Honors in the Arts Cohort 2023-24
IJEOMA ALOZIE | The Most Radical Act
BA Communication
After experiencing a life-altering medical emergency the summer after my freshman year of college, I realized how many people did not care for my survival as a fat Black non-man. In fact, they tried their best to kill me. The hospital, a place where I always envisioned was a place of care, tried to kill me. They were not the first, and they will never be the last to try.
Now, I ask myself: If they had succeeded, if they had killed me, what was the proof of my survival until that point? Now, all I have is my survival, so I ask myself: how do I immortalize this radical existence? And how did others like me do the same?
The Most Radical Act is an experimental short film, inspired by the Black creative nonfiction writers and filmmakers who come before me, that serves as a way to ensure my survival, both in my aliveness and long after my death.
ISABELLA ANDAYA | Dahil Sa’yo
BA Film & Media Studies
When my parents traversed the water and the risks between the Philippines and America, they gambled certainty for the chance that their children could touch the sky.
In this short film, I explore the sacrifices after The Sacrifice within the immigrant experience. Mustering the lived realities of my parents, myself, and others, “Dahil Sa’yo” sheds light on the distinctly quiet and sacrificial nature of an “immigrant parent” love; it renders visible the burdens our parents selflessly carry and reminds us of a simple yet often forgotten fact: their idea of home differs from ours.
Over the course of my senior year, I lovingly and with humbled awe build this film to completion for my parents, who – with inexhaustible love and humility – have spent their lives building me to the greatest heights: this is my way of thanking you, of recognizing your sacrifice while admitting that I do not (and likely will never) know the full extent of it. But it is in learning of your decision to give me everything that I realized your love is all I need.
KEONA BLANKS | GOBI DUST: A Geomorphology of Belonging
BS Earth Systems
Suppose I were to tell you that if you dug your hand into Kaua‘i’s chalky soil, dust from the Gobi desert could be found under your russet finger nails. Suppose I told you that this dust were infused in the water raining down upon you at that very moment. Suppose I looked up and saw myself in that great dust cloud, made up of watercolor strokes that brushed upon the Asian continent itself. GOBI DUST: A Geomorphology of Belonging is a work of creative nonfiction that explores the question of whether home can be found as a settler in a late-colonial world. Through a hybridization of prose and poetry, I search for answers in the living earth beneath my upbringing as a second-generation Japanese-American settler in Hawaii. At the nexus of decolonial studies and the Earth sciences, the book-length piece weaves together lyric essays on Hawaii’s geomorphology, ethnographies of Hawaii’s settler and Indigenous inhabitants, and journal entries from days spent on the Hawaiian Kingdom’s russet shores.
GRACE CARROLL & KYLEIGH McPEEK | the True Crime Podcast podcast
BA English | BA Psychology
For the past year, we’ve become personally obsessed with the inscrutable world of True Crime podcasting. Or, if you want to get into the specifics – and apparently, we do – we've become obsessed with trying to understand why people make careers out of talking about homicide, and why even more people walk around with their headphones blasting horrific details of kidnappings; why some podcasts can help solve murder cases, and why other podcasts seem to be slowly corroding the sanctity of the American legal system. Is the modern True Crime podcast just voyeuristic murder porn, or a prescient public safety warning? Is it a subversive mechanism for holding power to account, or unchecked TikTok mob-rule? Is this what happens when an unregulated new medium meets a storytelling tradition as old as humanity itself?
We aren't detectives or crime reporters. We aren't really even true crime podcasters. But yes, we've spent the past year talking to lawyers and journalists, podcast hosts and forensic psychologists, crime investigators and reddit crime fanatics, trying to figure out what exactly is going wrong inside this opaque and mysterious sector of the media industry. And now we've made a podcast about it.
We’re your hosts, Kyleigh McPeek and Grace Carroll, and you’re listening to the True Crime Podcast Podcast.
