Faculty

When Prof. Robyn Schiff sat at the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she felt as if, “I was living my life at the center of the world.” Nearly 30 years later, Schiff transformed her experiences into an epic poem, expertly weaving its collections of visual art and connections to the world into her life’s journey, material world and imagination.

For "Information Desk: An Epic" (2023), Schiff recently received the 2024 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America. The international Prize celebrates multipart poems, with the winner receiving $20,000. Previous recipients of the Four Quartets Prize include Courtney Faye Taylor, John Murillo and Dante Micheaux.

Inside a climate-controlled vault at the University of Chicago are hundreds of films and pieces of cinematic history. Each celluloid frame is cared for by the Film Studies Center, who maintains the collection for students, faculty and the public.

Thanks to two grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Center’s vault will soon be home to groundbreaking and restored films by Black and Filipino filmmakers. These include two experimental short films by filmmaker Aarin Burch—Dreams of Passion (1989) and Spin Cycle (1990)—and five home movies depicting early 20th-century Filipino community life.