The 2023 ITRA Prize - Award Winners
(sponsored by the British toy and Hobby Association)
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The ITRA Prize Awards Committee, consisting of Mark Allen (United Kingdom), Gilles Brougère (France), Cleo Gougoulis (Greece), and Greta Pennell (USA), unanimously decided to award the senior and student prizes to the following candidates:

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The Senior Prize was awarded to Antonietta Loffredo an Independent Scholar, pianist and musicologist from Como, Italy for her detailed historical book The Toy Piano: From the Playroom to the Concert Platform published by UT Orpheus, Bologna (Italy), 2018 ISBN: 978-88-8109-511-7.

All aspects of the toy piano are discussed in this book which offers a comprehensive history of toy pianos and their precursors in Europe, the migration of the toy piano to the United States along with its positioning by manufactures and advertisers. This little piano was different from the standard piano both for its small dimensions and for its sound produced by hammers striking different length metal rods. From there the book looks at music composed for the toy piano and its acceptance and performance on concert stages around the country.

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The Junior Prize was awarded to Janaíne dos Santos Rolim for her Masters thesis Female Empowerment: A Multimodal Analysis of Representations of Women in Images of Barbie Dolls' Packages completed under the direction of Danielle Barbosa Lins de Almeida at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa (UFPB), João Pessoa, Brazil.

Drawing on the Grammar of Visual Design of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996 [2006]), and on the System of Transitivity and ideational metafunction of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics (1978; 1985), Ms. Rolim’s thesis is a semiotic analysis of Barbie and her packaging in order to examine female representation in relation to traits of empowerment.