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Welcome to Polish Studies Endowment Committee at University of Washington
MISSION
Bridging Cultures through Education about Poland by sharing Polish intellectual, scientific, and artistic accomplishments.
VISION
The vision of the UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee is to create a leading West Coast Polish Studies Center at the University of Washington. In pursuit of this goal, we have established an Endowment Fund, we sponsor a Distinguished Polish Speakers Series, provide student scholarships, attract visiting scholars to the UW, and build partnerships with community organizations in the Pacific Northwest.
Film Screening: The Guardian of the Past
Introduction: Prof. Marek Wieczorek, UW School of Art
May 7, 2013, 7:00 pm Communications 120
Malgorzata Potocka is a Polish director who filmed The Guardian of the Past in 2004. It is a documentary about Borys Voznytsky, Director of the Lviv National Art Gallery, who in the face of Soviet tyranny fought relentlessly to preserve some twelve thousand works of sacred art hidden at the St. Bernard Monastery in Olesko, Ukraine. The film garnered awards at documentary festivals in Los Angeles (2005), Kyiv (2006) and Moscow (2007).
Borys Voznytsky (1926-2012), longtime Director of the Lviv National Art Gallery, honorary member of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine, and doctor emeritus of the Krakow Pedagogical Academy, devoted his life to Ukrainian and Polish art, traveling around Ukraine and its abandoned churches in search of neglected treasures such as icons, liturgical objects, and other remnants of religious art. The expeditions in which he involved art historians and enthusiasts saved about twelve thousand museum-worthy artifacts, which otherwise would have been destroyed as a part of the Soviet campaign against religion.
Marek Wieczorek is Associate Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Washington specializing in late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-garde art and culture with a focus on abstraction. His publications on modern and contemporary art include texts on De Stijl, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Gerhard Richter, the Situationist International, and “bioart.” He has curated exhibitions in Europe and the US, and worked on the traveling retrospective of Vantongerloo and the exhibition of De Stijl at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Free and open to the public. Reception after the screening at Communications Building, Room 204
Co-sponsored by: Polish Cultural Institute, New York, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, UW Ukrainian Endowment Committee and Ukrainian Association of Washington State
Dr. Maria Siemionow
April 25, 2013, 7:30 pm Kane 220
Challenges of Facial Transplantation
co sponsored by UW Division of Plastic Surgery
The lecture presents challenges encountered during establishment of Face Transplantation Program at 
Cleveland Clinic. These include medical, surgical as well as ethical challenges. The process of patient selection as well as face transplant outcomes are also discussed.
Prof. Dr. Maria Siemionow is a world-renowned Polish scientist and micro-surgeon. She gained public notice in December 2008, when she led a team of six surgeons in a 22-hour surgery, performing the first face transplant in the United States. Dr. Siemionow is leading the way in developing new technology for minimal immunosuppression in transplantation, and enhancement of nerve regeneration. Dr. Siemionow has been the Director of Plastic Surgery Research and Head of Microsurgical Training for Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Plastic Surgery since 1995. In 2005, she was appointed Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgery at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Siemionow has been honored with numerous awards including the Polish Order of Merit, the Commander’s Cross Polonia Restituta Award and the SAPIENTI SAT Medal. She currently serves as President of the American Society for Reconstructive Transplantation and is past president of the International Hand and Composite Tissue Allotransplantation Society, as well as the American Society for Peripheral Nerve.