Barnard introduces the Zora Neale Hurston Grant

Barnard community members discuss the new grant opportunity for students to celebrate the famous alumna’s legacy. 

Photo by Haley Scull/The Barnard Bulletin

By Haila Desai

October 30, 2025

Barnard’s Office of Inclusion and Belonging, in partnership with Africana Studies Department Chair Monica Miller, has announced the Zora Neale Hurston Grant. This grant aims to give students the opportunity to bring the Barnard community together through a project that commemorates Hurston’s impact.

In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston became the first Black student to graduate from Barnard. The College’s official “Zora at Barnard” webpage states that “Hurston’s life’s work combined her training and interest in literature, history, theatre, and performance, as well as folklore and anthropology; it enriched and transformed the disciplines of anthropology and American and African American literature. Her legacy can be seen in the work of Black Barnard writers and other luminaries who similarly span disciplines to tell the stories of Black people and their cultures.” 

Although Hurston is best known as a novelist, specifically for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Chair & Professor of Professional Practice Interim Director Alice Reagan argued that Hurston’s plays were her true passion. 

“Hurston was a playwright,” Reagan explained. “I and others believe that that was really where her passion was. If she had her druthers, she would have been directing plays on Broadway, that would have been her most important creative output.” 

“Hurston knew in her bones that Black life is exciting and worthy of being presented, of being shared, and that Black life equals performance,” Reagan continued.

An email sent to the Barnard community on October 3 by Akilah Rosado, Barnard’s Vice President for Inclusion and Belonging, explained that the Zora Neale Hurston Grant is meant to celebrate “the impact of Zora Neale Hurston in academia, the arts, the African Diaspora, and American life in the 20th century” as part of the Zora Neale Hurston Centennial.

Led by the Office of Inclusion and Belonging, the Zora Neale Hurston Centennial is an "interdisciplinary, multiyear project” that commemorates Hurston’s work and legacy from 2025 to 2028. Joanne Delgadillo, a representative from the Barnard Office of Inclusion and Belonging, explained that the start of the celebrations was the two-day Zora Neale Hurston Summit in the spring. 

“That took a lot of work, and it was amazing,” she said, referring to the summit. “There were different speakers, different events going on.” 

Delgadillo noted that if students apply to be interns for the Office of Inclusion and Belonging, they may be involved in planning events for the centennial. She highlighted some additional upcoming celebrations, including another movement lab exhibit, an annual event through the Africana Studies department, and inviting a keynote speaker on campus.

Other centennial celebrations include the Weaving Dreams project, a display of “handmade quilts and other textile artifacts selected from the oeuvre of quilting artist and Barnard professor of Africana Studies and literature, Kim F. Hall.”

To receive the Zora Neale Hurston Grant, students are asked to submit a proposal that “celebrates Hurston’s legacy” and “brings together distinct constituencies for discussion and relationship building.” Selected students will receive up to $2,500 per semester to explore their passions and implement their projects. Applications for the grant are due by November 7.

The email further explains that projects should focus on the themes in Hurston’s literary writing and plays. They can take the form of “visual artwork, theatrical productions, dance, or performance projects, [or] seminars and workshops on Hurston’s legacy.” Delgadillo noted that she and her colleagues are “particularly interested in what current students are looking for because they’re going to be here during the centennial celebrations over the next three years.” She emphasized that the grant is open to current Barnard students, alumni, faculty, and staff members and that proposals can be made for future projects that happen in the coming semesters or even after students graduate. 

When asked if projects should focus on the Barnard community or if they can extend into the greater New York City area, Delgadillo replied, “For now, we’re very much focused on Barnard. However, there are opportunities for it to be open externally.” She highlighted the summit last spring as an event that had “many external people participating on campus.”

In Professor Reagan’s class, “Zora Neale Hurston and Black Performance,” students study Black performance across music and theater through Hurston’s foundational 1943 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Professor Reagan, talking about Hurston, stated, “she wasn’t interested in uplifting the race in a certain ‘respectability politics’ kind of way. She was … passionate about the people she grew up with.” 

“The hope for the grant is that it will have people across the camps and alums think about what Hurston might have wanted or done — things that she might have wanted to have seen here, and how we can continue her legacy,” Reagan went on to say. “The grant is there as a[n] encouragement for students to try out ideas and to build community, hopefully, beyond the gates as well."

Students in Reagan’s class agreed, adding that the grant should be used to celebrate Hurston and Black students at Barnard, not the College itself. They want to see it fund projects that will invest in classes like theirs, which examines the legacies of previously ignored Black academics’ work, as well as projects that make an impact in the broader Harlem area — a part of Hurston’s legacy as a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. 

As student Zoë Benavidez (BC ’27) stated, “[this grant] should not be about what Barnard did for her, but about what she did for Barnard. [We] should not be thinking about the first Black student at Barnard but about the ten thousandth.”