Honors in the Arts Symposium 2025-26

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Virtual Symposium

The twenty-one student artists in the 2025-26 Honors in the Arts and Inter-Arts Minor cohort have spent the academic year creating deeply innovative and interdisciplinary projects across a wide spectrum of media: creative writing including poetry, screenwriting, fiction, and creative non-fiction; visual arts including sculpture, photography, mixed media, and painting; film, dance and performance art; multimedia installations, fashion design, and exhibition curation. Their work was on display at a public exhibition on June 5.

View the video essays created by this year's Honors in the Arts students below.

BABY:

(fiction, mixed media)

AMANDA ALTAREJOS

B.A. Comparative Literature, Creative Writing (minor)

Faculty Advisor: Vida James
Grad Mentor: Sabrina Yate

Project Statement

Baby: is a sinner. She goes to reconciliation to confess that her skin is hot and fragile and harboring something terrible. The Father forgives her for a little while.

But in the City, there are only fervent Misters, an important Secret, and look above: a billboard with the face of the highly revered Master promising an efficient fantasy. Or whatever you’d like, Mister! Baby, again and again and again searches for faith in this City as Things Grow Unbearable and as birds continue their torment, calling her to repent. When A-Saint arrives and brings her home, she is reminded that there is faith everywhere. You just have to devour it.

BABY: is an experimental fiction novel that intertwines the grotesque and the intimate, the body and capital. Its strange, fragmented narration is inspired by the deconstructive nature of postmodernist works such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. While artistically concerned with pushing the boundaries of poetics in the novel form, BABY: puts forth a criticism of our culture’s obsession with production and hegemony. In its absurd banalities, BABY: speaks a lyrical language that disturbs.

In Motion, In Stillness

(oil on canvas)

CHRISTINA BA

B.S. Computer Science, Art Practice (minor)

Faculty Advisor: Xiaoze Xie
Grad Mentor: Chukwudubem Ukaigwe

Project Statement

Paintings have long been evaluated on how faithfully they chase alignment-with-the-real-life. From subject, to pigment, to composition, each element begins first in lived experience before an artist can willfully extend it into a stillness to match sight.

In Motion, In Stillness challenges that notion by presenting, overlapping, a still painting with a moving projection of the same scene. By blending traditional mediums with digital interactivity, my project examines the blurred space between perceived and illustrated motion, holding both in tension while staying grounded within the decidedly still medium of canvas.

hurts to remember just as much to forget

(mixed media, performance)

ALISON CAO

B.S. Design

Faculty Advisor: Migeul Novelo
Grad Mentor: Marina Johnson

Project Statement

If your mind forgot what happened, then why does your body still hurt?

Even if your mind forgot what happened, your body remembers how it felt.

How you felt is how you remember what happened.

Can you tell a story not by describing what happened but by resurrecting how it felt?

The human body metabolizes traumatic memories into strange and displaced feelings. Even after the memories are buried or forgotten these feelings float inside the body, displaced and painful, real and not-real.

As proof that these feelings existed inside my body, I wanted them to exist in the world. I made them into an ice mask, a transparent leaf, and a book made of glass. These objects are indubitably here but seem to always be on the verge of disappearance. They ask what it means to exist and not exist, to be here and not-here, to remember at the same time that you forget.

Watchers: The End

(audio, wood, metal, ceramic)

EYDN SPECTOR DELGASS

B.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, B.S. Geophysics

Faculty Advisor: Kerri Conlon
Grad Mentor: Alex Han

Project Statement

Watchers is about a moment of apocalypse, hung in suspension. A red star begins to glow over the tamed landscape, growing hotter and hotter until the fat of the earth itself is rendered in a boiling broth. This is a version of the world born from and ended by paranoid observation. It is a dark utopia concocted by Russo-American mutually assured destruction, an anticlimax of order melting into soup, just as dreaded by the powers that be.

The birds. Their faces are glamorous — pumped and surged for the gods. In the voice of a fleshy trumpet, they sing for you songs of joy and sorrow — what is and what could have been.

Bloom

(oil on canvas)

MEREDITH GAVIN

B.S. Biology

Faculty Advisor: Lauren Toomer
Grad Mentor: Maggie Poulos

Project Statement

Bloom is a collection of large-scale oil paintings of phytoplankton, microscopic marine algae that produce the air we breathe and sequester large amounts of carbon but that are underappreciated because of their size. Inspired by my experiences as a student and educator in marine biology, this project aims to make their beauty and oversized ecological role more accessible to a wider audience. Each painting is accompanied by detailed and well-researched wall text aimed to educate the viewer on these beautiful organisms and inspire them to protect our oceans.

