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Madison Tyler was having dinner with her host family in Madrid, Spain in early April when she got an email notifying her she received a 2022 Beinecke Scholarship.

The award, founded in 1975, provides graduate funding and mentorship for juniors in the arts, humanities or social sciences. Tyler, a junior double major in African American studies and English, is the third Syracuse University student to be named a Beinecke scholar. The scholarship works with 135 participating institutions in the United States and named 16 total recipients for 2022.

Tyler initially came to Syracuse with the intention of getting a liberal arts education, and only enrolled as an African American studies major. It wasn’t until she took Interpretation of Film, an introductory English course taught by associate professor Roger Hallas, that she decided she wanted to pursue film.

“I had never really thought about studying movies from an academic perspective or approach,” Tyler said. “But once I discovered it, I love it.”

During her time at Syracuse, Tyler has continuously found ways to continue pursuing film studies both in and outside of the classroom. She’s written for The Renegade Magazine, SU’s Black general interest magazine, which she said allowed her to break out of her comfort zone into journalism.

“I’ve been able to carve out a niche of talking about Black popular culture, which was a through-line of thinking critically about movies and race, blackness, and all the work I’ve done so far academically, and outside of class,” Tyler said.

Tyler met Melissa Chessher, chair of the magazine, news and digital journalism in the Newhouse School of Public Communications, during a seminar she ran for first-year students in the Renée Crown University Honors Program. During the seminar, Chessher encouraged Tyler to engage with campus publications like Renegade.

Chessher said Tyler took the initiative to act on her curiosity. She’s also written for PopSugar magazine, a pop culture publication that partners with Newhouse to provide internships and jobs for students.

“What is special about Madison beyond her talents and intelligence, when she’s committed to something, she follows through and delivers,” Chessher said. “She has a singularity of purpose.”

Cameron Gray, the most recent SU student to receive the scholarship, served as an inspiration for Tyler, she said. Gray, who became a Beinecke Scholar in 2021, is also a Black woman studying film and encouraged Tyler to apply for the award.

Tyler reached out to Gray in fall 2021 for advice after the two met in a class. Gray then invited Tyler to work on her senior thesis project, Bootyshort Revolution, a short film about discrimination young Black girls face in public schools, which will be released soon. Tyler leaped at the opportunity, Gray said, and worked as a script supervisor during production.

“We both are really passionate about film and we’re both very passionate about the politics of representation in film, but I was really inspired by her,” Gray said. “I was just trying to offer any and everything I knew to get her involved.”

This semester, Tyler has been studying abroad in Madrid, where she said she’s been able to immerse herself in the Spanish language and culture. By taking classes in Spanish that she wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to on main campus, she’s been able to grow her expertise in film studies, she said.

“I chose to take (History of Art in Spain) because I was reading a book on making movies by Sidney Lumet, and he said he got the inspiration for lighting in a film from a painting that he saw,” Tyler said. “To take an art history class, and learn about this other form of art, could enrich how I look at films or how I think about movie making as well.”

Each Beinecke scholar receives $4,000 immediately and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school with no geographic restrictions. While Tyler hasn’t decided which graduate school she’d like to attend, she said she’s excited to pursue either a master’s degree in fine arts or a PhD in cinema studies.

Tyler said the application process for the scholarship, which pushed her to be specific and articulate her interest in researching Black excellence narratives in film and her career goals, was humbling, and she praised her mentors along the way.

“At 20 years old, that’s kind of hard to think about. You have to think five to seven years into the future,” she said. “It was really important to talk to people who are older than me and wiser than me about how to go through that process and really get clear on my goals and what I want in the future.”

DISCLAIMER: Madison Tyler is a film columnist for The Daily Orange. She does not influence the editorial content of the News section.

Published on May 3, 2022 at 12:50 am

Contact Richard: rcperrin@syr.edu | @richardperrins2