Office for the Arts Announces 2025 Arts Prize Winners
FOURTEEN HARVARD STUDENTS RECEIVE PRIZES FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE ARTS
(Cambridge, MA) — The Office for the Arts at Harvard and the Council on the Arts at Harvard, a standing committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announce the recipients of the annual undergraduate arts prizes for 2025.
The awards, presented to more than 224 undergraduates over the past 42 years, recognize outstanding accomplishments in the arts undertaken during a student’s time at Harvard.
Robert E. Levi Prize
Sedina Ackuayi ‘25 and Payton Thompson ‘25 are the recipients of the Robert E. Levi Prize. This prize goes to a Harvard College senior who has demonstrated outstanding arts management skills over the course of an undergraduate career. The recipient’s dedication, organizational talent and creative problem-solving, as well as ability to nurture artistry, have been critical factors in the success of one or more arts organizations and/or projects. The award honors the memory of Robert E. Levi, Harvard College class of 1933 and Harvard Business School, MBA, 1935.
A resident of Winthrop House; concentrator in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a secondary in Mind, Brain, Behavior and a citation in Spanish, Sedina Ackuayi is an active member of Harvard Ballet Company and has made contributions to the theater community by serving as an assistant choreographer and performing in the Harvard Arts Festival and Lowell House Opera. Ackuayi is a pre-medical student and wrote her senior thesis based on research done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on respiratory regulatory circuitry and opioid induced respiratory depression. She stays connected to the arts scene as a dancer and choreographer in Harvard Ballet Company. She served as the inaugural diversity, equity and inclusion chair of HBC and created the peer mentorship program Beyond the Barre for prospective HBC dancers to get oriented to the dance scene at Harvard and in the greater Boston area and to get tutoring and guidance in approaching auditions. Ackuayi has also served as the director of Harvard Ballet Company and worked to put on two productions in 2024, collaborating with student and professional choreographers, the Balanchine Trust, and fundraising over $6,000 to allow dancers the opportunity to perform George Balanchine’s work, while promoting inclusivity in the process.
As a resident of Eliot house and a double concentrator in Economics and Theater, Dance & Media, Payton Thompson is a contemporary ballet dancer who has established herself at Harvard through co-founding the Harvard Undergraduate Contemporary Collective, directing Harvard Ballet Company and participating in Eleganza and the Harvard Crimson Dance Team. She was the first HBC director to secure a contract with the Balanchine Trust and Ballet West, enabling HBC to perform Stars and Stripes in 2024. While at Harvard, she has been instrumental in fostering collaborations with guest choreographers such as Francisco Gella, Madison Hicks, Christopher Charles McDaniel, Levi Marsman and Jessie Stinnett, and has been a faculty member and soloist with Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre. Thompson took a gap year to train with Ballet West and spent the 2020-2021 season dancing with the company. She was also invited to represent contemporary ballet in the judge’s round of So You Think You Can Dance, seasons 13 and 17. Thompson has spent summers training on scholarship with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, Ballet West, Joffrey Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Francisco Gella’s pre-professional Dancer Institute. In the summer of 2024, she worked with Dance Theatre of Harlem, performing repertoire by Robert Garland.
Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize
Caitlin Beirne ‘25 and Adrienne Chan ‘25 are recipients of the Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize. The prize recognizes a Harvard undergraduate who combines talent and energy with outstanding enthusiasm for musical theater at Harvard. The prize honors the memory of Doris Cohen Levi '35 and is conferred upon a student who has made a consistent contribution of high quality to the production or performance of musical comedy, opera, dance and all other forms of theater which combine music and theatrical performance at Harvard.
A resident of Dunster House, Caitlin Beirne is a joint concentrator in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (concurrent Master’s Program) and Theater, Dance & Media, as well as a joint-studies student with Berklee College of Music. Beirne has been involved with over 11 Harvard musical productions spanning Hasty Pudding Theatricals, American Repertory Theater, Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, Office for the Arts, Harvard College Opera and Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players. From 2021-2022, Beirne worked as the common casting coordinator on the HRDC board. She also served on the working group for the development of the strategic plan for Office for the Arts at Harvard, advocating for increased opportunities in musical theatre. Between her sophomore and junior years, Beirne was granted a leave of absence to work as a Disney Cruise Line mainstage performer and vocal captain aboard the Disney Wish. At Harvard, she has also performed with University Choir, President Claudine Gay’s inauguration choir, Harvard Pops Orchestra, Dunster housing day videos, Dunster Library concert series, First-Year Arts Program and First-Year Talent Show. Beirne is a cadet in Air Force ROTC and is thrilled to begin Air Force pilot training upon graduation.
