Honors in the Arts Symposium 2024-25

The twenty-one student artists in the 2024-25 HIA and IAM cohort have spent the academic year creating deeply innovative and interdisciplinary projects across a wide spectrum of media: playwriting and film, dance and music composition, fiction and creative non-fiction, graphic novels, and visual arts including sculpture, painting, photography, mixed media, ceramics and wood working

In addition to the public exhibition held on June 6, 2025, video essays created by this year's HIA cohort will be posted on this page later in June.

I come into fruition when I put on my lipstick (and other portraits)(photography, installation)

ADELAIDE BARRETT & ULA LUCAS, BA English | BA Comparative Lit

Project Statement

The Art of Crafting a Tea Experience
(ceramics, woodworking, performance)

GENEVIEVE DANDURAND, BS Engineering: Product Design

Project Statement

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves."

- Thich Nhat Hanh

In the relentless pace of life at Stanford, where there’s always something demanding our attention, embracing mindfulness becomes a radical act. Tea drinking is not just a ritual; it’s a powerful invitation to slow down, connect with our senses, and deepen our relationships.

Genevieve Dandurand creates meditative tea drinking experiences that transcend the ordinary. Her work, inspired by Japanese tea practices, is a journey of presence and community.

Through her own artistry in ceramics and woodworking, Genevieve crafts spaces that promote well-being and connection, reminding us of the preciousness of time and the value of our shared moments.

Diaries of an International Student
(graphic novel)

HELEN DENG 伊曼, BA International Relations

Project Statement

You just turned 18. Time to ship you off from China to America for university! Are you ready to adjust to a new geopolitical climate, learn new dietary practices, live under a different socioeconomic system, and wrestle with different philosophical traditions (woah)? But most importantly, could you do all the above with a lighthearted smile?

Diaries of an International Student is a 3-part hybrid graphic novel by Helen Deng that follows Yuu, a Chinese international student, as she confronts cultural displacement, identity, and the politics of the body. The narrative moves from her initial observations of American campus life to a visual exploration of eating disorders, concluding with a satirical critique of the commodification of the body in capitalist society.

Combining philosophy, personal experience, and varied visual styles, Helen would like to invite you to see the body not just as flesh and bone, but as a battleground where identity, society, and politics collide.

All My Baskets are in One Egg (theatre)

JUNAH JANG, BA Public Policy

Project Statement

In class, my economics professor calls keeping secrets "strategic ambiguity,” calls helping each other out "collusive behavior." "Everyone implicitly puts value on a life," he says to a room of my peers, "economists are just the only people brave enough to say it.”

All My Baskets are in One Egg is a roundabout response to my early economics education. Too often, we are taught a version of human nature that is exclusively self-interested, limitless in greed, and ruthless in pursuit of optimal outcomes — an image that guides our policy-making, rewrites our values, informs our interpersonal relationships, and rushes us towards destructive ends. but there’s more to us than rational decision-making, isn’t there? what is truly known in our “laws” of economics? and hey, shouldn’t my study of public policy feel closer to the public?

Born from interviews with my grandmother and my notes from ECON 1, this show follows the unexpected friendship of two people brought together by a board game. They talk siblings, game strategy, and the politically repressive landscape of 1960s South Korea. Together, they — to borrow from playwright Suzan Lori-Parks — solve for X, where X is the space between player one and player two, or between the arc of history and that of justice.

Stories from a Wounded Traveler
(creative nonfiction)

JAIDEN GRACE KORTH,
BA International Relations

Project Statement

“Health is life lived in the silence of the organs...” or at least that is how French surgeon René Leriche has chosen to define it. My definition: A precarious state of being often unattainable and yet far easier to adopt than “sick”.

Health and Sickness, categorical states of being, were created to narrowly define the human experience, and in the process they quantified, simplified, and isolated individuals seeking retribution for the silence that was stolen from them.

Stories from a Wounded Traveler, seeks to evoke the same healing self-actualization of the chronically ill through the use of illness narrative. This short-story anthology confronts the unique dispositions of international interpretations of health as they uniquely disfigure and alter the human experience. But more importantly, it aspires to leave the reader painfully aware of the privilege of their silence and the strength of their pain- that just a moment in the head of someone else might challenge us to unlearn the harmful perceptions we have adopted when nothing else was offered in its place.