AERI CHEN | Untitled
BA Art Practice
This fictional graphic novel is a fusion of adventure, mystery, and an exploration of “eastern high fantasy”. It draws its inspiration from the rich tapestry of Chinese neolithic and bronze age literature, artifacts, folklore, and mythology, then proposes something familiar yet distinct. Through the medium of stills and shuttering continuity, the story seeks to transfer its readers to a world imagined and ancient, with a narrative that leaps between the past and the present.
“On the north of the mythical Kunlun mountain range and south of the unforgiving Taklamakan desert is a civilization of lesser deities. They are the “Stone Summoners”. The inhabitants of this civilization are no different from regular humans, except for a unique ability — to call forth legendary creatures that had their visages carved into stone. Among these people is the young Kaimin, a promising warrior from the capital city of An.”
ZUNI CHOPRA | The Mountains
BA English
If you looked outside your window tonight, would you see a dragon’s shadow?
A young boy lives with his stony, aging father in a cabin up on the forest mountainside. He has been taught to survive, and that is all; things like dreams and words and mothers have all been lost in this way of life. One night, gathering firewood, he finds a dying griffin in the woods – a creature straight from the storybooks. A thing that is not meant to exist. It is these things that his father has always scorned and detested, these daydreams he has always insisted would destroy his son. And so, when his father declares that the world is soon to end before dying in his chair by the fire, the boy decides that he must leave the cabin. He uncovers the old teachings of his mother and her guide to the fae of the woods. He decides he will find the dragon causing the end of the world, and slay it – just like he thinks his father would have wanted. Just like the metal men in the stories.
This novel, The Mountains, is an amalgamation of my work in fantasy and my belief that the genre’s true power comes from its grounding in human emotion and experience. Its fictional realm draws inspiration from European fantasy, German fairy tales, and the world and culture of Bhutan. I see my own journey in that of my unlikely hero; the shaky departure from your only home, the slow discovery that your wise parents were not, perhaps, always right. This novel is also in many ways the purest expression of who I am as an artist; I am not limited by reality, because I do not see it in the same way the rest of the world does. I play with its boundaries like a cat in the shadows. I believe there is a distortion beneath what we call the quotidian, stories in faded crosswalks, a rich darkness in the dusk of passing streetlamps. I see dragons in subway maps, a haunting in the eyes of strangers, a muse in the haunted. I believe, to put it simply, in belief. I would hope that my readers, through the story of this boy, will find themselves believing too.
SYLVIA COLT-LACAYO | UNTITLED
BA Film & Media Studies
One in five people in the United States has a disability, yet growing up as a wheelchair user, I felt utterly alone. My outsider status was due to the inaccessibility I faced on a daily basis and the loneliness that comes when you don’t see yourself reflected in the media or the adults around you. I struggled to connect with my friends and family, people who felt uncomfortable with my disability and unable to handle the differences that came with my life. These experiences fundamentally altered my youth.
Vilma, the main character of my screenplay, faces similar challenges as she ages. Born with a disability that progresses and evolves over time, we watch as Vilma grows into herself and navigates being disabled at a young age. Told in three acts that encounter the main character at various stages in her life (ages 7, 13, and 25), Vilma's experiences are shaped before the reader as they are dropped into different moments in her development. A story about the effort it takes to find love for yourself when the world is not made to include you, this script is a coming-of-age film with a disabled perspective in the front seat.
KATIE HAN | Mood Room
BS Design
Sometimes it feels like our lives are a series of waiting – for the bus, for a response, for our next source of excitement. When we are in traffic, in line, or in a waiting room, we slip into a liminal period of anticipation. Anxiety, impatience, and expectation often accompany the simple act of waiting.
Mood Room is an interactive installation piece situated inside a waiting room. This installation is an exploration of the intimate connection between our emotions and the physical spaces we occupy, particularly in healthcare settings, where sterile design amplifies negative feelings. Linking heart rate sensors to shifting visuals, this interactive piece becomes an ever-changing emotional landscape. Participants become the creators of their surroundings, as the lighting and colors mirror the ebb and flow of their heart rates. Through this multisensory experience, I seek to illuminate the bridge between our physical and psychological worlds.
