Lex Brown
Three Princetonians awarded Rome Prize
Princeton faculty member Lex Brown, Class of 2012, a lecturer in visual arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts, has been awarded the 2024-25 Rome Prize for independent research in the arts and humanities, along with fellow Princeton alumni Anthony Acciavatti of the Class of 2018 and Lucas Ramos, Class of 2019. Recipients are invited to pursue their work at the American Academy in Rome, a global hub for artists and scholars, for five to 10 months.
“The Rome Prize is one of the most storied fellowship programs in the United States,” academy president Peter Miller said in the award announcement, offering recipients “the chance to live and work in Rome, inspired by the city and one another.”
This year, 31 American and three Italian artists and scholars received the fellowship.
Lex Brown is an artist, theatermaker, writer and songwriter whose recent work has focused on writing opera librettos. The American Academy in Rome awarded her the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize for her project "Soap Operetta." She joined the Princeton faculty in 2020.
The project “is part research and part practice towards developing my particular form, which is influenced by clown, stand-up, musical theater, performance art and opera,” Brown said, describing it as “a hybrid approach that incorporates operatic song structures and comedic physical acting.”
During her 10 months in Rome, she is studying the history of opera, including participating in workshops in various Italian performance traditions such as Commedia dell'arte and learning from contemporary theater makers.
“Italy is the birthplace of opera,” Brown said. “The performance traditions I'm studying are all embodied traditions; they can only be passed down through people. You have to be taught by somebody who knows how to do the movement, the entrance, the exit.”
She said she’s especially appreciative of mentors at the academy who connect fellows to artistic and scholarly communities within Rome and throughout Italy. “It's an incredible opportunity to advance and deepen whatever your field of interest is.”
Brown graduated from Princeton in 2012 and majored in art and archaeology. Her first short opera "Tati," composed by Kyle Brenn, about three people stuck inside a giant, bio-engineered whale, will debut in January at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, and the Kaufman Music Center in New York.
Anthony Acciavatti is the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and School of the Environment. The American Academy in Rome awarded him the Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize for his book project “Groundwater Earth.”
The book examines what Acciavatti considers “the hidden front line of climate change: groundwater.” In particular, he is interested in tubewells, which are privately owned mechanized wells that deliver most of the world’s groundwater.
“Our thirst for groundwater has shifted the axis of the earth by nearly one meter, causing cities and landscapes to sink at alarming rates,” he said. “Over half of all agriculture is irrigated with groundwater and nearly half of the global population drinks it every day.”
During his time in Rome, he said it has been most rewarding to study the aqueducts and fountains in the city itself, which was built with water in mind. “Today, nearly 85 percent of the city water comes from groundwater,” he said. “Whereas most part of the world access groundwater through tubewells, Rome gives a civic sense of monumentality to water as a collective infrastructure.”
Acciavatti will spend the spring in India — the largest consumer of groundwater in the world — as a senior fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Lucas Ramos
Lucas Ramos, who graduated from Princeton in 2019 and majored in history, is currently working towards his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He was awarded the Jesse Howard, Jr. Rome Prize for a project to complete his dissertation, “Queer, Catholic, Communist: Forging a Sexual Revolution in the Italian Republic, 1958–1989.”
As a recipient of the Rome Prize, Ramos will spend this academic year in Rome doing fieldwork at the Vatican Archives, as well as conducting interviews with queer political organizers from the 1970s. “I'm very excited to join the American Academy’s community of artists and scholars,” he said.
Ramos said he first had the opportunity to explore Rome while studying at Princeton, through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program.
Wendy Heller, the Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton and a 2001 Rome Prize fellow, served as jury chair for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies for this year's awards.