Dale Fellowship Provides Theater Alumna Kaelani Rae Burja with Opportunity to Write an Original Play

In June 2023, recent Program in Theater and Music Theater certificate graduate Kaelani Rae Burja ’23 received a Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship to spend the year following graduation in pursuit of an independent project of special interest. The project she had in mind was an original play about the life of her mother, Molley, who died weeks before Burja started her first year at Princeton.

“I discovered a box while I was cleaning out the apartment that really surprised me, seeing things that she did when she was my age, and realizing that I really didn’t know who she was besides my mother….and I had all these questions, but no time to ask them.”
— Kaelani Rae Burja

The Dale Fellowship, created by 1953 Princeton alumnus Martin A. Dale and supported through Princeton’s Office of International Programs, provides a $40,000 grant to select seniors to spend the year after graduation on “an independent project of extraordinary merit that will widen the recipient’s experience of the world and significantly enhance the recipient’s growth and intellectual development.” Burja applied for the Fellowship intending to travel the world, find people who knew her mom, study her mother’s archive, and slowly piece together a story about her life. The financial support she received through the Fellowship provided Burja time and money to do exactly that. She traveled to Guam, California, and New York and spent her post-graduation year researching and writing her new play, Love You Forever, Molley.

In September 2024, Burja returned to the Lewis Center’s Drapkin Studio to present a staged reading of her complete script for a packed audience of friends and mentors in the place Burja calls her “artistic home.”