NADIA EUGENE JO | He’ll give us what we need — it may not be what we want
BA Political Science
MALAVIKA KANNAN | Unprecedented Times
BA Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Eighteen-year-old Rishika Kumar arrives at Stanford with the vague goal of living a life worth writing about. With the dual recklessness of a budding writer and a homosexual, she dives head-first into first loves, complex female friendships, and literature classes, seeking to conquer the amorphous, amoral project of adulthood in a world that might collapse before she’s gotten a chance to change it. But no sooner has Rishi’s own world ignited than the rest of the world is shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanford closes its campus, prematurely ending a chapter of Rishi’s life — these are unprecedented times, authority figures keep announcing. Cast unexpectedly into the real world, Rishi moves into a farm commune with her college classmates, desperate to salvage the original plot of her story. Faced instead by a year of unbridled joy and unexpected violence, Rishi freestyles her way through a painful, tender coming-of-age journey.
Unprecedented Times seeks to challenge the female coming-of-age genre, raising the stakes to reflect the literary sensibilities of queer Gen-Z readers, forged by the twin hellfires of the Internet and pandemic. Most significantly, Unprecedented Times explores the power of self-narrativizing for queer women of color: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.
JARED KLEGAR | Growth Opportunity
BA English
At eleven years old, Emmett Choi made his Broadway debut, and a star was born. Then, very quickly, the star fizzled out.
Eight years later, Emmett’s theatrical stint has given him just two things, neither of them good: 1) a smoking habit, and 2)—in his failure to secure another acting credit since—the deep, dissatisfying feeling that he may have peaked as a prepubescent.
Or perhaps it’s three things: the smoking habit has given rise to a lung cancer diagnosis. And so, determined not to waste away in a hospice bed, Emmett forgoes treatment, opting instead to spend his life savings on lavish expenses and resolving to make his acting dreams a reality.
Growth Opportunity is a novel about the responsibilities we owe one another in the wake of illness. Drawing on research in public health and moral philosophy, it asks: Why do some people seek medical care and others avoid it? How can we envision ‘the good life’ in a society burdened by health inequity? And what does it mean, truly, to live each day like it’s our last?
YONATAN LADERMAN | Untitled
BS Symbolic Systems
Yonatan was born to Noga the daughter of Marie the daughter of Rachel and to Zev the son of Paul the son of Manuel on the first day of March in the year 02000 of our count.
In birth he received his Israeli name יונתן and his Americanized name, Jonathan. when he turned 15 he received his nickname—Ledi.
He has 3 names but Jonathan is not his name. Yonatan, he was named. Ledi, he was given.
Yonatan Ledi is doing art. Some of his art is intermedia installation. He is interested in space. In time. In worlds. in objects. In archives.
translations
Sharing our fears. It bring us together.
02023
YUER LIU | Becoming-with
BA Anthropology
"If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming with, in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake." — Donna Haraway.
From my earliest memories, I've been deeply enmeshed in the world of traditional Chinese puppetry, an art form that has deeply woven itself into the fabric of my identity. Each interaction is an intimate duet- the puppet and I move, breathe, dance, and become one. In Becoming-with, an intermedia and experimental puppet performance, I delve into this intertwining, exploring the boundaries where the self and the other blur. Drawing insights from feminist anthropologists' and posthumanists' ideas on multispeciality, the work challenges established paradigms of species identification — be it human, puppet, or animal. This exploration is realized through a synthesis of Chinese shadow puppetry, Chinese rod puppetry, and the auditory landscape of sound art.
VIVIAN LEILANI SHAY | Erosion
BS Earth Systems
When you realize it’s raining outside, how do you respond? Perhaps you reach for an umbrella, or perhaps you run out barefoot on the muddy grass and open your arms to the sky. But how might these reactions to rain reflect our relationship with nature?
Set on the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm, Erosion is a site-specific work of dance theatre that challenges us to reevaluate our relationship with the natural world. The story follows Iris, a 19-year-old girl who is spending the summer offering volunteer labor on a farm. Through physical labor, conversation with her hosts, and one very strange dream, Iris is challenged to consider the possible consciousness and emotions of non-human nature.
