Office of the Vice President for the Arts
VPA Senior Grant – Past Projects
Class of 2024
HALIMA IBRAHIM | Listen to the Prayers They Sing
Halima Ibrahim is an Egyptian American artist and poet currently based in Cairo and San Francisco. She is currently pursuing a double major in Art History and Art Practice, set to graduate from Stanford in June 2024. Halima works primarily in multimedia photography, working with alternative camera and printing techniques. Combining photography with culturally traditional processes such as embroidery and gilding, her work interrogates systemic and social issues in the United States and in Egypt. Ibrahim served as the 2020 and 2021 Rhode Island Youth Poet Laureate, and was the former Artist in Residence for the Markaz Resource Center for the 2021-2022 academic year. In 2023, Halima was a Fellow in the IDA Undergraduate Artist Fellowship and in 2024 completed an honors thesis in art practice for her project Listen to the Prayers they Sing.
Listen to the Prayers They Sing is poetry collection and multimedia photo series memorializing Cairo’s rapidly changing landscape told through poems and images of demolition and devotional graffiti. In grieving the loss of my city, I am meditating on the use of graffiti and poetry as an act of prayer and resistance.
ESMERALDA REYES | A Cocinar
Esmeralda Reyes (she/her) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. She graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and was a Lyric McHenry Community Arts Fellow where she worked alongside a NYC art organization. During her time at Stanford she delved into the arts, specifically lens-based art such as documentary film-making and photography. Much of her art projects highlight her family and touch on topics related to love and the complexities of immigration. She believes art is a method in connecting people and fueling change. Carrying these beliefs, she is back in New York City and building connections with artists and supporting art organizations.
A Cocinar delves into immigration, Mexican culture, and family bonds created through food. This documentary follows Tia Edith in New York City and the interactions between her family and the sharing of Mexican recipes and culture. Experience the beauty of food and its intersections with identity and culture.
LANA TLEIMAT | Little Scavengers
Lana (she/her) is a writer, performer, puppeteer and maker from Columbus, Ohio. She graduated with a B.A. in English, with a focus in Creative Writing. She nearly got a minor in Arabic, if anyone's asking. Her primary interests lie in using humor to find truth and in making strange, beautiful objects. She draws inspiration from her night terrors, mixed cultural/racial heritage and midwestern ennui.
In Little Scavengers, Lana will create a trio of puppets out of scrap materials, each depicting a different trash-eating animal. These puppets will perform a series of brief, humorous vignettes, perfect for puppet slams, capturing the lives of those most marginal in our human-centric society: the animals living in the shadows.
ZAE WOODS | It's a Front
We live in a drastically different world than any other today. What does that mean? It means that my generation, yes, the infamous technology-dependent, reaction-driven, Yeezy-wearing youth famously termed Gen Z, which sounds like the sequel to a zombie movie, is a walking parable for new lessons, messages and perspectives not yet articulated. That's where I come in. I'm here to articulate the hard-to-articulate experiences so that I might mirror back to the world and help people, if any, make sense of this spending globe that we call Earth.
It's A Front explores how African Americans or black people must change, adapt, and make themselves palatable for the rest of the world to respond to them through comedy and satire. Within social spaces and through the lens of 17-year-olds, I am to create relatable instances that aren't talked about as much or one has experienced before. This generation needs a voice to shout out and articulate the hard-to-articulate experiences. Because a lot of us have had encounters where we disguise, hold back, or pretend we're something that we're not just to obtain or survive something. We've all worn disguises until someone dares to say it's a front.
Sperry-stepping bow-tie-rocking Class President Zeke Metcalfe finds his entire world turned upside down after losing his job. Faced with a club of vainglorious white people, social climbing, a rebellious daughter, black stereotypes, and a deer, Zeke risks everything to get out of small-town Salisbury, North Carolina—including his life.
Class of 2023
MICHAEL BROWN | Musings of a Blaq Geek
Micheal Brown (they/them/theirs) was born and raised in Houston, Texas. They graduated from Lamar High School before attending Stanford where they graduated with B.A. with Honors in African and African-American Studies and a minor in political science. Micheal is an avid reader, writer, music lover, and tennis fan! They also have a dog named Samantha Serena Brown. During their time at Stanford, Micheal lived in Ujamaa for three years and was involved with the Black House (BCSC), Lathrop Library, the ASSU, and the MLK, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Their Honors Thesis-- entitled From BET to Beyond: Exploring Black Family Culture and Black Media Politics-- is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on outlining various debates about the contemporary Black media ecology. Micheal has returned to their hometown to spend time with their family and in hopes of getting reacquainted with local activism and community organizing.
