Visual arts lecturer Lex Brown and historian Lucas Ramos awarded Rome Prize

Princeton faculty member Lex Brown, lecturer in visual arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts, and historian Lucas Ramos have been awarded the 2024-25 Rome Prize(Link is external) for independent research in the arts and humanities. Both are Princeton alumni. Recipients are invited to pursue their work at the American Academy in Rome, a global hub for artists and scholars, for five to 10 months.

“The Rome Prize is one of the most storied fellowship programs in the United States,” academy president Peter Miller said in the award announcement, offering recipients “the chance to live and work in Rome, inspired by the city and one another.”

This year, 31 American and three Italian artists and scholars received the fellowship.

Lex Brown is an artist, theatermaker, writer and songwriter whose recent work has focused on writing opera librettos. The American Academy in Rome awarded her the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize for her project “Soap Operetta.” She joined the Princeton faculty in 2020.

The project ”is part research and part practice towards developing my particular form, which is influenced by clown, stand-up, musical theater, performance art and opera,” Brown said, describing it as “a hybrid approach that incorporates operatic song structures and comedic physical acting.”

During her 10 months in Rome, she is studying the history of opera, including participating in workshops in various Italian performance traditions such as Commedia dell’arte and learning from contemporary theater makers.

“Italy is the birthplace of opera,” Brown said. “The performance traditions I’m studying are all embodied traditions; they can only be passed down through people. You have to be taught by somebody who knows how to do the movement, the entrance, the exit.”

She said she’s especially appreciative of mentors at the academy who connect fellows to artistic and scholarly communities within Rome and throughout Italy. “It’s an incredible opportunity to advance and deepen whatever your field of interest is.”

Brown graduated from Princeton in 2012 and majored in art and archaeology. Her first short opera “Tati,” composed by Kyle Brenn, about three people stuck inside a giant, bio-engineered whale, will debut in January at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, and the Kaufman Music Center in New York.

Lucas Ramos, who graduated from Princeton in 2019 and majored in history, is currently working towards his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He was awarded the Jesse Howard, Jr. Rome Prize for a project to complete his dissertation, “Queer, Catholic, Communist: Forging a Sexual Revolution in the Italian Republic, 1958–1989.”

As a recipient of the Rome Prize, Ramos will spend this academic year in Rome doing fieldwork at the Vatican Archives, as well as conducting interviews with queer political organizers from the 1970s. “I’m very excited to join the American Academy’s community of artists and scholars,” he said.

Ramos said he first had the opportunity to explore Rome while studying at Princeton, through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program.

Wendy Heller, the Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton and a 2001 Rome Prize fellow, served as jury chair for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies for this year’s awards.