I am Vivian Leilani Shay (she/her), a choreographer, musician, writer, and tree-hugger. I embrace Robin Wall Kimmerer’s notion that there exist “unseen energies that animate everything” in nature– even the rocks, rain, and soil. Weaving together the fields of hydrology, terrestrial ecology, environmental ethics, and dance, Erosion investigates how channeling Kimmerer’s perspective can both augment our scientific understanding of the natural world and heal our sense of dominance over nature. In doing so, the piece promotes an ethic of care for the environment.
TRISTYN THOMAS | Normal
BA Human Biology
My goal in creating with my community is not to demand that you see us as people; to ‘humanize’ us. We are full of so much complexity, reflected in the world around us which has always tried to govern us, but never succeeded. The only desire I have is that when you set your gaze upon us, there is no way to see anything other than what is right in front of you. We are here (thriving), as we always have, and as we always will. “Normal” sifts through moments of connection, joy, intimacy, and love found in queer community, weaving a colorful collective consciousness which elucidates upon the ways in which our being is eternal. Its manifestation is a photographic diary which explores these themes through various modes. Do not allow our beauty to make you lose sight of the rich empirical elements which undeniably affirm our existence throughout time, even further augmented by the natural world.
SKY WALKER | Untitled
BA Sociology & Art Practice
Untitled is a multimedia exhibition that utilizes sculpture, painting, and projection technologies to comment on the relationship between the digital and natural world, specifically how it pertains to Blackness and Black bodies. Untitled achieved this by including overlapping projections on paintings to link historical contexts of racism to the inherent exclusion and bias within digital systems that don’t recognize darker skin tones. By no surprise, these algorithms are a continuation of systems not designed for Black people. Artificial intelligence (AI) operates by standardizing data, and oversimplifying it to make it “logical and predictable.” Untitled extends this oversimplification to the body and how Black people are digitally portrayed; Using patterns and video loops as thematic symbols of the predictability of AI, the exhibition comments on how algorithms standardize human action, specifically that of Black people, to make it digestible for the technological world. This digital generalization of Black bodies contrasts how we are viewed in digital realms and how we view ourselves. Untitled begins a conversation about the alienating relationship between digital representations and self-representation using 2D and 3D art. Untitled then transitions to explore the journey to recovery from our digital selves to our natural selves using sculpture and representations of natural elements. Themes of nature and surrealism are used to challenge the predictability of AI tech and logic because of its inherent variability. The unpredictability of surrealism and nature is used to recover and liberate ourselves through self-representation.
LYDIA WEI | Butterfly and Other Stories
BA American Studies
For this project, I hope to write a collection of eight short stories examining both natural and Internet landscapes and how they shape our performances or understandings of gender and sexuality. The stories will draw from feminist studies, queer studies, and new media art and explore spaces such as Tumblr and online chat rooms. I hope to explore questions such as: how do we perform gender, and how is that performance imprinted onto the way we interact with the natural and digital landscapes around us? But on the flip side, how are natural and digital landscapes mapped onto our bodies, and how do our actions in our locales shape our notions of gender?
Though I want to write short stories, my art practice will draw — and has always drawn — from varied sources; for example, I can see myself revisiting video games by trans artist Porpentine Charity Heartscape, the tropey photography of Cindy Sherman, and the video art of Nam June Paik. These works often explore the performance and mass media-created notions of gender. I’d also like a greater exploration of feminist and queer studies in my work; I’d like to synthesize the writings of thinkers such as Amia Srinivasan and Judith Butler.
HOPE YOON | Seabreather
BA Comparative Literature
There is suffering, and then there is the language which tells the story of that suffering. Seabreather is concerned with both. How is one influenced by their cultural vocabulary around mental illness, and what happens when the process of immigration and assimilation bulldozes this existing vocabulary while asserting a different one? Through intricate portraits of the protagonist’s inner world and formal experiments with multilingualism and translation in the writing process, the novel seeks to gently explore what it might look like for someone to find their own words for normalcy and disorder.
It’s a story about the ocean, the void, and people who choose to live close to it. It’s about standing at the edge and listening to the whispers.
