Arts + Justice: 2025 Grant Recipients

In its fifth year, SAI's Arts + Justice Student Grant funded fifteen solo and group projects investigating social justice issues through creative practice. The 2024-25 cohort includes both undergraduate and graduate students who work in an array of mediums and forms.

The 2024-25 Arts + Justice Student Grant funded fifteen students engaged in creative pursuits around questions of art and justice. This year’s cohort included both undergraduate and graduate students who work across many disciplines, mediums and forms including textiles, printmaking, illustration, creative writing, film, photography, mixed media installation, and performance.

The students in this year’s cohort also received the support of an expanded workshop program, led by graduate student coordinator Delaney Holton (Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Art History). The monthly roundtable sessions enabled students to share their projects, provide peer feedback, and build a justice-oriented artistic community. In addition to the roundtable sessions, the grantees met with Artist Amy Elkins for an artist talk and workshop on “Sustaining an Artistic Practice through Creative Ritual”.

Made possible with the generous support of the Shenson Fund, the Arts + Justice Student Grants program is sponsored by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI), in cooperation with Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA).

KATIE BAIK

Living Beyond the Norm

Bio

Katie S. Baik is a Korean-American interdisciplinary performing artist whose work blends dance, choreography, vocal performance, and acting to tell stories that challenge, heal, and advocate. Trained pre-professionally in multiple dance disciplines and currently studying taking Theater and Performing Arts classes at Stanford University, Katie performs with companies including eMotion Arts and has choreographed for both stage and screen. Her creative voice is deeply rooted in social justice, drawing from her experience growing up in a conservative Korean household and her commitment to breaking the silences around race, gender, and identity. She uses choreography and movement to spark empathy, reflection, and action. Katie is passionate about teaching and empowering the next generation of dancers to speak up and take space, both onstage and off. She hopes to continue blending art and advocacy, ultimately bringing her creative practice into public service and political leadership.

Project Statement

"Living Beyond the Norm" will be a contemporary choreography project that delves into the unique experience of LGBTQ+ Koreans. Through my choreography and presentation choices, I will seek to highlight the challenges, triumphs, and resilience of individuals navigating identity, acceptance, and community in a society shaped by ultra-traditional norms. Through physicality of movement, emotion, and storytelling, I will aim to capture themes of self-discovery, pride, and resistance, offering the audiences a visceral understanding of the LGBTQ+ experience in Korea.

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ZACH BEN-AMOTS

School of Fish: Unpacking a Legacy of Eugenics in the Stanford University Archives

Bio

Zach Ben-Amots (he/him) is a second year MFA student in Stanford's Documentary Film & Video program. He came to nonfiction filmmaking through local news, having worked as a photojournalist and reporter in Chicago, New York, and Colorado Springs (his hometown). Ben-Amots believes in making meaningful work through research and collaboration. His work frequently involves puppets, aiming for a distinctly hand-made combination of sculpture, installation, and video.

Project Statement

“School of Fish” will be an art installation about the history of eugenics and race-based pseudoscience at Stanford, using the university’s archives to examine the ways that institutional sin is stored and cataloged. By combining analog projection with sculpture and installation this project aims to deconstruct the university's special collections archive on Stanford's first president (and noted eugenicist) David Starr Jordan.

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METZTLI CARBAJAL

B/Pack

Bio

Metztli Carbajal (she/her/ella) is a creative from San Ysidro, CA, shaped by the cultural and political life of the borderlands. She grew up painting murals in Chicano Park with her dad and attending a Raza Liberation school led by artists and community educators. Her creative work is rooted in political education, memory, and self-determination, often drawing from everyday borderland experiences.

Metztli is currently a junior at Stanford University, studying Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Science, Technology, and Society. She’s interested in how creative practice can challenge dominant systems and build spaces of belonging. In the future, she hopes to open a borderlands arts studio that provides enrichment programs centering the voices and leadership of transfronterizo youth.

Project Statement

B/Pack is a collaborative art piece that encapsulates the embodied knowledge of transfronterizx youth, or students who cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily, through the design of a single, custom backpack. Co-created with transfronterizx high school students, the backpack reflects how identity, surveillance, coloniality, and spatial politics converge in everyday objects.

