Shellfish, cinema projects win 4th round of R.I. Foundation fellowships

PROVIDENCE – With a nod to seafood and the arts, the Rhode Island Foundation on Wednesday announced this year’s winners of the Rhode Island Innovation Fellowships.

The fellowships, or so-called “genius” grants, were awarded to John Haley for his proposal to stimulate the state’s shellfish industry and duo Daniel Kamil and Emily Steffian who aim to create the “Providence Cinemateque” to focus on independent movie exhibition, film festivals and education in media literacy.

“We don’t have any prescribed industry that we’re looking for, so it’s wide open,” Neil D. Steinberg told Providence Business News. “This year just happened to be seafood and one from the arts and culture.”

The fellowship, formed to stimulate solutions created by Rhode Islanders for Rhode Island challenges, is the brainchild of Providence philanthropists Letitia and John Carter, who started the program with their ideas and donations.

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Steinberg headed a six-person selection panel, which chose the two projects out of 353 applications. The fellowship, now in its fourth year, will give the two projects $300,000 each over the next three years.

Haley, a naturalist and entrepreneur, is creating a more reliable method of seeding mussel beds. His “Blue Mussel Spat Attachment Cord” will come pre-loaded with juvenile mussels, called “spat,” which would reduce steps in the cultivation practices and allow for multiple harvests each year.

“If we hatch mussels in a brood stock in a hatchery and we have a process in which we can put these larva on the line, the substrate could change the whole industry,” Haley said.

Kamil and Steffian, owners of the Cable Car Cinema & Café in Providence, will offer a community movie and culture center with three auditoriums of various sizes. Inspired by the lack of diversity they’ve noticed in popular movie culture, the duo will set up one of the auditoriums completely dedicated to women, minorities and LGBT filmmakers.

“Emily and I were sort of appalled with the Oscars [Awards] and how male and white it was,” Kamil said. “Living in 2015, and running the Cable Car, we’ve come across barriers of entry. There’s this lack of representation of other sort of stories, whether it’s cultures, class or race – so that’s why we’re devoting the one screen.”

The formal announcement will take place at Veterans Memorial Auditorium at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

In addition to this year’s winners, the selection panel also wanted to recognize five finalists for their “merit and potential.” They are:

  • Harold Vincent proposed creating the Ocean Technology Manufacturing Center, which would apply new technological to traditional markets in military, scientific and commercial endeavors such as offshore oil and gas production and extend them into the new sectors of offshore renewable energy, scientific research and environmental monitoring
  • Meg O’Leary and Sarah Friedman proposed founding the state’s first urban teacher residency program, specializing in serving English language learners and low-income students in order to improve academic performance in urban schools
  • Arnell Milhouse, founder of IntraCity Geeks, planned to use the Fellowship to expand ClassForward, the nation’s first series of computer-programming, junior bootcamps and junior hackathons for K-12 students. IntraCity Geeks seeks to ignite the state’s economy by creating a pipeline of STEM job candidates and entrepreneurs
  • Andrew Trench, Kyla Coburn and Peter Haas proposed building RI3D, a publicly accessible 3D library of the state’s environmental and historical treasures where students, artists, architects and engineers can preserve and work with the most advanced mapping technologies
  • Bruce Campbell and Walter Zesk proposed creating a single, on-line resource portal to coordinate Rhode Island’s awareness of and adaptation to sea level-rise concerns

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