Musings of a Blaq Geek (Musings OABG) is a collection of poetry & prose that centers on the experiences of Black folks & Queer folks. I intend to highlight intersectionality through written work & audiovisual media with provocative social, political & cultural commentary.
TYAH-AMOY "YOMA" ROBERTS | The Chrysalis Collection
Tyah-Amoy "Yoma" Roberts (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist who works chiefly in yarn and fiber arts, fashion design, songwriting and music production. Their work explores Black queer self-fashioning and storytelling, utilizing their own experiences to create spaces of belonging and Black queer community through their art and advocacy work. Tyah-Amoy graduated with their B.A.H. in African and African American Studies with a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics and a minor in Political Science from Stanford University in June of 2023. They were a Thesis Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and a lifetime advocate for education and equity through art making. Tyah-Amoy is currently exploring the relationship between clothing design and installation art through the medium of crochet, knitting, and felting.
Ruminating on ideas of queer subjecthood and legibility, The Chrysalis Collection marries fashion design and fiber art installation to create a collection of crochet wearable art for all modes of gender expression.
LORA SUPANDI | Eastside Elegy
Lora Supandi (they/she) is a writer and filmmaker of Hakka-Indonesian descent. Through the diaristic and the imagined, they experiment with the possibilities of radical futurism, postcolonial landscapes, and unseen intimacies. Their work asks, “What does it means to dream during the apocalypse, and yet to still be pierced by cultural memory – the ephemeral, its decay, morphed by grief and history?”
Outside of their personal art practice, they teach film & cinema for a summer program at CalArts, assist with programs at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and work as an abolitionist with formerly incarcerated mothers. In the past, they have exhibited installation art in Berlin, collaborated with Asian poets in London, and participated in the Levinthal Tutorial in poetry with Wallace Stegner Fellow Jalen Eutsey.
Eastside Elegy is a poetic documentary that examines how devotion and grief are transformed by state violence, genocide, urban adolescence, and Indonesian kinships. To bridge immigration and remembrance through a non-linear narrative structure, experimental poetic forms are fused with video art’s DIY reimagining of cultural history.
CAMILLA WICKMAN | Cailleach
Camilla Wickman (they/them) is a singer, storyteller, and aspiring sound healer with a Gemini stellium. They received their B.A. in Music Composition with a minor in CSRE from Stanford University in June 2023.
Their influences include explosive femme musicians like Tori Amos, Mitski, and Minnie Riperton. Camilla braids poetry into lush vocal textures with the rhythmic gait of piano rock, creating what one listener had called “operatic folk,” a label they will claim until it no longer fits.
Inspired by the Norse cosmological idea of Öorlog (or ancestral debt), their music acknowledges that the personal is always political, and they hope it will encourage European-descended listeners to consider their place in the evolving myth-reality of the colonial imagination.
Cailleach is part-concept album, part-family history project grounded in the archetype of the Gaelic divine hag of winter by the same name.
Class of 2022
CAMERON MIRHOSSAINI | The Way to the Bread
Cameron is from Colorado Springs, Colorado but spent a lot of his time growing up in Esfahan, Iran. His writing aims to explore the consequences of traditional masculinity and global imperialism on Iran’s rural and urban working class, and how both communal and individual knowledge about care are affected by and defy these power structures. Cameron studied Mathematical and Computational Science with a minor in Iranian Studies and participated in the Honors in the Arts Program.
The Way to the Bread is a novella that explores the present-day, psychological consequences of forced nomadic sedentarization one hundred years ago in Iran, examining how relationships with grief, land, desire, and care are transmuted by cultural imperialism.
