Kavita Pillay Receives U.S. Student Fulbright Award

Kavita Pillay of Cambridge, Massachusetts has received a Fulbright grant to India in Film Studies, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced recently.

Pillay is one of over 1,000 U.S. students to travel abroad for the 2005-2006 academic year through the Fulbright Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Program's purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the rest of the world.

Pillay is a graduate of Tufts University. As part of Fulbright program, she is living in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala in order to research the work of Kerala's humanist and independent filmmakers.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its inception, the Fulbright Program has exchanged over a quarter of a million people - 100,900 Americans who have studied, taught or researched abroad and 166,600 students, scholars and teachers from other countries who have engaged in similar activities in the United States. The program operates in over 150 countries worldwide.

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. Among the thousands of prominent Fulbright alumni are: Craig Barrett, former Chief Executive Officer of Intel Corporation; Marek Belka, Prime
Minister, Poland; Mohamed Benaissa, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Morocco; Chan Heng Chee, Ambassador to the U.S., Singapore; Luis Ernesto Derbez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mexico; Renee Fleming, opera singer; Dolores Kendrick, Poet Laureate of the District of
Columbia; Daniel Libeskind, Architect; Robert Shaye, Founder and Co-Chairman, New Line Cinema; Javier Solana, Foreign Policy Chief, European Union; Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics; and Muhammed Yunus, Managing Director and Founder of the Grameen Bank.

Fulbright grantees are among over 30,000 individuals participating in U.S. Department of State exchange programs each year. For more than forty years, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has supported programs that seek to promote mutual understanding and respect between the
people of the United States and the people of other countries. The U.S. Student Fulbright Program is administered by the Institute of International Education.

For further information about the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, please visit our website at http://exchanges.state.gov or contact Heidi Manley, Office of Academic Exchange Programs, telephone 202-453-8534, or e-mail academic@state.gov.

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