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Artist Brian Kavanaugh ’05 Earns Fulbright Award

He helps people with disabilities express their creativity and produce art.

Brian Kavanaugh ’05 (visual arts) has earned a Fulbright Award from the Romania-U.S. Fulbright Commission in the field of Education. 

Hosted by the National University of the Arts in Bucharest, he’ll spend nine months researching how to help adults with disabilities participate in the production of art in their communities.

He’s been working for the past 5 1/2 years at the Soul Café and Studio in Detroit, MI as a senior facilitating artist helping adults with disabilities make art. They’re not only expressing themselves creatively, the work they create is placed on view in the gallery and sold. The Soul Café and Studio fills a need for adults with autism, Down Syndrome, social anxiety, or cognitive challenges who age out of programs for children. 

“My goal is to find how this pedagogy can be applied in countries that have no precedent for such practices, enabling people with disabilities to be included in the cultural production of their communities,” he writes.