DANIKA LYLE | Work-Life Malice
Danika Lyle is a comedian, writer, and actor currently based in Los Angeles. They graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Film and Media Studies in the African & African American Studies Concentration and an Honor in the Arts. At Stanford, they were a writer and performer in the Robber Barons sketch comedy team, a DEI Coordinator at Stanford Sierra Camp, a Head Writer for Gaieties, and a recipient of the Chappell Lougee grant for their web series concept Mixed Not Stirred, a comedy exploring the biracial experience of white-passing people in a post one-drop world. When they weren’t writing, they enjoyed being the Tuesday night baker at EBF and performing stand-up comedy at CoHo. After completing their honors capstone Cycle Breaks, a one-woman dramedy on the ethics of birth and breaking cycles of trauma, they decided to move to LA to pursue writing and live performance. Now, they work as an assistant in the Audio Department at United Talent Agency. Follow them on Twitter @Danika_Lyle.
Work-Life Malice is a comedic screenplay and radio drama satirizing the corporate experience in the world of a super villain’s HQ. Following an “expendable” henchman thrust into the role of HR, we explore our need to empower in the workplace.
ISAIAH "ZAY" SMITH | Church Walls
Isaiah “Zay” Smith is a creative technologist and digital artist hailing from Amarillo, TX. He attended Stanford University, earning a B.A. in Art Practice. His work appropriates technology and emerging media in order to investigate personal history and the intersections of technology and the Black experience. Smith’s work often takes the form of satirical web applications, speculative design objects, and sculptures activated by augmented and mixed reality.
Church Walls recontextualizes Black American pew figurines into a diorama centering Black identity and its relationship to the “Black Church.” The diorama incorporates AR (augmented reality) to bridge the cultural tradition of figurine making and emerging media practices.
OMAR HOWAIDA EL-SABROUT | Dovecotes Domiciles
Omar Howaida El-Sabrout (any pronouns, Comparative Literature with minor in Art History and Practice ‘22) is really excited about playing with dirt and fermenting! The prospect of making work about memory, identity, cultural heritage, community, brownness, queerness etc... etc... etc... is deeply thrilling to them and they feel immensely privileged to have been awarded this grant. They would love to chat with you, yes you dear reader, about any questions you may have relating to their process and their plans.
Through the creation of four to five large-scale site-specific sculptures, Dovecotes Domiciles investigates themes of transplantation, ugliness and queerness. Recycled waste will constitute the material, engaging sustainability and revitalization.
Class of 2021
ANGIE LEE | (Dis)abled
Angie Lee graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in English with creative writing emphasis and a minor in Human Biology. She wrote her honors thesis on representations of disability in Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” and her creative writing often explores her interdisciplinary interests in medicine and the humanities. Angie is a recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, Stanford’s Undergraduate Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the Chappell Lougee Scholarship. Her writing has appeared across campus as a part of the Medicine and the Muse Symposium, Stanford Arts Fair, Leland Quarterly, and Caesura. She was a panelist at the 2018 War, Literature and the Arts Conference, where she read from a work of short fiction. Angie served as a managing editor of The Stanford Daily, peer advisor for the English Department, and member of the class cabinet. In her free time, Angie likes to sing a cappella, eat spicy tuna rolls, and blog about how disabled people are, in fact, fully able.
(Dis)abled is a story cycle, a collection of short stories that each stand as independent works but are also in conversation with each other and enhanced when read together. At each story’s center is a protagonist affected by disability, directly or indirectly. The culmination of stories highlights the disabled experience as a whole and explores the concept of normalcy as perceived or construed by society.
Inspired by ideas Angie began to nurture in Stanford classes such as Advanced Fiction Writing, Novel Writing Intensive, Secret Lives of the Short Story, and Reading for Writers, Angie will spend the summer drafting five short stories, each with disability centralized. The works will focus on the varying perspectives of a physically disabled child, her parents, her sibling, and her best friend, as well as the initial child later as an adult. Angie will attend various summer writing workshops to gain feedback on the pieces. In the fall and beyond, she will revise the stories and work to put the collection together as a complete book.
JAMIE SENEY| Valley View Rd
Jamie Seney is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in drawing and video art. Their work investigates the dynamics of rural poverty through their own experiences in Helena, Montana and Omaha, Nebraska. Especially interested in the quotidian subtleties of poverty during childhood, the “if you know you know” moments, Jamie puts a spotlight on these overlooked facets. They explore the possibilities, ritual and otherwise, of repossession imagined beyond landlordship.