A resident of Pforzheimer House and double concentrator in Sociology and Theater, Dance & Media, Adrienne Chan is a contemporary ballet choreographer, dancer and theater-maker. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she trained with Cleveland City Dance. As an advocate for dance as a narrative medium, her work imbues minute movements with meaning to modern audiences. Chan directed and co-choreographed one of Harvard’s first evening-length dance-theater productions, Romeo & Juliet, which premiered in November 2024 at the Loeb Experimental Theater. She also choreographed several musical theater productions across Harvard’s venues, including Footloose in the Agassiz, Spring Awakening in the Loeb Proscenium and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in the Loeb Ex. Her choreographic work has been performed by the Harvard Ballet Company and the Asian American Ballet Project. Chan served as board secretary for the Harvard Ballet Company (2023) and the campus liaison on the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club Board (2024). Beyond Harvard, Chan was a summer trainee at Ohio Contemporary Ballet and recipient of the E. John Busser Scholarship.
Louise Donovan Award
Kayla Bey ‘25 is the recipient of the Louise Donovan Award. The award recognizes a Harvard student who worked behind the scenes in the arts, for example, as director, producer or accompanist, contributing most to the success of a production and the opportunity for others to shine. The award is given in honor of Louise Donovan who, through her distinguished career at Radcliffe College, was a role model of unselfish, effective support for the College.
A resident of Pforzheimer House and concentrator in Theater, Dance & Media, Kayla Bey is a multi-hyphenate theater artist. In her first two years at Harvard, she wrote for Black Community and Student Theater’s (BlackCAST) Black Playwrights Festival. In 2023, she was awarded the Artist Development Fellowship from the Office for the Arts at Harvard to develop a full-length play centered around research in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Bey has also written several full-length, one-act and miniature plays, one of which was performed at Boston’s Lyric Stage as part of Fresh Ink Theater’s MAD DASH, and another original one-act play, which was staged in the Adams Pool Theater at Harvard. She interned with the American Repertory Theater in 2023. In her junior fall, she directed BLKS by Aziza Barnes in the Agassiz Theater—the first play sponsored by BlackCAST to be performed in the Agassiz in more than 10 years. She has designed lighting for several BlackCAST shows, for Romeo & Juliet, directed by Adrienne Chan ‘25, and Theater, Dance & Media’s production studio of Black Girl Nerd.
Robert Levin Prize in Musical Performance
Ethan Chaves ‘26 is the recipient of the Robert Levin Prize in Musical Performance. This prize has been established to recognize an extraordinarily gifted undergraduate musician. The award honors Robert Levin ’68, professor emeritus and former Dwight P. Robinson Jr. professor of the Department of Music at Harvard University.
A resident of Winthrop House, joint concentrator in Music and Philosophy, and member of the dual degree program with New England Conservatory, Ethan Chaves is a performer and composer of contemporary art music. He has received awards for his work from National YoungArts, Ensemble Altera, American Viola Society and other organizations. This year, he was featured as soloist and winner of the Bach Society Orchestra Composition Competition for his violin concerto the broken seal—. Additionally, his work has been played by the Harvard Pops Orchestra, NEC Philharmonia, Mivos Quartet, New York Youth Symphony, Trio Immersio and Harvard Choruses. Chaves is a passionate promoter for new music on campus, frequently engaging in performances at University Hall, Harvard Arts Festival and CompFest. He has attended numerous festivals as a composer and performer, including Darmstadt, highSCORE Festival, Valencia International Music Festival, BUTI, ICEBERG New Music, Heifetz Institute and Curtis Summerfest. His violin teachers have included Joel Smirnoff, Li Lin and Naoko Tanaka, and he has studied composition with Michael Gandolfi, Chaya Czernowin, Julian Anderson, John Harbison and Eric Ewazen. On campus, Chaves will be the artistic director for Lowell House Opera ’25-’26, co-creative director of CompFest, a concertmaster for the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, violist for Brattle Street Chamber Players and a member of the Signet Society.
Jonathan Levy Award
Avery Hansberger ‘25 and Nia Weeks’ 25 are the recipients of the Jonathan Levy Award. This prize recognizes the most promising undergraduate actor(s) at Harvard College.
A resident of Mather House and a double concentrator in Theater, Dance & Media and Economics, Avery Hansberger is a driven and disciplined actor. At Harvard, Hansberger is a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals business staff and former co-president of the Asian Student Arts Project. As an undergraduate, he has performed in a range of plays, musicals and short films including Cells, Ugly Feelings, Legally Blonde and Something Like Sadness. Most recently, Hansberger wrote and performed his one-man thesis play An Actor Prepares? A Fictional and Non-Definitive Guide to Acting. The play, an exploration of 20th-century realism acting techniques and how they interact with the life of a grieving student in search of validation and purpose, was Hansberger’s first solo performance and playwriting debut. He is also a former recipient of an Artistic Development Fellowship from the Office for the Arts at Harvard, which he used to attend Stella Adler’s Art of Acting Studio as research for his thesis play. Following his graduation, Hansberger will move to Los Angeles to pursue on-screen acting.