SOFT/SHARP (creative nonfiction)

STELLA LI, BA English; BS Design

Project Statement

In writing, the senses are posited as a worthwhile epistemological pursuit, while sight in particular is exalted as the most trustworthy sense. But sight is deceptive—the human eye, greedy and critical, favors the beautiful over the ugly, often attaching a moral valence to these judgments. Yuriko Saito writes about Kim Bong-ryong’s “crude” gouging out of a blemished mother-of-pearl inlay: the human impulse is to correct, often violently, and few frontiers remain free of the human impulse to manipulate.

But where sight fails, touch relieves. SOFT/SHARP meditates on the folly of vision and the honesty of the haptic. What if, instead of correcting the unpalatable sight, we felt it? What if we could inhabit ugliness at no moral consequence? This series of lyric essays explores the intimacies of writing and asks how the written word might allow us to “touch” that which we might not perceive otherwise. In these essays, maybe the mother-of-pearl lives on to become an heirloom, perfect or not. Blending the personal and the academic, these essays explore themes of femininity, loss, heritage, the cyclical, and the random. Here, there is room for beauty to be a fortuitous encounter, rather than an engineered end.

Frame (oil painting, AI-generated images)

RYAN LIAN, BS Design

Project Statement

A million memories. A thousand stories. One face.

Even with our closest friends and family, our understanding of them is shaped by fragments—glances, gestures, shared moments that fade as quickly as they arrive. Still, we sense something more—something unspoken but deeply known.

Frames explores that space between memory and meaning—between what we can capture and what we simply feel. Through life-sized oil portraits of two friends—one from middle school, the other from early college—I attempt to portray not who they are objectively, but how they exist in my perception.

Alongside the paintings, I work with AI—feeding it prompts, reference images, fragments of memory. The portraits it returns are coherent, sometimes even beautiful, but never personal. The model draws not from intuition, but from what’s most seen, most expected.

Still, there’s something eerily familiar in the way it guesses, extrapolates, and fills in the blanks—a machine mirroring our own pattern-seeking minds.

This isn’t about choosing a side. It’s a quiet attempt to understand what it means to know someone, to hold onto what can’t quite be said. Both painting and AI try to fill in the gaps. Both reach, guess, interpret. And in both, something always slips away. But maybe, in paying attention to that loss—in pigment, in pixels—we come just a little closer.

Desert Post (film, EP)

CALEB LIU & DALYNN MILLER,
BS Computer Science | BS Design

Project Statement

"Desert Post" is a 20 minute short film and accompanying EP that explores love, timing, and life’s great "what-ifs." The story follows Henry, a post office worker stationed in the heart of the Mojave Desert, where time moves far more slowly than in the outside world. He has long collected artifacts of “life outside” and feels perfectly content living through the stories travelers share. However, his peace is disrupted when he meets Val, an aspiring singer passing through on her move to New York. Music was central to our creative process; we initially crafted the characters’ identities through songwriting to foster emotional intimacy and understanding before building the narrative and, ultimately, the short film. Our story traces the ebb and flow of Henry and Val’s relationship as both characters—doomed by timing—come to appreciate how they have changed each other, becoming artifacts of love in each other's lives.

Recollections of Home (oil painting and essay)

MIA PENFOLD, BS Computer Science

Project Statement

The summer after my freshman year at Stanford, I was driving past the intersection two blocks away from my old school—the one with the steakhouse right across from the gas station—when I saw that a tree had been chopped down. It wasn’t just any tree though, it was my mom’s favorite kind of tree. It was a “Saman,” native to the Venezuelan flatlands where my grandfather grew up. It was the kind of tree I dreamt of having in my future home’s backyard. As I saw the remaining stump jutting from the broken pavement, a little something in me broke too. My garden would never have a Saman, and no other tree would ever mean as much: to me, to my mom, or to my grandfather.

“Recollections of Home” is a series of twelve postcard-sized oil paintings and a personal essay that reflect on leaving home and moving to the United States. Drawing from architecture, art history, and technology, the project delves into our evolving relationship with space, place, and time.

How does the mobility of modern life reshape our sense of home? How does technology, by collapsing distances and accelerating movement, redefine our understanding of place? What becomes of home when we’re no longer there? When does space become place (and vice versa)?

