Margaret and Bill Benjamin Endowed Faculty Fellowship
at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro
The museum’s first award available to faculty at UNC Greensboro, the Margaret and Bill Benjamin Endowed Faculty Fellowship at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, expands access to the museum’s renowned collection of modern and contemporary art and accommodates object-based teaching and learning among faculty, students, and the Greensboro community.
The Margaret and Bill Benjamin Endowed Faculty Fellowship promotes innovative use of the museum’s collections by fostering curricular collaboration between faculty and Weatherspoon educators, curators, and staff. Benjamin Fellows receive support to plan a course and/or an exhibition drawing upon (but not limited to) the museum’s collection. Awardees are supported in developing new content for teaching and learning within their discipline, and awardees can include interaction with campus or community partners. Any gallery installations or exhibitions that arise from the fellowship will serve both the campus and the community.
Research and learning from fellowship activities will enter the museum’s collections database to support teaching and learning within the larger UNCG community and beyond. Over time, this fellowship will create a virtuous cycle of increased knowledge development and access.
All members of the UNC Greensboro faculty are encouraged to submit a proposal, with pre-approval from their department head. (A written endorsement will be requested at the time of application.) There is no specialized knowledge of art or curating required. If a course is proposed, there is no minimum requirement on the number of times it must meet in the museum’s study rooms or galleries, but the expectation is that direct interactions with artworks from the collection are measurably integral to the course’s design and impact.
For more, read the UNCG News Story from the recent Light the Way Campaign about the Benjamins’ gift: https://lighttheway.uncg.edu/news/weatherspoon-auditorium-dedicated-for-benjamins/.
2026 - 2027 Benjamin Faculty Fellows
2026–27: Emily Voelker, Assistant Professor of Art History, and Tamra Hunt, Lecturer, School of Art
The 2025–26 Benjamin Faculty Fellowship, now in its fourth year as an integral part of the museum’s work, has been awarded to Dr. Emily Voelker and Tamra Hunt from UNCG’s School of Art. As assistant professor of art history, Voelker researches the histories of photography, archives, and Native American representation. As an instructor of drawing, community-engaged muralist, and proud member of the Lumbee Tribe, Hunt focuses her creative practice on understanding and sharing the Indigenous histories of Guilford County. Together, the two are expanding opportunities within both the art history and studio practice curricula for students to learn about Native traditions and practices, past and present.
As Benjamin Fellows, Voelker and Hunt will bring contemporary Native artists to campus to speak with both students and community and help the museum better understand—and potentially expand—its collections of artworks by Indigenous artists. In the past, Voelker has built courses around the Weatherspoon’s photography collections, and Hunt has served as a volunteer docent. We are thrilled to support these committed and longstanding partners in their work through the Benjamin Fellowship.
Past Fellows
2023–24: Heather Holian, Professor of Art History, Associate Director, School of Art
Inaugural Benjamin Fellow Heather Holian collaborated with Weatherspoon curator Emily Stamey on the fall 2023 Space for Engagement exhibition titled A Golden Age: Original Animation Art from the Walt Disney Studios, 1937–42, drawing on her teaching experience in the history of animation and her research on early Disney art exhibitions and especially the legacy of the Galerie St. Etienne and its director, Dr. Otto Kallir, who began exhibiting and selling Disney artworks in the 1940s. The present-day Kallir Research Institute arranged the loan of the exhibition’s artworks from a private collection, and some of them later became gifts to the Weatherspoon, ensuring opportunities to learn from them for generations of UNCG students to come.
View Dr. Holian’s exhibition brochure here: https://www.flipsnack.com/weatherspoon/walt-disney-originals-behind-the-magic/full-view.html.
2024–25: Lalenja Harrington, Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
Dr. Lalenja Harrington is an assistant professor in the UNCG School of Education’s Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations Department and an interdepartmental instructor and artist-in-residence with the Honors College. Her research explores the ways we experience and define inclusion. As the 2024–25 Benjamin Fellow, she engaged students from two of her courses—Devising Inclusion in the Global World (first-year honors) and Critical Disability Studies (graduate seminar)—with the museum’s 2024 exhibition Crip* and developed a range of projects aimed at providing greater accessibility to the exhibition and creating opportunities for community dialogue.
Read about her time at the Weatherspoon in her article in the Journal of Participatory Research Methods: https://jprm.scholasticahq.com/article/163533-collective-care-in-action-theatre-of-the-oppressed-as-critical-participatory-action-research-cpar-in-a-college-based-undergraduate-research-experie.
2025–26: John Borchert, Director, Applied Research in Computer Arts, Digitization, and Esports (ARCADE), affiliated faculty, Department of Religious Studies
A scholar of digital humanities and game studies, Dr. John Borchert serves as director of videogaming and esports studies at UNCG. As the 2025–26 Benjamin Fellow, Dr. John Borchert joined the museum team to explore the ways in which close study of physical artworks in the galleries can inform the creation of virtual worlds online. He convened gatherings of faculty from across disciplines to think together with the museum about how collections and archives can be activated through real-time 3D technology in ways that support both traditional art history and contemporary design studies.
Read the August 2025 UNCG article about Professor Borchert’s Benjamin Fellowship here: https://www.uncg.edu/news/new-digital-art-experience/.