Growing up on Vashon Island off the coast of Seattle, one of my favorite activities was to swim in bioluminescent waters on a dark night, seemingly surrounded by stars from all sides. As I've progressed in my academic life as a molecular biologist, a marine biologist, an educator, and an artist, that sense of awe has never left me. I hope to instill that sense of awe in my audience, showing them the beauty of that which is both much smaller and much larger than ourselves.

Coordinates: Performance Mapping Poems

(dance, mixed media)

DAKOTA GELMAN

B.A. Comparative Literature

Faculty Advisor: Alex Ketley
Grad Mentor: Erin O’Keefe

Project Statement

We are worker bees. We are at a loss for language. We are ephemeral.

Coordinates: Performance Mapping Poems is a series of dance performances and poems inspired by honeybees. Foraging honeybees return to the hive to perform a waggle dance that communicates a miniature map of their environment. Each choreography, soft sculpture, participatory workshop and poem created throughout the process is a coordinate directing to a point in space. To coordinate, is also a verb that creates relationships. By combining both meanings of the word, my work seeks to explore how bees serve as a model for forming collaborative communities. The mediums work together to create a moving map of motifs in my life.

By conversing with my past work I am foraging for answers about my present nature. Born from a matching tattoo with my cousin who is a cystic fibrosis warrior, they remind me of our interconnectedness and gratitude for my breath. I wonder where the coordinates of communication on this chaotic map will lead us next.

To My Dear Child that I Never Lost,

(mixed media, oil painting)

KOSTADIN K. HADZHIIVANOV

B.S. Design

Faculty Advisor: Zio Ziegler
Grad Mentor: Christian Gonzalez Ho

Project Statement

I turned to painting to understand my life, problems, and the world around me, yet gracefully found myself being turned to God instead. I started this project thinking I would continue searching for identity and self through the imaginary worlds I once painted, with the imaginary friends I once had. Yet, with every brush stroke, with every second spent on my paintings, I found myself being called to leave it all behind.

It shattered my identity, having been an artist since I can remember. Who am I, if not a compilation of colors on a canvas—a shattered life put back together in a colorful story.

I realized I am not the author of my story. I am a part of a much bigger truth being told all throughout time. And although my means of painting no longer ring as true as they once did, this work is an honest account of where I currently am. A truth experienced and shared with honesty. The work I leave to you, is one of honesty and a search for truth through painting and faith. It tells the story that we all carry within ourselves.

Love Poems in the Wasteland

(poetry, fiction, bookbinding)

AMANDA KAY

B.S. Computer Science

Faculty Advisor: Aracelis Girmay
Grad Mentor: Katie Livingston

Project Statement

Love Poems in the Wasteland is a collection of poetry and prose that scavenges for tenderness in the wreckage of ordinary life. It moves through gas station parking lots, empty vending machines, crumpled bills, and pockets full of loose change, tracing the ways love endures in a world running on fumes. The work prioritizes the fragmented, the discarded, and the obsolete, treating these remnants not as symbols of loss but as sites of quiet devotion and survival. The collection holds close the small, disposable things and asks what they remember about us—what they have witnessed, absorbed, and carried forward. Like shards of glass caught in empty alleyways and laundromats, Love Poems in the Wasteland becomes a love letter to what refuses to disappear, to what lingers after use, abandonment, or neglect. Beyond the endless expanse of rusted cans and exhausted systems, the work insists on remembrance and the insistence on the act of feeling: something that glimmers in the dirt, stubborn and radiant, long after everything else has left.

Death & Other BS: A Health Data–Driven Comedy Film

(film)

JAMIE KURTZIG

B.S. Bioengineering, Film & Media Studies (minor), M.S. Epidemiology & Clinical Research

Faculty Advisor: Ross Venook
Grad Mentor: Mateo Larrea

Project Statement

How can we harness data and the human body to make film more immersive? My short film uses biometric data to break down the barrier between human performance and physiology. As the actor moves through scenes, their biometric data will shape the film’s sonic and visual language. A racing pulse quickens the score. Blood oxygen saturation influences color saturation. The film itself will breathe with the actor. This project links internal physiology and external expression, turning the body into both subject and storyteller.

Throughout time, media has become increasingly immersive, from paintings and sculptures, to novels and movies, to videogames and virtual reality. The next step is physically feeling what another person feels. Through this project, I hope to push the boundaries of storytelling immersion and invite people to listen to their bodies.

SHI: 时/世/诗

(poetry)

KRISTINE MA

B.S. Symbolic Systems, Creative Writing (minor), M.S. Computer Science

Faculty Advisor: Hieu Minh Nguyen
Grad Mentor: Jonathan WuWong

Project Statement

In its romanized form, shi. This could mean time, the world, poetry: 时, 世, 诗. Although these characters are of varying tones unique to the Chinese language, so much is captured in the ambiguity of the romanized three letters.

