art camp. It was run by a cousin of my dad’s out of her garage and I think having the opportunity to participate in camp for several summers was essential in my drive to pursue art later in my life. My Big Idea is to provide that same experience for a new generation of kids, at no cost, primarily for families who are not typically able to send their kids to fine arts camps.
Isabella Spagnuolo: Parallels
My Big Idea will be an animated short series exploring the relationship between two contrasting generations, where it critiques both traditional and contemporary mediums that resist censorship and erasure of information. The story follows a 50-year-old librarian, dissatisfied with her life, who experiences a vision after an accident. When she causes a mishap that costs a young employee her job, she tries to make amends by joining the young adult’s podcast. Together, their podcast explores questions about the universe, humanity, and themselves — rediscovering their purpose along the way.
Marissa Woods: Shopaholic
I aim to develop Shopaholic through code and illustration, an interactive indie video game that immerses players in the struggles of lower-class families facing clothing scarcity and gentrification. Shopaholic raises awareness of economic inequality through storytelling and interactive gameplay. This funding will support game development, design, and outreach, expanding its impact beyond the University of Michigan. Successfully launching Shopaholic will serve as the foundation for establishing an indie game studio, dedicated to using art and technology to drive social change.