Our Nominees for Studienstiftung Scholarship – Veronika Wiens

A total of four cross-media publishing students from the Merz Akademie have been nominated for the 2021 scholarship call of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. This means that all the recommendations made by Professor Kevin B. Lee, who has accompanied and mentored the students since the beginning, have been included by the foundation in the further selection process.

We will be presenting the nominees in more detail here in the coming weeks.

Kevin B. Lee: “Veronika has distinguished herself as a truly outstanding student who contributes exceptionally both as an individual and in collaboration with her classmates. Through her studies in Crossmedia Publishing she eagerly embraces new media forms while applying critical insights to evaluate their qualities. She often comes up with an idea that makes a defining contribution to whatever class she is taking.”

A main example is the course Media Networking, where her class was tasked to conceptualize an artistic performance exhibition. She contributed key ideas for the resulting project “Manko”, in which an artistic space was transformed into an alternative society with a casino-based economy. Visitors engaged in various activites through which they could produce personal wealth based on different value systems. The event was a spectacular success which left a vivid impression on everyone.

Veronika has a varied range of subject interests which she explores through a variety of mediums. She has co-written and co-produced a podcast episode on life after COVID-19 that aired on Freies Radio für Stuttgart. For the course Screen Stories, she made a video essay comparing the media appearances of Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s to the use of her image in contemporary social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The video will be screened at the 2021 Stuttgarter Filmwinter.

The next step is a seminar in which the nominees present their work and have a selection interview with a jury of experts.