The design draws from student sketches and visions of an “ideal backpack” for mitigating surveillance at the border. Design components such as transparent materials, limited compartments, and compact dimensions are requirements shaped by the logics of inspection and control.

B/Pack reimagines a common object as a political artifact, revealing how students navigate and subvert systems of power, while carrying with them their own definitions of safety, movement, and belonging.

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HAN DAO

Xin Xăm

In collaboration with Monica Chau Huynh

Project Statement

“Xin xăm” is a web-based communal art project about love inspired by the idea of “xin xăm,” a traditional form of fortune telling in Vietnam to get spiritual guidance through card-picking. We aim to reframe the one-way, transactional “xin xăm” activity into a way of preserving communal guidance on love: one selects a prompt on loving, receives someone else’s answer, and reciprocates by sending in their own answer. We believe this provides a meditative space that preserves our collective experience in love with radical reciprocity and challenges the Western ideals against tenderness, vulnerability, and individualization.

EUNICE JOY DE BELEN

tailless lineblue

Bio

Project Statement

tailless lineblue is a collection of photographs chronicling one’s complex relationship with grief and the baggage that comes with it. it aims to take you in this journey of vulnerability and acceptance, and love and community, and pain and purpose. it’s a mosaic of memories, twenty years of love and months of events documented in this series. tailles lineblue is a showcase of beautiful lives, of existence, of those no longer here with us and those who live on having experienced this.

D FUKUNAGA-BRATES

He would have given them wings

Bio

Project Statement

I wrote, illustrated, and printed a ~15-page perzine as my first artistic exploration into my identity as an American adoptee from Kazakhstan. The intention of this perzine is to counteract rhetorically homogenization of international adoptees’ stories by sharing my own in an authentic and intentional way. Considering the emotional complexities implicated by adoption law and policy, mixed-media personal expression is the chosen way to better understand and express its many nuances of love, family, separation, and borders.

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ALEXANDREA HENRY

Role Models

Bio

Alexandrea Henry (she/her) is a former elementary teacher who misses it every day. She believes in and is committed to the formation of worlds where every child is free, from the River to the Sea. She is currently a second-year doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education, where she studies how our youngest learners make sense of power and belonging in the context of school discipline. She also loves documenting the world through film photography, sweet poems, and long conversations at dusk. Alexandrea is currently reading works by Rasheeda Phillips and Robin D.G. Kelley.

Project Statement

Often, when considering the past and future, we overlook the thoughts, experiences, and contributions of children. Young minds are typically viewed as an afterthought. This project is a call to center the imaginations of young children, one that takes seriously the futures that they wish to see.

In a two day design thinking workshop, I encouraged a first grade class in Philadelphia to think about problems in the world around them and to design technology to address them. Using watercolor to illustrate their ideas, we get a glimpse of how each child leaned into the fluid and expressive medium to convey their visions. Each child received “futuring goggles”, which allowed us to peer into unrealized worlds, envisioning futures they wanted for themselves and each other.

Photographed in medium format black and white film, the children are captured in the hallways of their school. These portraits invite the viewer to feel the nostalgia and to ponder how they serve as an archive of each child’s self-perception as they envision themselves in the future.

So, as you look up at the ceiling, reflect on how often you look down at children. Take in their voices as art, not noise. And may we envision a future where we adults look to young imaginations for inspiration, as our Role Models.

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ROSINA LIN

Golden Ink

Bio

Rosina Lin (she/her) is a third year undergraduate studying economics and music. She has practiced Chinese calligraphy since childhood, which is a traditional art form that uses brush, ink, and paper to write Chinese characters with expressive strokes and careful technique. Her artistic practice aims to bridge traditional Chinese calligraphy with contemporary environmental activism, reimagining calligraphy as a medium for ecological reflection and engagement.

Project Statement

This exhibition merges the traditional art of Chinese calligraphy with a contemporary reflection on environmental sustainability. Centered around the phrase 惜墨如金 ("treasuring ink as if it were gold"), the project reinterprets this classical idiom in light of today’s urgent ecological concerns. Each artwork in the series is created using ink mixed with air pollution particulates collected on campus. By literally treasuring this ink—formed in part from harmful pollutants—as if it were gold, the work transforms a cultural ideal into a powerful environmental message that prompts viewers to consider the invisible costs of modern living and the need for greater ecological mindfulness.

