The Open Society Foundations recently announced that Columbia University School of Professional Studies student David Keefe ('20SPS, M.S. in Narrative Medicine) has been awarded a 2020 Securing Open Societies Fellowship.
David is a part-time M.S. in Narrative Medicine student on track to graduate in 2020. He is also the Senior Assistant Dean of Student Veteran Initiatives at the Columbia University School of General Studies. David is a Marine Corps veteran and Adjunct Professor of Art at Montclair State University, where in 2011 he developed and built a nationally recognized and awarded program called Combat Paper New Jersey (CPNL), a community and social practice art project aiming to change CPNL into a new non-profit organization, and Frontline Arts, which connects communities by supporting socially engaging art projects rooted in printmaking and papermaking.
As a Securing Open Societies Fellow, David will expand his current fine-arts practice to continue focusing on connections between veterans, immigrants, undocumented immigrants and DACA recipients, as well as to focus on publishing articles and a field manual on the initiative. The hope is that this practice can lend itself as in intervention to use between bifurcated communities and can teach people how craft-making can help return people from a disconnected world to a collective way of thinking.
Through the fellowship, this work will be highlighted in a new book/field manual, published articles, blog posts, exhibitions and performances over the next year. Additionally, this practice is being developed for application to various communities in other parts of the country, and the world, that are disconnected due to injustices caused by health systems and police/military states.
Click here more information on the Open Society Foundation.
Learn more about the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University School of Professional Studies here.
