Honors in the Arts Symposium 2021-22

Join us in celebrating the work of students from the 2021-22 Honors in the Arts cohort!

Welcome to the hybrid symposium for the 2021-22 Honors in the Arts cohort. These sixteen student artists have spent the academic year creating deeply innovative and interdisciplinary projects across a wide spectrum of media: poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, film, photography, digital and visual art, screenwriting, playwriting, theatre, and dance.

Eleven Honors students created video essays to present their capstone projects, which you'll find on this page. The other five members of this year's cohort presented their capstone projects at the live symposium on Friday, May 13, 2022. You'll find their project descriptions at the bottom of this page.

Video Essays

(un)grounded [photography and digital collage]
Vrinda M. Suresh, BS Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Jenna Wang, BS Product Design, Minor in East Asian Studies

Visit the project website

Mary Magdalene, Daughter, Boatperson [theater]
Diana Khong
BA Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, minor in Theater & Performance Studies, Film & Media Studies

Looking for Now [visual art & poetry]
G.S.
BS Product Design, BA Psychology, minor Creative Writing (Poetry)

Stories from the Spaceport: Terryn & the Saturn Conspiracy [interactive fiction]
Hana/Connor Yankowitz
BA Fen, Gen, & Sex Studies, Minor in Art Practice and Creative Writing

i am not a girl! [poetry]
Kiara T. Dunbar
BA Fem, Gen, & Sex Studies, Minor in Film & Media Studies

Narcissus [interactive fiction]
Dante Zhu
BS Symbolic Systems, BA Classics, Minor in Art Practice and Creative Writing

Play Narcissus here

Beetles & an Abortifacient [screenwriting & interactive storytelling)
Elizabeth Fox
BA Philosophy, Minor in Film & Media Studies and Creative Writing

Visit the project website

An Embodied Introspection [dance]
Ruth Ling
BA Psychology, Minor in Theatre & Performance Studies

Visit the project website

Abort [screenwriting]
Elizabeth "Betsy" Kim
BA Economics and Film & Media Studies

Live Presenters

The Nudes [poetry & visual art]
Syd Westley
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.

Natachi symposium image how to fall in sane cover

How to fall insane [novel]
Natachi Onwuamaegbu
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.

Detritus: A Coming of Age [creative non-fiction]
Christina Macintosh
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.

Reel [experimental film]
Marina Luccioni
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.

Homage to the Pixel [visual art]
Sarah Eunah Kim
BS Product Design, Minor in Art Practice

Visit the digital quilt

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.

Honors in the Arts