This project examines not just the personal experience of leaving home but also the broader shifts in how we inhabit the world—physically, digitally, and emotionally. Despite its deeply personal roots, by exploring themes of time and memory, this project touches on the universal experience of revisiting our childhood, mourning lost places, and the search for continuity in a fast-changing world.

Boulliabaisse (fiction)

NICOLE SEGARAN,BS Computer Science

Project Statement

Bouillabaisse is a novel about inheritance, identity, and the versions of ourselves that might have been.

Leilani, a twenty-four-year-old Sri Lankan American, has just been laid off. As she scrambles to find work and resist the slow erosion of her self-worth, she stumbles upon something unexpected: her long-lost step-sister, Rachel.

Rachel is everything Leilani is not—poised, successful, and, most of all, white. She is the version of Leilani that could have existed, the daughter her father might have had if history had played out differently. But Leilani was born instead, and now Rachel lingers elsewhere—trapped in the world of dreams, appearing only when Leilani sleeps.

As Leilani spends her waking hours growing closer to Dhruv, caught between the limbo of platonic friendship and something more, her nights are filled with Rachel—cooking together, sharing stories, existing in a space where time folds in on itself. But the closer she gets to her step-sister, the more her reality begins to fray. Dreams bleed into waking life, memory twists into something unrecognizable, and the boundaries between past, present, and what could have been start to collapse.

At its core, Bouillabaisse is a meditation on the ghosts we inherit, the truths we refuse to face, and what it means to chase a life that was never ours to begin with.

Archival Orchesis (dance)

ISABELLA TERRAZAS, BA Sociology

Project Statement

Before his death in 2012, Paul Taylor–renowned as one of modern dances’ “greats”–wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he made dances out of a desire for people to know about themselves. Creation of dance was a compulsion to make something simultaneously fleeting and durable, an experiment in the depiction of humanity, a desire to communicate with the world in both its pedanticism and its beauty.

Archival Orchesis is a dance project that attempts to restore choreographic archives from a campus dance group originating in the 1940s. The artist explores whether modern dance can be preserved, how we create fidelity to the past, and what emerges when we test the limitations of restoration (while leaving room for wild speculation).

Emerging from her very own creative compulsion with making new movement, the material for Archival Orchesis borrows from choreographic archives, the artist’s own historic repertoire, and new movement created for the project.

Isabella Terrazas is a lifelong dancer and creative. She would like to thank her parents and her own modern dance “greats”.

Serotonin (fiction, literary translation)

CELESTINE WENARDY, BS Neurobiology

Project Statement

People Watching and Other Stories (fiction)

KATHERINE WONG, BS Symbolic Systems

Project Statement

What are the hidden costs of ambition? When does progress blur into exploitation? How do we retain human connection in an ever-changing world? People Watching and Other Stories is a collection of literary short stories that tackle the complexities of human relationships in the shadow of rapid technological and scientific innovations—spanning speculative genres of science-fiction, horror, and dystopian fiction. From stories about a 9-5 work commuter navigating mass surveillance in an urban city to a car with the hidden ability to bend time, People Watching and Other Stories explores the fraying bonds between individuals and how innovation can often serve as a catalyst for longing, isolation, and disconnection.

Next to You (dance film)

CHUYI ZHANG, BS Computer Science & Biology

Project Statement

Growing up, I often heard songs about love before I could fully grasp what love was. I believed I would only ever encounter love through the lives of others. But then, I met someone who changed all of that. What began as a friendly connection grew into something much deeper. As my heart unfolded, I discovered a part of myself I never knew existed, one capable of truly loving someone.

Next To You is my love story retold through a dance film. Through movement and storytelling, I aim to explore the themes of connection, conflict, and vulnerability that come with opening oneself up to love. Through choreography, I aim to communicate the delicate, innocent journey of understanding what it means to love someone and to be loved in return.

This project is not just a retelling of my personal experience, but an exploration of love’s capacity to shape who we are. Through dance, I hope to convey the depth of these emotions and celebrate its beauty in both love and performance.

Desire

Clarice

Quarantine Paintings

bite back

a ritual for the sky

Beyond the Window

Into the Mist

Dinner, Party

Creative limitation

Table for Two

Rainbow Hoover

Flames

Heal

Untitled (Study for St. Sebastian) and Untitled (Study for Gabriel)

Rancho de San Luis, JAL, MX

Renowned Bodies

Lake Nakuru

Illuminating the Mind

Time to Spare

A Hand To Hold (World)