Dale Fellowship recipients pursue original projects after graduation
Julianna Martin and Ceci McWilliams
Class of 2026 members Julianna Martin and Ceci McWilliams are the latest recipients of the Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship, which funds yearlong independent projects for members of each senior class in the year following their graduation. The two students began their work this summer.
The Dale Fellowship, created by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin Dale, provides a $40,000 grant to spend a year on “an independent project of extraordinary merit that will widen the recipient’s experience of the world and significantly enhance the student’s personal growth and intellectual development.”
Fourteen Princeton sophomores also received $7,000 Dale Summer Award stipends for smaller projects they completed over the summer. The 2026 Dale Summer Award recipients are: Yara Almoussa, Narges Anzali, Poem Dang, Arsalan Ebadi, Hannah Franklin, Noah LaBelle, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Kailani Melvin, Lucy Park, Theodore Peebles, Margalit Ramirez, Jared Sewell, Imanuel Udofia and Daisy Yao.
Julianna Martin
Martin graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in art and archaeology and a minor in entrepreneurship. She is a photographer and visual artist who has also served as event chair and student editor of the student-run magazine Rah Rah Visual Arts and a member of the Princeton University Art Museum student advisory board.
For her Dale project, “Slow Witness: A Photographic Journey Through the Tahoe Basin Watershed,” Martin is producing a collection of analog photographs from the watershed of the 120-mile-long Truckee River near her hometown of Truckee, California.
“My experimental photography methods center water as both subject and material agent,” Martin wrote in her Dale application essay. “I want to walk the river’s complete path with a camera, using water from each section to alter film and prints — letting the landscape write itself onto photographs through contact, erosion, and gradual marking.”
Martin plans to create an artist book combining her photographs with journal excerpts from hiking the watershed. She will then host a traveling exhibition in the watershed communities of Tahoe City, Truckee and Reno.
In his letter of recommendation for the award, Basile Baudez, an associate professor of art and archaeology, said Martin’s project will “transform how we think about the West, our impact on nature, and how the photographic medium can reveal new ways of seeing and understanding water and landscape.”
For her senior thesis at Princeton, Martin produced a solo gallery exhibition of experimental analog photographs, “Sites of Erosion,” using novel photographic processes to explore change, age and decay. She also organized an entrepreneurship practicum about navigating the artistic landscape of grants, residencies and exhibitions. She has interned at the New York Foundation for the Arts.
On campus, she served as executive director and director of events for the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club’s Output social entrepreneurship team, a swim lesson instructor with Princeton Aquatics and a teaching assistant for Deana Lawson, the Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Among other honors, Martin has received previous funding for her work through the Lewis Center’s Alex Adam ’07 Award.
Ceci McWilliams
McWilliams graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in Spanish and Portuguese and minors in history and journalism. She served as a staff writer and senior editor of Nassau Weekly and performed with Más Flow Dance Company.
For her Dale project, McWilliams is interviewing Afghan refugees living in her hometown of Austin, Texas, about their resettlement there, along with leaders of nonprofits, immigration lawyers and state officials. The yearlong reporting project will produce a series of long-form articles tied to recent changes in immigration policy.
In her application essay for the Dale Award, McWilliams wrote that her project “aims to illustrate the precarious circumstances of Afghan refugees in the U.S. today and, at the same time, foster understanding between an underserved community and Austin’s wider population.”
In her letter of recommendation for the award, Christina Lee, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and department chair, called McWilliams’ project “a meaningful contribution to public understanding of the Afghan migrant experience in the United States, bringing greater nuance, context, and agency to stories that too often circulate without them.”
McWilliams had previously conducted research in Spain. She said her interest in migration deepened after writing a story for the “Narrative Nonfiction” course taught by Eliza Griswold, professor of the practice in the Humanities Council and director of the Program in Journalism, about Afghan sisters divided by the Taliban’s education restrictions and the U.S. immigration system.
McWilliams published her piece in The Nation in June 2025. She has been published in other outlets, including Publishers Weekly and Princeton Alumni Weekly.
She received this year’s Vicente Llorens Castillo Senior Prize in Spanish from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and was awarded the department’s Ricardo Piglia Best Senior Thesis Prize for an oral history of Basque separatism. She previously received a Howard and Suzanne Kauffmann Fellowship, which funded her thesis research in Orexa, Spain.
At Princeton, McWilliams served as a research assistant for journalist Amy Waldman, a research assistant for the National Head Start Association and a tutor with Princeton Tutoring. She held summer internships at New Hope Housing in Houston in 2023 and at the LITA Spanish language immersion program in 2024.
