Class of 2024 members Juliette Carbonnier and Collin Riggins are the latest recipients of the Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship, which funds yearlong independent projects for members of each senior class in the year following their graduation. The two students began their work this summer.

The Dale Fellowship, created by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin Dale, provides a $40,000 grant to spend a year on “an independent project of extraordinary merit that will widen the recipient’s experience of the world and significantly enhance the student’s personal growth and intellectual development.”

Juliette Carbonnier

Carbonnier graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in English and certificates in creative writing, music theater and theater. She is a writer, performer, musician and designer whose Princeton credits include theatrical productions at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Theatre Intime and the Princeton Triangle Club.

For her Dale project, she is writing a one-woman play with music inspired by the legacy of her ancestors, some of whom were progressive Yiddish performers, comedians and composers, while others were Holocaust survivors.

Her piece will “explore the dissonances between art and trauma, comedy and tragedy, memory and reality, honoring the past while being true to the present,” Carbonnier said.

She will use tropes and traditions of Yiddish theater — including comedic shtick and songs written by her family members — as inspirations, and hopes to untangle stories from her family’s past “to grapple with what it means to yearn for a place that no longer exists and how to instead find home in story and song,” she said. 

“Our world is wracked with anger, grief and suffering. It is the privilege, honor and challenge of artists to offer space to mourn, empathize, celebrate, create community, and share hope that we can all slowly, but surely, march towards a better world,” Carbonnier wrote in her Dale application essay.

In her letter of recommendation for the award, Stacy Wolf, professor of theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and American studies, called Carbonnier’s project a “perfect expansion and extension of her time at Princeton, as a student, an artist and a person.”

“It unites her family history with the history of Jews in Europe before the Holocaust. It ties together pathos and humor — a definite marker of Juliette’s style as a writer,” Wolf wrote.

Carbonnier is currently traveling across Central and Eastern Europe for research. She will then examine and translate family documents and sheet music from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. She is learning Yiddish through the Workers Circle, a nonprofit social activist and Yiddish cultural organization there.

For her English thesis at Princeton, Carbonnier wrote, co-produced, co-designed and starred in “Bodywork,” a dark comedy about a young woman with chronic pain who becomes eligible for a new body-swapping surgery. She also wrote a poetry collection, “Funeral Theatrics,” through the Program in Creative Writing. 

During her time at Princeton, she served as artistic director of Quipfire! Improv Comedy, a resident artist with the Nassau Literary Review and a writer for the Princeton Triangle Club and All-Nighter.

Carbonnier has received several honors from the Department of English, most recently the 2024 Alan S. Downer Prize. She also won this year’s Lewis Center’s Francis LeMoyne Page Theater Award and was recognized by the center for outstanding work her first, sophomore, junior and senior years.

Read about Collin Riggins and the sophomore recipients of Dale Summer Award stipends in the full University homepage article: