Honors in the Arts Cohort 2021-22

MUNIRA ALIMIRE | Terra Obscura

BA Anthropology and Urban Studies

Picture this:

A beautiful university with perfect weather. The community whispers about the sheer impossibility sometimes, joking about a secret weather machine, hiding the fact they’re half-serious. Streets paved with imported palm trees and students whizzing dangerously around the Circle of Death. Buildings built in that Mission Revival style, with a church and a tower in the center. It’s certainly academic in nature, but not like the ivory towers the American consciousness has come to both desire and revile. It’s made up of that American new money; tech moguls and warlords coming together to divide the spoils of the future. It’s so achievable; it’s right within your grasp; it’s the university everyone in the world wants to be at.

In my previous life as an ASSU representative, I became intimately aware of everyone I met with told me they felt like they had no power at Stanford. That made perfect sense - that undergrads, grad students, service workers, and staff would feel disenfranchised here - until it didn’t. Until I heard from the most powerful administrators at Stanford and discovered that they felt like they had no power. For years, this realization plagued me. If they don’t have power, who does?

Terra Obscura answers that question simply: cosmic demons. Set at a Stanford that evicted its students for a year and a half not just because of the pandemic, but because an interdimensional rift formed and is violently leaking beings from netherworlds; Terra Obscura is a California-gothic biomythography from the eyes of QTPOC seniors. A love letter to burnt-out student organizers everywhere, this novel is a reminder that the real monsters are the people you know.

Kiara Dunbar | i am not a girl!

BA Fem, Gen, & Sex Studies, Minor in Film & Media Studies

Project Statement

“this is the awful price you pay to be yourself / against it all.” These words, pulled from the final poem in my chapbook, perfectly capture the ethos of my project. i am not a girl! — a cry to be seen, heard, and imagined — is inspired by the legacies of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Wanda Coleman, and several others whose works place Black gender-marginalized folks at the center of the world. Drawing from Black feminist thought, queer theory, and performance studies, this chapbook explores the ways in which I’ve navigated Black girl/womanhood as a queer, Black, nonbinary person. Several of my poems travel across spacetime to bridge gaps within Black histories; I simultaneously grieve the Atlantic blue while imaging future iterations of Black life beyond Earth. As an artist-scholar, I wrestle with questions such as: what does it mean to imagine oneself in a world that actively works to disappear them? How does engaging with and contributing to the Black transgender archive transform Black cultural memory? How can poetry be used as a liberatory tool that (re)articulates queer Black subjectivity?

ELIZABETH FOX | Pirating Cochineal

BA Philosophy, Minor in Film & Media Studies and Creative Writing

Project Statement

In the latter 18^th century, the Mexican-native cochineal beetle was so prized for its crimson dye it became a popular target of maritime battles and pirate raids. For one man, the beetle would inspire an elaborate undercover expedition into America to steal the Spanish-monopolized insect for his home country. French botanist Nicolas-Joseph Thiery de Menonville’s personal journal is the only known account of the true story.

When I first read Nic’s journal, I was inspired by the descriptions of natural landscapes, enchanting characters, and the absurdity of the circumstances. I was drawn to the complicated dynamics of colonialism that pervade the entire story and the warped centeredness of European bodies in a Mexican homeland. Most succinctly, Nic’s journal planted the seed for a screenplay, a historically-conscious fairytale-based-on-true-events.

My script will expand critically on the story, drawing from the period’s wider historical context, tangential accounts, and the Greek myth to which Nic himself makes reference. Through research, experiments in adaptation, criticism and synthesis, the script will develop Nic’s bizarre adventure into a screenplay epic that addresses colonialism’s insidious violations in stark contrast with the ethereal innocence of nature.

BRENNECKE GALE | Reburn

BS Human Biology

Project Statement

After two straight summers of being evacuated from the paths of wildfires, I’ve felt many emotions: anger, sadness, heartbreak, despair. I’ve also felt guilt in my whiteness and privilege, knowing that the burning land belongs to Indigenous people who have a sense of place that is deep and different than mine. In thinking, reading, and writing about wildfire, I’ve identified a central emotion: loss.

What does it mean to bear witness to losing a place? Reburn brings together poetry, narrative, cartography, collage, photography, and more into a physical space that will act as a living, learning exhibit. Reburn explores loss as both a personal and collective experience: enter the exhibit to find a myriad of stories of loss and, before leaving, add your own, in hopes that we can search for what comes next, and where we might go from there.

ELIZABETH "BETSY" KIM | Abort

BA Economics and Film & Media Studies

Project Statement

Regret is a powerful emotion that can warp our view of both the past and the present. ABORT is an eight-episode comedy-drama that explores regret, as well as religion and the experience of being a woman and mother. Set in modern-day Orange County, the show follows YOUNG KIM, 34, as she navigates life as the mom of a 12-year old and a pastor’s wife while also dealing with an unshakable sense of regret about her decision to settle down, marry, and have a child. When a deity named Journee Christ (Jesus, but a woman) allows Young to magically rewind to her pre-marriage and pre-baby life, she takes it. But when the time travel and memory wipe don’t quite go to plan, ABORT prompts its audience to ask: why do we experience regret, and what does it mean to start anew?

SARAH KIM | Homage to the Pixel

BS Engineering, Minor in Art Practice

Project Statement

We live in a world in which digital images play an integral part in our construction of reality. Homage to the Pixel is a series of quilts that examine the pixel, the smallest unit of information to convey a digital image. Each quilt begins with an image of an ordinary, utilitarian tech object or icon involved in the image viewing process, which is then digitally deconstructed and collaged. To see the pixelation present in these images is to confront the nature of their construction, akin to a glitch in the illusion of reality presented by the internet. The image data, the set of instructions used by the computer to compose the image, is revealed and manipulated to produce unpredictable visual effects. Homage to the Pixel brings together design and art to recontextualize artifacts of technology and understand our hybridized digital and physical realities through a new lens, one pixel at a time.

DIANA KHONG | Mary Magdalene, Daughter, Boatperson

BA Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity

Project Statement

Mary Magdalene, Daughter, Boat Person is a three-act experimental play; is a Vietnamese ghost story; is dreamscape that asks: when a light goes out, what words still linger?

Following the death of their mother, three siblings — Mercy, Jimmy and Joy — spend considerable time indexing their grief. Mercy finds refuge in take-out containers, late-night suicide hotline calls, and foul-mouthed grandmothers quick to take her under their wing. Jimmy comes to terms with his sexuality, now freed from the constraints of his traditional upbringing. And Joy — well, Joy’s never been good at forgetting. While Mercy and Jimmy ascend — more or less — out of their grief, Joy becomes obsessed with the idea of following their mother through life and into death after an encounter with a goblin (in the form of an Asian grandmother) who informs her that her mother has gone to hell. So she follows her down.

An exploration of generational trauma, memory work, queer futurity, and hauntology, this work will debut for the first time onstage as the Asian American Theater Project’s Spring 2022 Mainstage Production.

Ruth Ling | An Embodied Exploration

BA Psychology, Minor in Theatre & Performance Studies

Project Statement

Mental illness experiences are unique, elusive, and heavily stigmatized. As I pursue a career in psychiatry, I will investigate narrative dance and movement therapies, particularly how embodied introspection of personal experiences of mental illness can provide potential avenues of healing and human connection. This project aims to explore patient narratives of Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder through creative improvisational movement scores inspired by these patient experiences. Ultimately, the scores will be utilized in movement improvisation classes as a way to both understand these patient narratives and to personally connect to any shared experiences.

Marina Luccioni | Reel

BS Human Biology

Project Statement

My cousins are still so little that they take the stairs like scooting up a palm tree. They love playing with ants and spiders in the corners of rooms and watching their pet fish lay eggs. If nature really is everywhere, why don’t we make more films about our backyards? Why are humans only in voiceovers? There are stories we can tell and myths we can re-imagine to better connect to the environment, for my cousins to grow up celebrating and caring for what we have already: the life alongside us. Reel is a short film made with dancers from Stanford Dance Commune.

Marina is a visual artist interested in exploring human-environment relationships and the mind. She is Corsican-Indonesian and grew up in London, UK.

CHRISTINA MACINTOSH | Detritus: A Coming of Age

BA English, Minor in Earth Systems

Project Statement

Detritus is a work of creative nonfiction about trash, relationships, repulsion, consumerism, and the process of creating art and a self. Centered around ten trash-related excursions – to a municipal recycling facility, a landfill, a beach clean-up, an anaerobic digestion facility, riding a garbage truck, and more – Detritus charts a journey of exploring the world beyond the self and the interior discoveries that follow from such. This work is one part exploration into the final resting place of trash, one part an ethnography of the people met along the way, and another part journal. Detritus explores the confusions and continuities between the personal, collective issues, and making art. It is a story about navigating the complexities of time, memory, and responsibility, both as an individual and as a member of a collective faced with environmental change.

AUDREY MITCHELL | Pilgrimage

BA Political Science, BS Management Science & Engineering, TAPS minor

Project Statement

Pilgrimage, a comic-dramatic monologue for a female performer, explores narratives of unconventional religious journeys and takes a feminist tack towards how women are portrayed, idolized, sexed-up, and destroyed in religion. The play will draw from a number of sources— from the modern-day TV show Fleabag, to essays by an 11th-century nun, to original interviews conducted with members of the religious community, past and present. Pilgrimage is a story of loss, self-discovery, and searching for something greater than oneself.

A staged reading will (likely) be held in spring.

NATACHI ONWUAMAEGBU | How to Fall Insane

BA Political Science, Minor in African and African-American Studies and Creative Writing

Project Statement

How to fall insane is a novel about a young Nigerian woman who rebels against instinct and family when she journeys to find her runaway brother. Luckily, she has a stillborn sibling haunting her, a white man for protection, and an inescapable desire to die. This novel will bring together the impossibilities of Black womanhood (as a daughter, sister, and an individual) with mental illnesses and a deep understanding of the American landscape with all its beauty and stolen land. At its core, this story is about a girl who loves her brother more than herself – enough to stay alive.

GS | Looking for Now

BS Product Design, BA Psychology

Project Statement

Looking for Now is a collection of paired portraiture and poems in conversation that attempts to conceptualize queerness of the past decade and capture how the experience of queer youth intersects with the rise of digital media. Poetic predecessors have centered on violent resistance, love in hiding, and the scar of the AIDS epidemic. These themes are present in the collection, as they are for queer people today, but Looking for Now also extends beyond periods of survival. In both verse and paint, figures grapple with the Internet, dating apps, exploration, and the trivial parts of queerness to create a larger portrait of queer youth in America understanding themselves and learning to thrive.

VRINDA SURESH | (un)grounded

BS Biology

Project Statement

Environmental catastrophes take time to unfold. But the things that make us pay attention, that are made visible, tend to be big, catastrophic, apparently instantaneous—a wildfire, a hurricane, a river in flames.

But environmental change isn’t only visible through these kinds of stochastic events. There are smaller steps, smaller changes that happen over time, that sometimes take a keener eye or more intimate relationship with a place to notice.

Through photography, digital collage, and interviews, this project explores how we witness environmental change happening everyday. Changes that make places unfamiliar and unrecognizable, that displace us. Quiet casualties—a disappeared species, the bare fruit tree in my yard—as things we once deemed reliable and stable and constant are no longer so.

We mix satellite maps depicting global environmental change with photos of changing places, places identified and described by our interview subjects. How do people relate to the environments and ecosystems they live in? How does environmental change impact our sense of place? How do we grieve for these prolonged casualties?

JENNA WANG | (un)grounded

BS Engineering, Minor in East Asian Studies

Project Statement

If you look at a satellite map of deforestation, or sea level rise, or temperature changes, what do you see? The climate is changing, sure. But for whom? Maps can be a powerful scientific tool, but at the same time they hide a great many things. They won’t show you the smell of the wildfire smoke that permeates the house even when the windows are closed. They won’t show you the intense heat of the hottest day of the year, the sun beating down on your back. They won’t show you the swathes of land, bare of trees. They won’t show you the sense of loss as you look out your window at an unfamiliar landscape that you used to call home.

Through a series of collages mixing satellite maps and photos, we uncover the hidden stories, diving into the lived experiences so often erased and overlooked. We explore how these environmental changes can creep up on us, making what once was considered normal a thing of the past, and things once considered shocking seem normal. How has climate change affected us all, and why should we care?

SYD WESTLEY | The Nudes

BA Comparative Literature

Project Statement

In her poem, “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson enumerates a series of Nudes, which she defines as visions that have come to her as “naked glimpses of [her] soul.” Taking inspiration from this project of Carson’s, my full-length manuscript, The Nudes, explores the concept of the figurative and literal nude through a trans lens. Is a nude an accurate depiction of our bodies as they are or as we want them to be? To what extent does a nude figure exteriority and/or interiority? Is it even possible to articulate a nude in language? As a trans person in the process of transitioning, I seek to use these larger philosophical questions as entry points into my own questions of local body and desire.

A series of journal entries, poems, photographs, prints, and intertextual conversations with various scholars and poets, The Nudes serves as a fragmented archive of the (figuratively and literally) changing body and self.

HANA/CONNOR YANKOWITZ | From Queer to Infinity

BA Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Minor in Art Practice and Creative Writing

Project Statement

In what ways can fiction be more truthful than reality? When does form impact the way we understand content? In what ways can, and should, our histories impact how we imagine our futures— how do stories parallel and intersect across time and space?

This collection of stories explores the ways in which speculative fiction can give us new ways to imagine queer futures and alternate realities; how form and content can bend around each other, and narratives can be assembled from scattered pieces; and how science fiction and fantasy can be two sides of the same coin.

A space station stablehand sees a suspicious ship circling xir world. A murder in an interstellar band results in a dizzying investigation. A scholar contemplates a society of generational spacefarers. Told through interactive fiction, excerpts of academic prose, blackout poetry, quotes, and more, these stories intertwine in strange and unexpected ways.

DANTE ZHU | Narcissus

BS Symbolic Systems, BA Classics, Minor in Art Practice and Creative Writing

Project Statement

Now, instead of a stream, Narcissus fell into live streams. Narcissus is a piece of inter-{active, passive} fiction built with Twine, {based on Ovid’s myth of Narcissus, recontextualizing the tale told by Parthenius of Nicaea, being just a chimeric phantom born out of nowhere but our age of the Internet}. Through creating textual spectacles that are more {poetic, eye-catching, grotesque} than {hybrid monsters awaiting Theseus in The Labyrinth of Crete, a million Tik-tok videos}, Narcissus asks this question: how does one “Know Thyself” in the digital age where superfluous {information, disinformation} and spectacular {images, ads} can be presented to them at any time?

Now, take the quest of Narcissus to find out who {he is, you are}. Tread the water of Deltagram, Tau-tau, Astrotube and EmeisChat and beware of the danger of falling. Since you are in a {plague, pandemic} lockdown you have all the time in the world. Click “Play” right now to double your rewards.