Gabrielle Rajerison is a researcher, poet, teacher, and freelance editor. She has previously held a 2020-2021 Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, the 2018-2019 Carol Kay Dissertation Fellowship, a Spring 2017 Artist-in-Residency from the University of Pittsburgh’s Physics & Astronomy Department, and the Nationality Room’s 2017 Wendell L. Wray Memorial Award for two months of archival research in Madagascar. Her dissertation is on the concept of the “poetic” image in Black diasporic visual culture, with particular attention to Madagascar.
As an undergraduate, she was a McNair Scholar and has since taken a special interest in both vertical and horizontal mentorship. In Fall 2020, she served as a mentor to graduate students teaching in the University of Pittsburgh’s English department for the first time. She has also taken the initiative to mentor a handful of undergraduates interested in graduate school, teaching, and/or personal enrichment, taking them on as TAs and self-designing their training. Her teaching portfolio includes courses in composition, literature, and film taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Texas-Austin's Michener Center for Writers. When she grows up, she’d like to be a filmmaker