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LIZBETH LUEVANO

unveiling the valley

Bio

lizbeth luevano is a mexican-american poet and artist from the desert scape in the Coachella Valley. lizbeth's research brings visibility to the environmental hazards that migrant field workers are exposed to in the valley, and considers how that in turn creates entire landscapes where migrant futures are disrupted, such that in the end, labor is desired and the laborer forgotten. her research heavily breathes life to her creative practice, where she is presently focused on creating art that is active, historical, and deeply embodied.

Project Statement

landscape visuals have never been neutral. historically, photographs of the Coachella Valley have often operated as colonial archives, shaping what can be known, and remembered about the communities dispossessed inside of them. “unveiling the valley” thus confronts the visual legacies of the Coachella Valley, where in the desert amidst the intense heat, migrant field workers are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and are made invisible across the horizon. Inspired by how chicana scholar gloria anzaldua described the borderlands as "una herida abierta," "an open wound" this multimedia project uses photography, testimonies, and carved cacti to create a reimagined landscape where migrant field workers are placed back onto a field of visibility. by creating scars across different planes of cacti with the portraits of field workers, this project considers what it means to carve out the natural landscape and imbue violence through the same extractive nature that migrant bodies hold scars from their labor. “unveiling the valley” is consequently a rupture into the capital gaze, asking us to be attentive to the silences of the landscape, and who gets to be seen.

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ARUNDATHI NAIR

Rethinking “Natural” Gender Roles

Bio

Arundathi (Aru) Nair is a multimedia journalist from Laramie, Wyoming. Her work seeks to not only inform and educate, but deepen our understanding "How will we learn about the world if not from each other?"At the heart of her work is a conviction beautifully captured in Sarah Thankam Mathews’s novel: "How will we learn about the world if not from each other?" For Nair, the answer lies in stories—shared, listened to, and lived—because it’s through one another that we come to understand not only the world, but what it means to be human. She spent her undergraduate degree studying Human Biology and Comparative Literature in concentrations that center on understanding humans and how we interact with both each other and the world around us. Storytelling in all its forms (audio, video, writing) is one of their biggest passions because of its incredible power to bring people together.

Project Statement

"Rethinking 'Natural' Gender Roles" is an audio documentary exploring how myths about gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies have been weaponized to uphold institutional sexism and shape the narratives that inform and ultimately create the world in which we live. By bringing together anthropology, archaeology, history, and oral storytelling, this audio story serves to challenge these pervasive myths, asking why we rely on them to define human nature today.

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CAITLAN NOCKIDENEH

Cruel and Unethical: A Woven Offering of Reproductive Resistance

Bio

Caitlan (they/them/any) is a multidisciplinary artist, multimedia enthusiast, and undergraduate student at Stanford University studying Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Earth Systems. Their mediums include textiles, basketry, pottery, silversmithing, beadwork, and other forms of needlework like sewing, and embroidery. Their artwork centers themes of ancestral memory and Indigenous placemaking and placekeeping; exploring how we come to inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. This interplay between landscape and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that they use their art to embody Indigenous people’s intimate relationship(s) with others, themselves, and the complex natural (and social) landscapes in which they live.

Project Statement

Cruel and Unethical: A Woven Offering of Reproductive Resistance brings together the fields of art, cultural studies, and social justice to explore the role of Navajo (bead) weaving as a medium for resistance and healing. This project envisions the completion of my very own woven art piece that confronts the legacy of forced sterilization inflicted upon Native women by colonial and state institutions. This piece combines beadwork, anatomical imagery, and traditional ecological knowledge to honor ancestral knowledge and reclaim the body as sacred territory. It becomes a vessel of remembrance, resistance, and rematriation as a material offering that honors womb sovereignty, ancestral medicine, and the enduring fight for reproductive justice in Indigenous communities. The final piece will be an exhibition that embodies the survival and resilience of Indigenous womanhood.

