New York – The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its work on a podcast series called New Angle: Voice, dedicated to preserving and sharing the lives of the most influential women in the history of architecture and design.
The NEH recently announced about $31.5 million in grants for 226 humanities projects from across the U.S., supporting a wide range of projects from education and scholarly pursuits to the preservation of archives and digital media.
Amaza Lee Meredith
The Outright Award for audio documentary series New Angle: Voice – Pioneering Women of American Architecture, cites the project director, Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA, executive director of the BWAF. In the announcement, NEH describes the podcast as “a multiplatform project about the history of women’s contributions to American architecture.” It was awarded under the grant category of the Division of Media Projects Production.
Hosted by Kracauer and produced by Brandi Howell, the first season of New Angle: Voice debuted last year and reveals intimate details and challenges faced by five notable women in architecture: Julia Morgan, Natalie de Blois, Helen Fong, Florence Knoll and Norma Sklarek. The listening audience jumped from a few thousand to over 40,000 during the spring of this year.
Ray Kaiser Eames
The NEH grant comes as the BWAF prepares to release the second season of New Angle: Voice. The second season’s premiere episode, to be released in early October, introduces the story of modernist industrial designer, Ray Eames. Subsequent episodes will present the lives of TAC founders, Jean Bodman Fletcher and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness; the African-American architect, Amaza Lee Meredith; inventor and suffragist Anna Wagner Keichline; and the first-ever winner of a Pulitzer Prize for architecture criticism, Ada Louise Huxtable.
