CAAAS Grad Student Award Winners

2024 - 2025 CAAAS Grad Student Award Winners

Angel Anderson

MFA Student, Department of Theatre & Dance, College of Arts & Sciences

Angel Anderson is a performing artist, scholar, and educator from the south suburbs of Chicago. Encompassing various dance forms rooted in Africanist traditions, her movement archive includes street and club dance forms, modern and contemporary sensibilities, and neo-traditional African dances. Anderson is an alumna of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she obtained her BFA in Dance and BS in Psychology. Alongside performing as a principal dancer in Rennie Harris Puremovement, she’s assist...

Edem Dotse

Critical Media Practices

Edem Dotse is an artist and practice-based scholar interested in the intersections between spirituality, cultural memory and mediated representation in contemporary society. Through an ever evolving set of approaches involving video and sound, his work attempts to interrogate and recontextualize African modes of thought and existence within an increasingly globalized media landscape. With a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an MFA in Film & Media Production from the University of Texas in Austin...

Trevor Egerton

PhD Student, Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Trevor Egerton is a fourth-year PhD student in the University of Colorado 51´«Ã½â€™s History Department. His research focuses on the intersections between race and outdoor recreation in the twentieth century American South. Particularly, he uses a set of forty Black-only state parks scattered throughout the region to better understand the connections between the development of outdoor recreation and the Black Freedom Struggle between 1935 and 1965. Trevor is originally from Austin, Texas and graduated in 202...

Millicent Elewosi

PhD student, Department of Communication, College of Media, Communication and Information

Millicent Elewosi is a Ghanaian PhD student in the Department of Communication at University of Colorado, specializing in Rhetorical and Critical Studies. Her research engages decolonial thought, African feminisms, digital activism, and storytelling as strategies for social change. As a former Mastercard Foundation Scholar and community activist, she explores how local epistemologies, oral traditions, and mutual aid networks shape advocacy in Ghanaian contexts. Their current projects examine visual rhetoric...

Kolony Holmes

Department of Religious Studies

Kolony Holmes is an M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University ofColorado 51´«Ã½. She received her bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies with a minor in Astronomy from San Diego State University. Her research focuses on the study of new religious movements, specifically American UFO phenomena, and the interrelationship between contactee interpretation, media, and modern mythology.

Tyreis Hunte

MFA Student, Department of Theatre & Dance, College of Arts & Sciences
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Tyreis Hunte is a Creole Amazônido interdisciplinary artist and creative director birthed in Guyana, South America. Their work is embedded in the understanding and the connections of global indigenous cultures and their embodied philosophies. Tyreis is a Davis World Scholar and alum of the United World College, Changshu China, receiving their Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Asian Studies with focus on Movement Therapy from St. Olaf College.Tyreis is keen on the historic as well as contemporary contributions o...

Ubochi Igbokwe

PhD Student, Department of Musicology, College of Music
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Ubochi Igbokwe is a fourth-year doctoral student studying Ethnomusicology here at CU 51´«Ã½. She is an instructor and teaching assistant at the College of Music and a Graduate Fellow at the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS). At the American Music Research Center (AMRC),her scope of duties included cataloging the digital objects associated with Grauman Theater Scores, Glenn Miller Collections, and importation of digital objects related to popular music through the CU World Cat. Her res...

Idowu Odeyemi

PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts & Sciences2025-2026 Alice Cleora Reeves Endowed Dissertation Awardee
CAAAS Graduate FellowsCAAAS Doctoral Fellows

Idowu Odeyemi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado 51´«Ã½. His research and teaching centers on epistemology, moral philosophy, and social and political philosophy. He is an alumnus of the Open Student Workshop at the University of Oxford. His essay "Living in America, Leaving Nigeria" was recognized as one of the 18 notable essays by a Nigerian in 2023. The philosophical issues he tends to focus on are non-idealized, particularly focusing on how to morally evalu...

Olumide Ojediran

PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Olumide Ojediranis a PhD candidate in Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado 51´«Ã½. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 2019, and subsequently completed a joint Master of Science in Quaternary Geology, Prehistory, and Bioarchaeology at the Natural History Museum of Paris, and Universität Rovira i Virgili, Spain, in 2023.As an Africanist archaeologist, Olumide is dedicated to advancing zooarchaeology within Nigerian...

Success Osayi

PhD Student, Department of Journalism, College of Communication, Media, Design and Information (CMDI)
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Success is Nigerian. He is a PhD student in the Department of Journalism. His research interests revolve around the interrelationship between socio-political power dynamics (especially at the macro level) and the media industry in developing democracies, with the expectation that his work will significantly contribute to our understanding of how these dynamics can shape media representation (in terms of workforce makeup) and portrayal of issues, and how such representation and portrayal can in turn contribu...

Nandi Pointer

PhD Student, Department of Media Studies, College of Communication, Media, Design and Information (CMDI)2024-2025 CAAAS Alice Cleora Reeves Endowed Dissertation Awardee
CAAAS Graduate FellowsCAAAS Doctoral Fellows

Nandi Pointer is a doctoral candidate in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information (CMDI) at the University of Colorado, 51´«Ã½, advised by Dr. Sandra Ristovska. Her multimodal dissertation, which includes the completion of a documentary film, focuses on Black American male identity formation and its rearticulation in Black expats. She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, where she produced her first award-winning documentary Highway of Dreams. The f...

Reya Roussel

J.D. Candidate, University of Colorado Law School
CAAAS Graduate Fellows

Reya Roussel is a third-year law student from Arlington, Texas pursuing a Civil Rights and Racial Justice Certificate and an Entrepreneurial Law Certificate at the University of Colorado Law School. She also serves as a Senior Fellow with the Byron White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, where she helps conduct legal research and coordinate educational events related to a wide range of topics in Constitutional Law.She holds a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies and a minor certi...