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WILLIAM PANGBURN

Gyotaku Impressions from the Bay Area

Bio

Project Statement

Gyotaku Impressions from the Bay Area is all about sharing the physical and emotional impressions magnificent fish can have on us and sharing experiences and snapshots from the lives of local fisherfolk. For this project, I purchased the fish from local fisherfolk or caught them myself. The prints were created by inking the whole fish with edible inks and creating impressions on paper. Afterwards, I cleaned the fish, cooked them and had dinner parties to share the fish. In creating this project, I reflected on how I can be more in tune with nature and shift my values to be less wasteful. We live in a time of a climate crisis and in order to combat this, I believe it will take a dramatic shift of perspective. The best way I can strive for this in my personal life is by interacting with as many different people as possible and hearing different perspectives on what it means to live harmoniously with our natural world.

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AILEEN RUBIO

Representing Brentwood: Ideation on Counter-Narratives

Bio

Aileen Rubio (she/they) is a third year undergraduate studying Art Practice and CSRE. They specialize primarily in oil painting, screen-printing, and sculpture. Their 2D work explores representations of marginalized peoples historically underrepresented in the portraiture spaces. They engage in an ongoing process of establishing a Chicane visual language rooted in their hometown as a means of understanding their own experiences better. They often depict people they know to cultivate such a language. Their 3D work focuses on tensions between queer and heteronormative forces through intense color and repetitive forms.

Project Statement

Representing Brentwood is a series of artworks that go against the imaginary of Brentwood as a very white place despite its critical location between two worlds that are remarkably non-white—-the Bay Area and the Central Valley. The city prides itself on being an agricultural mecca, yet rarely acknowledges the various groups of migrating people working as farmworkers to cultivate such a mecca. I use luchador masks to protect anonymity of individuals and as a non-white visual language that resonates with me. I worked with the East Contra Costa Historical Society and stories from my mother to develop an understanding of our histories within the agri-tourist town and how it works to quiet its non-white peoples. I look forward to continuing the series into the summer

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CÉSAR VALENZUELA

Proportionality

Bio

César Valenzuela (Caracas, 1989) is a political philosopher, performance artist, and filmmaker creating dialogues between theater, film, and political theory. Currently, they are a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Stanford University, where they are writing a dissertation on global warming and democracy. Their experience as a queer, Venezuelan immigrant has motivated them to put political action and social identity in the forefront of their research and art practice. Both their artistic work and philosophical research interrogate the limits and possibilities of political action: how ought we to transform our political reality and tackle the climate crises, systemic oppressions, and AI expansion?

Before coming to the Bay Area in 2019, César practiced as an actor, poet, and editor in a variety of artistic projects in Caracas and Paris. At Stanford, they have focused on developing their interests in democratic theory, applied ethics, and philosophy of race, and integrating movement into their theater background.

Project Statement

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HELEN WANG

Bodies of Knowledge: Anatomical Art as a Tool for Liberation

Bio

Helen Wang (she/her) is an MD-PhD student at the Stanford School of Medicine. As a visual artist, she specializes in realism and figurative art through painting and drawing. Her work draws on training in classical art, Western American art, and traditional Chinese painting. She has earned numerous regional and national art awards and has several years of teaching experience in the arts and art and medicine. As a physician-scientist, she hopes to apply her background in the arts to improve the practice of medicine and make science more accessible.

Project Statement

Knowledge about one’s body is a form of liberation, yet persistent systemic issues such as socioeconomic disparities, racial inequities, and inadequate health education limit individuals’ body knowledge. Historically, anatomical artwork has largely focused on communicating a scientific dissection to physicians rather than celebrating natural beauty and function with laypersons. In this project, I aim to create anatomical artwork in the form of drawings and paintings that are both informative and celebratory, that empower viewers with accessible body knowledge and inspire a corporal self-love.

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Arts + Justice: 2025 Grant Recipients

Misfit Photography

Truth

self – portrait

Dosed and Exposed

Confirmation

Photos of Old Beijing

Find the Light

Still Life of a Support System

Grief

skytree: levels

Community

Tahoe Mountains and Sky

body of evidence

Ode to Stanford

A Matter of Time

Main Quad at Sundown

Art at Stanford

Sezen

Untitled

Nostalgia