SHI: 时/世/诗 is a collection of poetry that hopes to bridge the gaps between languages. Through the individual poems, the collection explores dimensions of cultural identity, time, memory, as well as language itself, blending the study of East Asian languages, the psychology of memory, and critical study of literature, with creative writing at its center.

Into the river of red mud

(photography)

SAMUEL MINEV-BENZECRY

B.A.S. Earth Systems, Linguistics, History (minor)

Faculty Advisor: Alexander Nemerov
Grad Mentor: Paulina Cho

Project Statement

The Amazon region represents to the Western World a limit of expansion, both physical and epistemic. In the past 200 years, the land and its people were subjected to forces of a changing world, crushing entire ways of being and ways of knowing. BR-319, an unpaved road built by the military in the 1970s, is the only land connection between Manaus and Porto Velho, and by consequence, the rest of Brazil. This road, soon to be repaved, presents a case of a world nearing its end, or arguably, its rebirth. While this socio-environmental dilemma is of extreme relevance to the region, it offers a portal to explore the fragility of that which seems unknowable and unsurpassable. Film photography, a sensitive medium, comes as a vessel to bring this fading world to light. The void between a dying world and the world to come into being is what these negatives carry. The road, therefore, is medium and a sign of a world wrestling to be born. The “world” ends every day, but it does not come in equal force to everyone.

Through a post-documentary photography series, I intend to introduce a glimpse of this road that is and that is not simultaneously. This journey crosses Amazonia not in the search for a formulaic solution of what must be done, but rather as a study of essence, of being and being-not, and of the reflection on what is left behind after the convoy of progress passes through.

Gravity of the Immigrant

(mixed media)

JASON WILSON NAVARRO-LOPEZ

B.S. Geological Sciences

Faculty Advisor: Regina Pieck
Grad Mentor: Lucas Baisch

View the virtual exhibit here

Project Statement

Waiting for my mobile seismometer to run its measure, I sat in a landslide in Guastatoya, Guatemala, and asked myself: How can I understand the arrest and deportation of my father through geology and deep time?

In Gravity of the Immigrant, I challenge geology’s claim to objectivity, insisting that the Earth is known through bodies, histories, and movement. Following critical geographer Kathryn Yusoff’s work on geology and race, I redress gravity as a geosocial force that names the intimate calculus of space and time, that has constructed the lifeword of my transnational family from South Central Los Angeles to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

The project uses speculative animation and electronic sound to construct a geological field site of my family’s living room, where everyday space is reimagined as a terrain shaped by time, memory, and movement. This geological field of time organizes five sample sites: a black hole, a garden, a comal, a bus, a mountain. Each operates as a temporal register: points of contact between deep time and my family.

In this way, the field site becomes both scientific and intimate: a space where Earth’s physics are reimagined through abolitionist worldbuilding within a physical installation at Casa Zapata, Stanford's Latine ethnic theme house. Gravity of the Immigrant will also be made available online through New Art City, an online exhibition platform: https://newart.city/show/gravityoftheimmigrant

The Shape of Suffering: Votive Intermediaries of Pain

(exhibition, catalogue)

KRISTINE PASHIN

B.S. Symbolic Systems (Neural Tissue Engineering), Art History (minor), M.A. Public Policy (Healthcare)

Faculty Advisor: Emanuele Lugli
Grad Mentor: Hannah Johnston

View the virtual exhibition here

Project Statement

My work examines how pain, an inherently private and resistant experience, becomes externalized through objects, images, and ritual forms. Drawing on art history, medical humanities, and legal theory, I trace a cross-cultural archive of votive objects, anatomical proxies, and visual representations that act as intermediaries between the suffering body and systems of belief, care, and exchange.

Rather than treating these objects as static representations, I approach them as active sites of negotiation: they translate pain into material form, allowing it to circulate, be witnessed, and be acted upon. Across contexts, from anatomical ex-votos to ritualized images of affliction, these forms operate as contracts between body and world, mediating relief, obligation, and meaning.

Through both visual curation and critical analysis, this project asks what it means for pain to take shape outside the body, and how these material proxies reconfigure the boundaries between embodiment, representation, and repair.

Pale Tide

(creative prose)

EVA SHEN

B.S. Biology, Creative Writing (minor)

Faculty Advisor: Emily Polk
Grad Mentor: Janie Kim

Project Statement

I’ve been thinking about erosion as a relationship of two things: the wearing down, and the taking away. A process of making by destroying – something leaves and something remains and is shaped. But in erosion nothing is ever destroyed; it is taken away and moved someplace else. Granite can come from the dust of previous rocks that settles on the seafloor, transformed inside out by the heat and pressure of the mantle.

Strange but human things to be obsessed with: what water does to rock. How rock is acted upon by water. And all of this, by light.

