Announcing the 2024 Zabar Scholars
Since 2019, the League has been awarding cash scholarships to the best and brightest preservation students studying in NYS. The Zabar Family Scholarship Program was established by former League Trustee Lori Zabar and continues to award students in her memory. This year’s applicants were extremely strong, inspiring a lively discussion among our scholarship jury. The three students receiving scholarships this year truly rose to the top, and we are honored to support them. Get to know this year’s Zabar scholars: Lorraine Colbert (City College), Cecelia Halle (Columbia), and Siena Leone-Getten (Pratt Institute).
Lorraine Colbert is an artist and senior student in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. Through her studies in art and architecture, she has gained experienced in architectural design, graphic design, illustration, and photography. She uses these skills in academic and professional projects to explore her interests in historic and cultural preservation. Lorraine is a native New Yorker and pursues opportunities to work with the city's historic preservation and urban planning efforts to benefit the public. A part of her work has been with Save Harlem Now!, a nonprofit historic preservation organization that is dedicated to protecting, preserving, and celebrating Harlem’s irreplaceable heritage. Her photography of historic landmarks in Harlem can be viewed here. Lorraine’s dream is to begin a nonprofit library organization that will promote the love of books and support literacy rates amongst children and marginalized adults.
Cecelia Halle is a designer, historian, and M.S. candidate in Historic Preservation at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in Art History from George Washington University, where she researched participatory museology in South Asia. Between 2020 and 2023, Cecelia worked as a communication designer for the Cultural Vitality Program at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Working as a designer in the field of cultural heritage, Cecelia collaborated closely with her colleagues—from language revitalization specialists to film programmers—to place community at the forefront of her practice. Her time spent at Folklife shaped questions that now guide her research as a master’s student, which considers how to leverage historic preservation policy to support diverse preservation strategies centered on marginal histories and cross-cultural ways of knowing while countering displacement and gentrification—bridging the “archive” and “repertoire” and merging the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
Siena Leone-Getten (she/her) is in her first year of the Historic Preservation M.S. program at the Pratt Institute Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. She previously worked in politics in her home state of Minnesota. Her undergraduate work in American Studies at Carleton College and her time as an AmeriCorps volunteer with American Conservation Experience led her to historic preservation. Siena hopes to work on preserving built, natural, and cultural heritage within parks and public lands.