A resident of Kirkland House and concentrator in Theater, Dance & Media, Nia Weeks is a young creative with a passion for the stage and screen. She made her professional debut in the spring of her first year at Harvard, performing in American Repertory Theater’s global premiere of Ocean Filibuster. That same spring, she starred in Harvard BlackCAST's first post-COVID production All the Natalie Portmans. Over the past three years, Weeks has performed in more than 10 theater and film productions. Notable performances include her work as Sally in the global premiere of Tori Sampson's Black Girl Nerd and the TDM biannual Production Studio as directed by Miranda Haymon. Beyond Harvard's campus, Weeks secured a role in Life on the Third Rail, a musical written and directed by renowned artistic director Crystal Fields for Theater for the New City in Manhattan. Her upcoming project is the short film Still Smells Like Wine, directed by Wyatt Roy and set for release in May 2025. A John Harvard scholar, Weeks is also a writer and producer, having co-produced for the Black Playwrights Festival, served as co-president of BlackCAST and completed her studies as a TDM playwriting honors student.
Suzanne Farrell Dance Prize
Mya Johnson ‘25 and Liliana Price ‘25 are the recipients of the Suzanne Farrell Dance Prize. Named for the acclaimed dancer and former prima ballerina of New York City Ballet, the prize recognizes a Harvard undergraduate who has demonstrated outstanding artistry in the field of dance.
Mya Johnson is a senior in Cabot House studying Neuroscience with a secondary in Theater, Dance, & Media. A freestyle dancer and DJ outside of the classroom, her current pursuits lie at the intersection of health and the arts, exploring ways in which the therapeutic qualities of dance and music can be enhanced to improve our quality of life. In 2024, Johnson was awarded the Artist Development Fellowship from the Office for the Arts at Harvard, which allowed her to work with the Boston-based dancer Stiggity Stackz for a summer, working on movement foundations and event curation. Since then, whether creating spaces for individuals to experiment with freestyle dance or to socialize with others who appreciate a similar craft, Johnson has been excited to produce more opportunities for the health and social benefits of the arts to be embraced within and beyond Harvard’s campus. Placing an emphasis on body isolations, Johnson has choreographed and performed with various Harvard groups such as Expressions, Eleganza and Harvard Breakers, as well as served as a movement artist for singer/songwriter Xavier Emmanuel, jazz musician Devon Gates ‘23 and songscape coordinator Díjí Kay. She has also DJ’d at Battle for Yardfest and performed alongside rapper Kelvyn Colt at the German American Conference.
Liliana Price, a resident of Lowell House and double concentrator in Sociology and Theater, Dance & Media, is awarded the Suzanne Farrell Dance Prize for her contributions to the Harvard dance community as a dancer, choreographer, administrator and director. Price is the co-founder of Harvard Undergraduate Contemporary Collective, the college’s premier pre-professional contemporary dance company; she has brought in acclaimed choreographers from the New York City and Boston professional scenes (Madi Hicks, Baye & Asa, Jessie Stinnett, Levi Marsman and others). HUCC recently advanced to the 2025 National Round of World of Dance. Price is an elected member of the Signet Society, a recipient of the Artist Development Fellowship from the Office for the Arts at Harvard and a Conflux Arts Resident Fellow. Her thesis Chasing Castability: Identity Negotiation in the Los Angeles Commercial Dance Industry explores identity performance in professional dancers. She has trained with BODYTRAFFIC LA, danced with Boston’s InEdit Improvisation Ensemble, Harvard Ballet Company and EXP Crew, has worked with Abilities Dance Boston and is a Boston Dance Studios Pre-Professional Program alum. She can be seen dancing in Madi Hick’s film Darker Than This. She has served as scene director for Eleganza and executive director for Expressions and has choreographed with both.
Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts
Alex Lee ‘25 and Haley Stark ‘25 are the recipients of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. The prize recognizes outstanding artistic talent and achievement in the composition or performance of music, drama, dance or the visual arts. This prize honors the sum of a student's artistic activities at Harvard.