The origin and morphology of the words, too; they come onto the page geologically, with a sort of tectonic upheaval – words eroded, taken away – to appear elsewhere in time. Pale Tide is my ecological experiment. It is circular, a process folding in on itself, like the water’s surface disturbed by stone, like the cross-section of a fish's ear bone under a microscope, the words illuminated from behind. I am coming back to the unknown.

Everywhen

(screenwriting)

GWENDOLYN SPENCER

B.A. Film and Media Studies (Screenwriting), Creative Writing (minor)

Faculty Advisor: Adam Tobin
Grad Mentor: Daniel Jackson

Project Statement

The Singularity refers to a tipping point where technological growth becomes so accelerated that the very core of being human, including mortality, becomes irreversibly transformed. My father is a believer in The Singularity, a technological optimist and my closest companion. When he was diagnosed with ALS in 2020, he believed that The Singularity, Brain-Computer-Interfaces, and Large-Language-Models could save him– could curb his own death. As a daughter, I would love nothing more than for him to be healthy again, for him to be able to hug me again. Yet, as a thinker and writer, I have to ask: Should we intervene with death? How would this possibility affect people whose loved ones are already gone? How does grief work to distort beliefs, bend behavior, and deepen love? In these ways, Everywhen, a feature length screenplay, represents the five-year culmination of personal and philosophical exploration– a story that blurs the line between the technological and the human, asking what remains when our bodies begin to fail us.

Pilgrimages and Rituals

(poetry, essays)

TEDDY SUISMAN

B.S. Psychology

Faculty Advisor: Amir Eshel
Grad Mentor: Connor Lifson

Project Statement

Ever since I was young, I've found myself drawn to forms of ritual and pilgrimage. From swimming every day in the cold ocean, to wandering alone in the mountains, to filling a blank page at night, through rituals and pilgrimages I've sought personal transformation and connection with forces beyond my conscious mind. In this project, drawing from writers, poets, and psychologists such as David Whyte, Pico Iyer, and Carl Jung, I undertook a series of pilgrimages and rituals over the course of my senior year. To me, the act of leaving behind one's day-to-day experiences in pursuit of a quest is the act of pilgrimage, and the activities one engages in at the destination of the pilgrimage– the sacred site– are the rituals. Through poetry and contemplative essays, I seek to understand this mysterious force which has compelled me to perform rituals and pilgrimages throughout my life, and to explore what role they play in our modern, increasingly secular lives.

In Patterns on a Screen

(poetry)

JENNIFER YIZHEN XU

B.S. Biology

Faculty Advisor: Cintia Santana
Grad Mentor: Yin Lin Tan

Project Statement

Thoughts can be intangible and difficult to frame into language. They can fly through the atmosphere or stray off to the far past. However, the brain from which thoughts arise is a malleable blob that doesn’t weigh much when held in your palms, fatty like any subcutaneous tissue, its color an unremarkable beige.

I’d like to reflect upon the process in which thought and cognition arise from the physical brain, which seems as miraculous to me as how poetry arises from 26 letters. In Patterns on a Screen is a series of poems where I attempt to capture anatomical characteristics of the brain, what lies between the material nervous system and abstract thoughts, and how the very real space we possess in our minds ebbs and flows over time. I will employ concepts, theories and metaphors from neurobiology, psychology and human anatomy to put together this work.

Vessel of Memories

(mixed media)

JENNY YOUM

B.S Bioengineering and Product Design, M.S Biology

Faculty Advisor: Lauren Toomer
Grad Mentor: Mercedes Montemayor Elosua

Project Statement

If your mind forgot what happened, then why does your body still hurt?

Even if your mind forgot what happened, your body remembers how it felt.

How you felt is how you remember what happened.

Can you tell a story not by describing what happened but by resurrecting how it felt?

Emergent Vessels / Synthetic Cesia

(Sculpture, new media (Vascularization of human heart organ via 3D bioprinting of carbopol-based bioink; optical cavities made by layering thin films of the soft, shape changing polymer, PEDOT:PSS, and thin films of gold)

STEPHANIE ZHANG

B.S. Bio-Architectural Design and Engineering (IDMEN)

Faculty Advisor: Alexander Nemerov
Grad Mentor: Bailey Scieszka

Project Statement

What does it mean to create with life itself as a medium? These sculptures are experiments in transfiguring life, with each piece grown from engineered cellular bioinks, tracing the hidden architectures of vascular networks. Vascularization exemplifies the universal physical laws that govern life: order arising from chaos. Life is a dissipative structure, a local instantiation of order contributing to global entropy. These vessels are not static; they are processes, emergence made visible, revealing the aliveness underlying all phenomena. In these forms, one encounters both intimacy and vastness. They bear witness to the interconnectedness of existence and ask: what is the basic unit of aliveness? How does life organize itself? What is left behind -- and what is gained -- when phenomena shift between mediums? Emergent Vessels is an invitation to witness, to inhabit, and to feel the spaces between matter and energy, art and science, system and life.