While applicants learn of the awards during the spring, the Fulbright program publishes data each February on the top producers of Fulbright scholars and students. 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program has promoted international peace through intellectual and cultural exchange since its founding in 1946. The program funds approximately 2,000 recent graduates and current graduate students annually to teach and conduct research in 160 countries around the world. 

Marielle Buxbaum: Theater for social change in Ecuador 

Brown’s 2024-25 student Fulbright winners are now midway through their year teaching or conducting research in nearly two dozen countries across Asia, North and South America, Africa and Europe. Teaching placements include elementary schools, high schools and universities, where awardees are providing classroom instruction and exchanging cultural perspectives between the U.S. and their host countries. Research award recipients are pursuing projects in a wide range of academic fields, from ethnomusicology and economics to filmmaking and education. 

For many recent graduates, Fulbright fellowships provide opportunities to pursue projects that extend the courses of study they pursued while at Brown. For Class of 2024 graduate and Fulbright awardee Marielle Buxbaum, it also meant a return to Ecuador, where she had previously studied abroad as a junior concentrating in theatre arts and performance studies. 

“There’s such an emphasis on family here that it almost feels like home,” Buxbaum said. “If you’re here without your family, you’ll quickly get ‘adopted.’ I have, like, five ‘moms’ in Ecuador now, and it’s actually helped me get closer with my own family. I call my grandma every day now.” 

And Buxbaum said there’s lots to share with her grandmother. Since settling into the southern city of Loja in late September, Buxbaum has been partnering with the municipal theater company Teatro Quimera to create a variety of theater-based projects aimed at empowering vulnerable communities of young people in Loja. 

In a class she teaches that focuses on playwriting for social change, Buxbaum helps guide teenagers in a public school as they write and perform pieces that cover sensitive topics like bullying, suicide, intra-family violence and substance abuse. 

She has extended that work beyond the classroom, as well. At a local juvenile detention center, Buxbaum is developing workshops that will engage young men in playmaking around superhero themes to promote positive masculinity and self-empowerment. At the same time, she’ll be working with a group of teen girls at a residential sexual violence treatment center, helping them process trauma through self-expression and performance. 

As those workshops play out, Buxbaum is also teaming up with a professor at a local university to co-author an article for a Latin American academic journal that will investigate how playwriting and original play creation can be used to help mitigate violence and its effects on young people.

From curriculum development to language proficiency, Buxbaum said there’s not a facet of her Ecuadorean research that hasn’t been influenced by her Brown education. 

“There's just so much confidence that you gain in an environment like Brown,” she said. “I always felt empowered to pursue my own projects and passions. And now, with the Fulbright, I have been given the great privilege of the time to figure out what it is I want to do as a researcher. There’s so much freedom, creatively and intellectually.” 

Though the Fulbright provides funding for one year of study, Buxbaum is considering staying in Ecuador longer to seek further funding opportunities for community-engaged theater work. But if she returns to the U.S. in the spring, she’ll begin applying to MFA programs in playwriting. 

Buxbaum knows she wants to impart social change through her work, but she’s not sure exactly where the future will take her — she said she would be equally thrilled to be a television writer in Los Angeles, a playwright in New York, a professor in Philadelphia, or a grassroots theater organizer in a city she hasn’t yet visited. 

“If I learned anything during my time at Brown, it’s that I don’t always need to take a direct path,” she said. “It’s better for me to zig-zag, creatively combining all the things I love and connecting my goals to wherever I am.”