Student filmmaker wins Princess Grace honorarium

Meredith Lackey, graduate student, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts. (Click on image for larger file.)

A filmmaker and graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose work addresses global issues has received an honorarium for her work from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA.

Meredith Lackey, who is completing a master of fine arts degree at UIC, describes her films as exploring “global networks — elements like contemporary finance, data centers, and fiber optic cables.

“I’m fascinated by contemporary experience and feel a strong desire to parse that,” Lackey said.

Her recent film “Shwebonta” will be screened at the New York Film Festival in October.  It portrays Burma’s (Myanmar) transition from isolation and military rule to global trade. The film was named for a street in Yangon “where sign board builders construct advertisements for the city by hand,” Lackey said.

A still from Meredith Lackey’s “Iron Condor.” (Click on image for larger file.)

Lackey now is working on her thesis, a film that traces the path of a proposed transatlantic fiber optic cable from South America to Africa.

“Ms. Lackey is as much ethnographer, anthropologist and theorist as she is artist. The foundation’s awards program is extremely competitive, but

she is a smart filmmaker,” said Jennifer Reeder, UIC associate professor of moving image.

Lackey received a UIC University Fellowship during the first year of her MFA program and a UIC Chancellor’s Award for “Shwebonta.”

The New York-based Princess Grace Foundation-USA supports emerging artists in film, theater

and dance through annual awards, honoraria, scholarships and fellowships.