Honors in the Arts Cohort 2020-21

ADESUWA AGBONILE | The Poisonous Arrow

BA Economics, Minor in Creative Writing

In Edo (a Nigerian tribe) mythology, there are two worlds – agbon and erimwin. Agbon is the world humans inhabit. Erimwin is the place of gods and ancestors. The two worlds exist simultaneously – they are two sides of the same coin, each inextricably linked to the other. Usually, the line between them is clearly delineated. Occasionally, one world spills into another.

This novel is a story about one such occasion. Isoken, a young Nigerian-American woman, finds herself haunted by Iye, the ghost of her great-great-great-great grandmother who lived in the Benin Kingdom right before its destruction by British army forces.

Isoken welcomes Iye with open arms - Iye’s presence gives Isoken an opportunity to learn about her lost histories. Iye gives Isoken the tools to understand herself and her body. But as time passes, Isoken finds that Iye is pushing her to do things – lying to get what she wants, using violence as a means to an end – that she wouldn’t have done before.

Isoken and Iye’s story is also a vehicle to examine larger themes of ancestry, colonialism, and Black womanhood. It asks: How does our history remain with us and live within us? When should we welcome our ancestors in - and when should we rebuke them?

IZZY AMPIL | Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

BA English (Creative Writing Prose Track)

Project Statement

Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues is a collection of love stories. The wild women at its heart love adventure. They live out of their cars and off of the land; they surf, ski, sleep in trees, bartend, DJ, dig pit toilets, sew their own clothes, and grow their own drugs. They don’t believe adventure belongs solely to untouched wilderness. They know “untouched” is a euphemism for “stolen,” a marketing ploy from 19th-century white conservationists who want you to think they got here first.

Unlike the self-aggrandizing loners of much adventure lore, these wild women don’t believe in severing emotional connection for their personal exploration. They need people. They love people. They don’t understand how anyone could romanticize nomadic life but hate the nomads.

Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues asks what it would look like to celebrate alternative ideals of adventure. Its characters seek connection, not flee from it. They have no use for hero-worship. They don’t want to break your heart. They want to rupture your assumptions of what makes the wilderness – and the people exploring it – wild.

OBED DE LA CRUZ | La Llorona

BA Theater & Performance Studies

Project Statement

Hundreds of years ago, in the town of Corozal, Puerto Rico, a young woman named María drowned both of her children and drowned herself in a nearby river. To this day, her spirit wanders the streets of the town, and children are told the tale of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), a woman whose desperation to find her children knows no limits. With this folktale as its backdrop, La Llorona is a horror musical set in early 2000s Puerto Rico, inspired by the sounds of the Puerto Rican countryside and the ghosts of the island’s past. The piece balances a modern narrative of cursed motherhood, cultural and genre-bending music, and all the bells and whistles of classic horror films. Though La Llorona aims to explore colonial Puerto Rico in its subtext, the musical exists as a piece of scary entertainment, and a direct response to an industry that rids Black and brown creative voices of nuance, autonomy, and above all, fun.

SHANA E. HADI | e.l.i.z.a.

BS Computer Science, BA English

Project Statement

e.l.i.z.a. is a speculative fiction story that examines digital manipulation in online news and social media and the consequences of exploitative interaction design. Eliza Kosasih, a former writer-turned-programmer, hesitantly becomes the marketing director for a presidential campaign in the fictional country of Nusana. As she unconventionally navigates futuristic technologies to aid an increasingly viable and charismatic candidate, she must resolve various ethical dilemmas and ask, is her work propaganda and an abuse of power, and if so, is she serving the lesser of two evils? e.l.i.z.a. investigates the unprecedented impact of technology on democracy, and it also merges narrative conventions of the novel with experimental forms such as hypertext fiction, with “advertisements” between chapters. It explores how stories are constructed and constrained by their mediums, and if expediency is ever worth the personal and social cost.

JULIA INGRAM | Front Lines

BA English, Minor in Digital Humanities

Project Statement

“No matter what you do, you can’t help them. You’re watching them deteriorate in front of your face,” one Brooklyn nurse said. She’s terrified of a second wave. A dozen people died each day at April’s peak, a Queens ER doctor recounted. It became redundant; he’s numb, almost bored.

Healthcare workers have been championed as heroes as the coronavirus pandemic wages on. But their distinct experiences are swallowed by global chaos, blending in with each other as so much of the world copes with iterations of the same unending crisis. Front Lines, a nonfiction story cycle, aims to preserve some of these stories, highlighting the individual while making sense of a collective experience. Centered on New York City’s peak and slow decline, it explores moments of confronting the unknown, life-or-death decisions in the face of limited resources, and the psychological toll of fighting a tidal wave of tragedy.

