CCNY junior Khenya Makena is the 2019 Blanche Mason Starkweather award recipient.
Summer is taking on a significant new meaning for City College of New York junior Khenya Makena this year. As the 2019 Blanche Mason Starkweather award recipient, the electronic design and multimedia major is spending the holiday on both east and west coasts engaged in humanistic research to benefit the LGBTQIA community.
The focus of Makena’s research is the history of inner city safe spaces in New York City and Los Angeles. Emphasis is on the role African-American members of the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied) community have played in the creation of these safe places.
“Basically, I am visiting archival sites and old community organizations to record oral history and compile research into a documentary film of about 40 minutes in length,” said Makena, a Bronx resident.
Her destinations in Los Angeles include the Free Black Women’s Library, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries, and The Los Angeles LGBT Center, which is regarded as the world's largest provider of programs and services for LGBT.
In New York, Makena is spending time at Harlem’s Ali Forney Center, the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Lower Manhattan.
The Blanche Mason Starkweather award is presented by City College’s Division of Humanities and the Arts. It provides a stipend of $4,000 to a BA or MA student engaged in a significant humanistic research project of his/her own design conducted under the guidance of a faculty mentor.
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