April 15, 2016
Three young women of Iranian background are among the 30 winners of the 2016 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
The Soroses are immigrants from Hungary and created the fellowships to help fellow immigrants pursue their education at the graduate level.
The fellows, selected from a pool of over 1,400 applicants, will receive tuition and stipend assistance of up to $90,000 in support of graduate education — in any field and in any advanced degree-granting program — in the United States.
Paul and Daisy Soros established the program in 1997 to support the graduate educations of students who were born abroad but have become permanent residents or naturalized citizens of the United States.
Each award recipient must have “demonstrated creativity, originality, and initiative in one or more aspects of her or his life,” as well as “a commitment to and capacity for accomplishment that has required drive and sustained effort.”
In addition, they must have shown a commitment to the values expressed in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Of the three Iranians this year, one grew up in Tehran and came to the US as an adult, another is Armenian and left Iran at age six, and the third has a British father and Iranian mother and was reared in England.
The first is Shadi Ghaheri, whose award will support her work toward an M.F.A. in theater direction at the Yale School of Drama.
Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Ghaheri says she was immersed in the arts from a young age. She played piano professionally and trained as a ballerina for nearly a decade. At Shahid Beheshti University, she founded the theater club and was the first woman to direct campus theater.
In 2011, Ghaheri moved to California with the dream of becoming a theater director. She started acting, assistant directing, and directing at Saddleback College, the Long Beach Playhouse and the Hollywood Fringe. Ghaheri was learning to act and direct in English and supporting herself with part-time jobs.
Today, Ghaheri is in her first year of the Yale School of Drama’s M.F.A. program in theater directing, which is the most selective program of its kind in the United States. She is currently studying the works of Anton Chekhov and Shake-speare. Ghaheri is known for her ability to reframe a story or a stage so that audiences can see new perspectives emerge.
As a theater director, Ghaheri says, she wants to tell the untold stories of women in pain and captivity, noting that she believes that more powerful roles and positions for women in theater can help transform the way that women see themselves and understand their identities in the United States and across the world.
Nairi Hartooni was born in Tehran into an Armenian family. Her parents were the first generation to live outside their familial village and receive a formal education. They feared the revolutionary regime would not fairly offer their daughter educational opportunities and moved to Glendale, California.
Nairi and her family often visited local museums, the observatory, and the public library for free educational events. Through these visits, Nairi became fascinated by biology.
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Nairi was a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar and double-majored in molecular biology and toxicology. While at Berkeley, she conducted research in plant evolution and worked several jobs to fund her undergraduate career including a position at the state’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch.
Now, Nairi is pursuing a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology in the Tetrad Program at the University of California in San Francisco.
Jenna Nicholas was born in New York to a British father and an Iranian mother, but was reared in England. Jenna decided to return to the United States for college. She was accepted into Stanford University for her undergraduate studies.
In her freshman year, Jenna learned about the idea of investment for social good from a graduate class she was taking. This captured her imagination and she ran with it. Jenna has worked with many of the leaders in the impact investing field, from the World Bank, to Calvert Special Equities, to managing the Divest-Invest Philanthropy Initiative and working extensively in China in this nascent field.
Jenna has been enrolled in the MBA program at Stanford since September 2015. In addition to her studies, Jenna plans to continue to grow her impact investing firm, Phoenix Global Impact, to draw greater pools of capital into socially-minded enterprises.