A resident of Dunster House and joint concentrator in Art, Film, and Visual Studies and East Asian Studies, Alex Lee is an animator and visual artist who specializes in stop-motion animation. During their time at Harvard, they have created six animated short films among a variety of other projects, including still work in screen-printing and figure drawing. Lee has worked with a diverse array of materials including hand-drawn and hand-painted animation, claymation and digital animation, and has a special love for puppet and sand animation. Past projects have included a comedic stop-motion short film about beer cans who get into a Shakespearian-style sword fight while arguing about whether they will get recycled after a frat party, and a sand-animation of the Tang Dynasty poem River Snow. Their current 9-minute thesis film combines puppets and dream sequences animated in sand to depict the life of a Van Gogh copyist living in Dafen, China. Lee also currently serves as co-president of the Signet Society.
A double concentrator in Theater, Dance & Media and Psychology, Haley Stark is a director with a broad range of artistic experience. Notable works include directing Postcard from Morocco (Lowell House Opera, the oldest opera company in New England), The Unknowable (world premiere, Sanders Theatre) and The Sorcerer (Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players). Stark also directed the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club production of Little Shop of Horrors. At Harvard, she has served as executive producer Arcadia and A Legacy in Harmony, and in technical roles for Being the Boss, Jesus Christ Superstar and Black Girl Nerd. A committed performer and creator, she has contributed to Three Letter Acronym Improv Comedy (two-time captain), Harvard College Stand-Up Comedy Society (writer, performer) and the Sketch Comedy Collective (editor). Additionally, Stark was a dramaturgical research partner at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of The Earthen Brothers, a paratheatrical novel. Stark was awarded the Harvard University Presidential Public Service Fellowship for her creation of artistic, accessible maps of campus.
Council Prize in Visual Art
Tiffany Onyeiwu ‘25 is the recipient of the Council Prize in Visual Art. The prize recognizes outstanding work by a Harvard undergraduate in the field of visual arts, which includes but is not limited to painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, film and video.
Tiffany Onyeiwu is a Kirkland House affiliate and concentrator in Art, Film, and Visual Studies, with a secondary in Social Anthropology. Onyeiwu is an artist, maker and researcher working to engage social histories within her creative praxis. She has been creative director and a three-time host of Cultural Rhythms, the largest multicultural and arts-based festival at Harvard. She has been an intern with Harvardwood and the Harvard Center for African Studies in Cape Town, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. Onyeiwu is the recipient of the Arusha Fund for Undergraduate Research, which supported her thesis in the U.K. on the heritages of Black and African identity and explorations on gender and Afrofuturism through the mediums of cyanotypes, àdìrẹ (dyed cloth from southwest Nigeria) and ceramics at the Office for the Arts at Harvard Ceramics Program. During her multi-country study abroad, she investigated the transformative power of public art in shaping the collective memory of Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Cape Town.
Special Citation for Arts Leadership and Innovation
Mariah Norman ‘25 is a resident of the Dudley Co-op and a concentrator in History and Literature with a focus in Black, queer and Indigenous American Studies. With a vision for building affinity through artistry and fostering collective healing through self-expression, Norman co-founded the Black Arts Collective alongside three other first years in 2021. Since then, the Black Arts Collective has been redefining what it means to be a student arts organization at Harvard. As a multimedia artist, scholar and community organizer, Norman blends disciplinary lines to create aesthetic experiences that reshape cultural memory and dream new worlds into existence. They direct documentary and experimental films, with a project currently in production by Aubin Pictures and co-directed alongside Catherine Gund. Norman has been commissioned to curate the collections of private estates, while also contributing to curatorial initiatives at Harvard Art Museums and Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. Their own visual art incorporates organic materials with painting/collage/photography and was exhibited in France and Morocco while they were studying abroad. Norman has been dancing for over a decade and is currently developing improvisational choreography for a forthcoming solo exhibition. Their writing spans creative non/fiction, including poetry, cultural critique and investigative journalism.
Council on the Arts members at the time of selection were:
Robin Kelsey (Chair) Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, History of Photography and American Art; Remo Airaldi, American Repertory Theater; Lecturer on Theater, Theater, Dance & Media; Alicia Anstead, Producer, Harvard Arts Festival; Associate Director for Programming and Communications, OFA; Daniel Chong, Professor of the Practice in Music, Parker Quartet; Fiona Coffey, Director, OFA; Angélica Durrell, Director of Programs, OFA; Elizabeth Epsen, Manager of College Dance, OFA Dance Program; Phillip Howze, Associate Senior Lecturer on Theater, Dance & Media; Ruth Stella Lingford, Professor of the Practice of Animation, Arts, Film and Visual Studies, Film Study Center Fellow; Laura Quinton, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lecturer on Theater, Dance & Media; Matt Saunders, Professor of Arts, Film and Visual Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies (on leave 2024-25); Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellow; Yosvany Terry, Senior Lecturer on Music, Director of the Jazz Orchestra.