Announcing the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards
The College of Fine Arts at Boston University is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards, the most prestigious awards conferred by the College. The 2018 award recipients were honored for their outstanding achievements in their careers and communities, and in service to the arts and society. The awards were held at 6pm on September 21st at the Boston University Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre in conjunction with Boston University Alumni Weekend.
The 2018 award recipients were Sedrick Huckaby (CFA’97, BUTI’95), Kelly Kaduce (CFA’99), and Katy Rubin (CFA’07).
About the Recipients
Sedrick Huckaby (CFA’97, BUTI’95) was born in 1975 in Fort Worth. He began painting quilts as backdrops for portraits. Over time, quilts became the focus, acting as artful messengers that tell stories of family, ancestral legacy and of spiritual concepts through draping folds and connected patches. His newest quilt paintings are typified by a monumental scale, heavy layers of paint, interplay of light and shadow, and a sense
of soft texture that defies the hardness of the thick impasto on canvas.
Huckaby’s recent series The 99% often mentioned in the press features a powerful installation of more than 100 lithographic portraits that the artist created during a recent residency at the Brandywine Print Workshop in Philadelphia.
Huckaby currently teaches at The University of Texas at Arlington and is represented by Valley House Gallery in Dallas.
Praised for “shining a bright light on operatic stages around the country” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), soprano Kelly Kaduce (CFA’99) is a national audience and critic favorite. For her creation of the title role in David Carlson’s Anna Karenina, Opera News proclaimed her “an exceptional actress whose performance was as finely modulated dramatically as it was musically.”
In the 2017-18 season, Kelly appeared as Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly with Santa Fe Opera, the title role in Massenet’s Thaïs with Minnesota Opera, Tosca with Michigan Opera Theatre, and Polly in Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera with Boston Lyric Opera. Her extensive repertoire ranges from Verdi, Puccini and Mozart to John Adams (Nixon in China), Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes), Carlisle Floyd (Susannah) and Bright Sheng (Madame Mao).
New works continue to be central to Kelly’s career, and in addition to the title role of Anna Karenina, she has also created roles in Moravec’s The Shining, Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner, and the operatic trilogy Central Park.
Kelly Kaduce was a winner of the 1999 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has performed around the world with companies including Canadian Opera Company, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, L’opera de Montreal, Teatro Municipal de Santiago, West Australian Opera, and Malmö Opera.
Katy Rubin (CFA’07) is founder and Executive Director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, a nonprofit organization that partners with communities facing discrimination to spark transformative action through theatre. Over eight years, TONYC has created Forum Theatre troupes with various communities including homeless adults; LGBT homeless youth; people living with HIV/AIDS; immigrants; and justice-involved youth and adults, presenting over 250 free, interactive public performances for 13,000 New Yorkers. TONYC has developed and popularized the practice of Legislative Theatre in the United States since 2013, bringing together elected officials, advocates, service providers and communities experiencing injustice, and impacting legislation and institutional policy throughout NYC. TONYC’s work has been featured in Slate Magazine, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Forbes, HuffPost and American Theatre Magazine, and on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer and MTV News.
Katy’s personal mission is to design and scale social change processes that are fun, creative, inclusive and accessible, through theatre and storytelling. She has facilitated Theatre of the Oppressed projects with activists and community artists in Nicaragua, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK, and across the US. Katy trained with Augusto Boal at the Center for TO—Rio de Janeiro, and holds a BFA in Acting from the Boston University School of Theater. She is an alumna of Coro Leadership New York.