JUSTINE KANEDA | Kintsugi (金継ぎ)

BA Human Biology, Minor in Theater & Performance Studies

Project Statement

Kintsugi (金継ぎ) is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery. Kin translates to golden and tsugi translates to joinery. Together, they become “golden joinery.” It is the art of highlighting and enhancing the beauty that comes with experience and hardship. It is the art of resiliency.

Culminating in a narrative dance film, my project seeks to further explore this concept of Kintsugi – specifically how this artform can be applied to human beings. Through my studies of Human Biology and Theater & Performance, I am curious in researching the universal question of “What makes us human?” through an artistic lens. As a sansei Japanese-American and lifelong performing artist, I also hope to further explore the interconnection of my cultural and artistic identities, in addition to the deeply intertwined relationship human beings have with the world.

DANIKA LYLE | Cycle Breaks

BA Film & Media Studies

Project Statement

For some, having children is an honorable tradition that they’ve dreamt about for years. For some, having children is an optional practice that just doesn’t fit with their lifestyle. For Wendy, having children is an archaic expectation of every woman that’s immoral if the world is in shambles but sounds nice sometimes but is altogether impossible for someone to ethically undertake right now. Or not. She really can’t decide.

Cycle Breaks is a comedic solo play that explores a woman’s struggle between her desire to mindfully have kids and her fear of repeating the cycle of trauma that raised her. After avoiding the baby talk with her wife for over a year now, a late period makes Wendy question the things that make her so hesitant. In a drug-induced night alone, Wendy discusses her mother’s absence, her strained marriage, and her recent nights out to “find herself.”

EMILY MARTHA MENDOZA | What Lies Within

BA Human Biology (Concentration in Child & Maternal Health)

Project Statement

We are each a cumulation of ideas, stories, and experiences that make us who we are. These experiences and stories are not always visible or understood by our surroundings, or even ourselves, but they are the catalyst that drives us to grow internally as well as externally in connection with our environments. These three oil paintings are grounded in feminism, women’s health, and conversations I conducted with women in my life to illuminate our innermost relationships to health, self-care, beauty, our inner child; and capture the wholeness in women’s personal narratives.

In alignment with my interests in women’s and community health, my hope is that these paintings will also deconstruct the diagnostic idea of ‘care’ that is practiced and reproduced in Western medicine that establishes barriers to healthcare that predominantly impact women of color and low-income women. ‘Care’ in this piece is revolutionized through the conversations I had with women in an effort to be present with one another, build unions through raw conversations, and blend our experiences into a form of self-awareness that uplifts and heals.

CAMERON MIRHOSSAINI | The Way to the Bread

BS Mathematical & Computational Science, Minor in Iranian Studies

Project Statement

The Way to the Bread is a collection of short stories that explores how violence is passed down within a multi-generational family living in Rehnan, Iran. Each story focuses on a single character and how they betray Laleh, a young girl who falls victim to colorism, beauty, and patriarchal violence that is perpetuated within her family and community. Using the Iranian desert plateau as the backdrop, the author probes the culturally-specific geneses of both shame and power in order to illustrate how we enact harm, how we practice care, and, more importantly, how we can choose between the two.

Using Toni Morrison’s scholarship on memory, along with Afsaneh Najmabadi’s work on sexuality in Iran, The Way to the Bread seeks to answer: how responsible are we to our personal, collective, and national history?

GRACIE NEWMAN | The Lunatic

BA English (Creative Writing Prose Track), Minors in French and Political Science

Project Statement

The Lunatic is a novel that explores the ways in which contemporary American society constructs – and deconstructs – the female psyche. The plot follows a defiant young artist as she joins a women’s therapy group, a motley crowd who confront both personal psychological distress and structural, systematic threats. Set in the heart of New Orleans, the book asks how technology, pharmacology, and misogyny might intersect.

With both satirical sincerity and sentimental irony, the novel investigates the nuances of mental illness, artistic liberation, and intersectional womanhood. The work is perhaps best described as feminist cooption of metamodernist philosophies, given its mediation between opposites: subjectivity and objectivity, individuality and community, cynicism and idealism. In addressing themes that range from the medicalized invalidation of female pain to the transference between the artistic and the experiential, The Lunatic ultimately aims to engage the frontiers of female suffering that challenge the social paradigms of sanity.

