Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: University of California, Los Angeles

Title of entry: The History of Nell Irvin Painter

About this entry: Nell Irvin Painter is a renowned historian who, after many years teaching at Princeton University, retired to pursue education as an artist. Her fascinating, funny 2018 memoir Old in Art School was praised by Time, The New York Times, and others. Painter, who received a master’s in African history from UCLA in the 1960s, is just the sort of person whose story belongs in UCLA Magazine — an unsung hero of academia whom our faithful Bruin readership loves getting to know. It’s a key part of the magazine’s overall mission: to build and strengthen affinity to UCLA.

To capture this piece, we knew we needed a top-drawer writer. Memoirist Joseph Earl Thomas, whose 2023 book Sink was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and others, is a stellar voice of the African American experience whom we’d been lucky enough to recruit to the magazine a few months earlier. A professor at Sarah Lawrence College and a powerful academic in his own right, he brought a deep knowledge of Black studies and a firsthand understanding of what it means to create Black art to the Painter profile.

The end product is one of the most beautifully written and moving pieces to ever appear in UCLA Magazine. Of the 40 most-read articles on our website since the story’s publication, it achieved the second-highest mark for visitors’ average time on page — those who begin the story get hooked and stay.