ALLISON ODDMAN | I Am: Tell Me Who, Tell Me What

BA African & African American Studies, Minor in Film & Media Studies

Project Statement

I Am: Tell Me Who, Tell Me What grew out of my frustration with Black men being constantly centered in every Black social, political, and artistic facet of life. Made in the tradition of Black Performance Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and womanism, my project is a choreopoem that follows a Black woman’s journey to find her missing name. Along the way, she encounters three other Black women whose lived experiences, joys, and colonial positionalities inform our protagonist of who she is outside of the white, somatic world order. Who is the Black woman de-labored? Who is the Black woman loved? This work is dedicated to every Black woman who has guided me and given me access to pleasures the outside world is ardent I remain ignorant to. There will be a virtual production in Spring 2021.

ESTHER ABISOLA OMOLE | Each Beloved Birth

BS Architectural Design, Minor in African & African American Studies

Project Statement

It is easy to feel like you don’t matter when you’re rendered invisible, even though matter is your birthright, everything that you are. Black creation is precious, and its existence is owed to something even more spectacular—the birth of Black creators. My project seeks to address the massive, enduring necessity for a celebration of Black birth and life where there is now a gaping, violent indifference. Through portraiture and poetic word, I argue for the understanding of Black creative thought as a force of nature equal to that of a star. With each face I assert that a Black life, enduring on a time scale beyond our current comprehension, persists in all its awe and beauty, forcing us to look with intention.

BRIANNA PEET | Black Bones

BA Human Biology

Project Statement

When George Balanchine came to America and forged the foundation of American ballet, he placed thinness on a pedestal, and sang of whiteness and collarbones and delicacy. I have struggled to feel at home in an industry whose teachers and consumers prescribe unattainable standards to my body. Misunderstanding and mishandling of my anatomy have accompanied me throughout my journey in dance from amateur to pre-professional, obstructing the healing power of my practice.

As a future clinician working towards justice and equity in health care, I speak to the women who are most often denied care in both my vocations. I channel the stories of black women who work professionally in dance to drive my choreography; the rhythm of their words guides the soundscape that accompanies the piece. Black Bones is a synthesis of auditory and performative mediums, as well as storytelling in the most intimate sense. This project addresses the reading of the Black ballerina’s body, a body perennially denied love and care. It is my way of reconciling the loss and the heart break, but also embracing the overwhelming joy of being a black woman in dance.

ANAÏS TSAI | Researching Behind the Scenes

BS Biology (Concentration in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology)

Project Statement

Let's take a walk down memory lane to a time when an educated woman was typically rejected and barred from the spaces of science research. This did not stop women from pursuing their scientific endeavors. Unsurprisingly, their discoveries were often disregarded or ignored, despite the breakthroughs their work provided for their respective fields. This project flips the switch on the attitudes that buried these contributions from the accolades that they deserved, shedding light on often overlooked contributions by women throughout recent science history. What awards should they have won? How did they create their own path to success? What privileges permitted them to walk the path of scientific scholarship, while many others were still prohibited?

This series of paired multimedia works includes 9 award-shaped piñatas celebrating women who were not recognized during their time, physically elevating work previously pushed off the path of discovery. For example, a Nobel for Ethel Harvey’s original work on embryo organization. Accompanying each piñata is a printed shirt featuring the face of a scientist alongside a visual narrative of their research. These clothes are eventually meant to be worn as one walks through the world, sparking conversations about women scientists throughout history. During your visit, I invite you to walk amongst some incredible researchers, check out some forgotten discoveries, and ask, who is doing work behind the scenes, today?

NIK WESSON | Senior Watch

BA English

Project Statement

“When you live in a suburb, everything looks identical. Houses, streets, front lawns all duplicates, tied together by indistinguishable street names. The memories stack on top of each other. Your parents say do this. Your teachers say do that. All the same, except you. You thought you’d inherited something from your family, but from your movements, to your words, to your clothes you’ve lost it trying to be the same. Instead, you're left with a life repeating in a cycle, events collapsing in on each other, until they’re all the same moment.”

Excerpt from Senior Watch

From its opening monologue, Senior Watch is a graphic novel about the stresses of young Black kids growing up in the suburbs. Taking place in a fictional Texas suburb, the comic follows Derick after he’s become the main suspect in a murder case. Along the way, Derick tries to craft out his unique identity as he deals with his absent parents, comes to understand some of his fellow students, and discovers secrets from the town. Senior Watch is about the struggle to find and perform Black identity in the face of white hegemony.