Valley View Rd is a documentary video piece following the process of beginning and developing a gardening practice with the artist’s mother while offering memorial to the trailer their family abandoned when it became uninhabitable. This work serves as a reimagining of the trailer as a space of life and abundance, while showcasing the growth required within the family to make a thriving garden possible today.
Valley View Rd works through the contradictory nature of landlordship, the impacts of whiteness on community and land relations, and the role of bearing witness in grieving.
LORENA DIOSDADO | Vero 2021
Lorena Diosdado earned her B.A. in Art Practice with Honors and a minor in Education at Stanford University. Her work, through various media explores the multiple layers in which individuals from marginalized communities exist in the United States. Thrilled by others’ stories as well as her personal upbringing, she hopes to explore the complexities of marginalized individuals and communities surviving systemic oppression in the USA. Complicating conventional views of race & ethnicity, class, and gender her art focuses on untold, often sentimental, narratives, challenging art history and contributing to ongoing efforts by BIPOC artists to complicate popular understanding of their intersecting identities.
Vero 2021 is a collection of 20 mixed media (charcoal, graphite & paint on 9x12 in paper and canvas) one-hour studies of Vero, a friend of Lorena's. The studies will be created over the course of four months. Lorena plans on using Vero as a paid model to create these studies from life in Vero’s home focused on the way that Vero’s visage and person reflects the rupture and healing from ongoing hardship.
Lorena's interest in this project comes from her friendship with Vero whom she first met in 2019 through Stanford’s Habla, a student organization that pairs Stanford students with Stanford workers to practice English. When the COVID-19 layoffs started, Stanford University by proxy of UG2, let Vero go. Vero has been unemployed since and much at the whim of whatever response the politician in power hands out--this has left Vero in a continuous lurch.
ROBERT MUNGAI | Aliens, A Web Series
Robert Mungai is a film writer and director currently based in the Bay Area. He is working towards becoming a Television show runner in Hollywood working on a mix of prestige one hour dramas and half hour dark comedies. when he is not deconstructing the intricate worlds built by his favorite director, Christopher Nolan, he is spending time staring at blank pages, chasing his creative muses. Most recently, Robert interned for film producer Brad Krevoy at the Motion Picture Corporation of America. on campus, he has worked as Financial Officer for Cardinal Studios and co-president of the Sandbox 48-hour film festival.
Outside of film, Robert enjoys reading crime novels, accounts of the most daring art heists on the Vanity Fair archives and camping in and around the Bay Area.
Aliens, A Web Series is a mini eight episode series reflecting Robert's personal journey of love as an international student seeking belonging and agency in political issues and conversations such as immigration laws.
As foundation for his characters and script, Robert is collecting narratives from peers who identify as international students. He is working with mentors Professor Adam Tobin and Professor Jamie Meltzer on storyboarding and a production schedule considerate of COVID-safety guidelines to keep actors safe, and pitch the finished work to festivals.
Class of 2020
eli feier | Utopic Love in Melodic Memoriam
Sounds and stories of growing up black in the Bay Area are blended with macro sociological commentary and introspection in the indie hip-hop of eli feier. feier seeks to ask, “who am I?” and "what world do I wish to see?" in an intimate take on conscious rap. feier believes that there are worlds inside each of our minds and that devotion to musical craft can build a place of convergence of said worlds, wherein we can find harmony and mutual understanding.
feier will spend the next months, quarantined in California, turning closets into makeshift studios, working on a debut album steeped in the traditions of hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and indie-pop and informed by their academic studies of sociology, poetry, fiction, climatology, and history. Through lyric and harmonic expression feier will tell their story of searching for love and belonging while multiracially black in a white world. In discussing their traumas, feier hopes to find healing, lessons, & love and allow listeners to do the same.
NATALIE JOHNSON | Speculative Fiction During COVID-19
Natalie Johnson is a multimedia artist and aspiring novelist and filmmaker. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in African and African American Studies and was elected this year to Phi Beta Kappa. She also earned minors in German Studies and Creative Writing in the Fiction into Film track.
Engagement with the arts has been a cornerstone of Natalie’s Stanford experience. Her undergraduate coursework spanned Black diasporic artistic and political movements, African American literature, performance studies, film theory, as well as instruction in creative writing and film production. She is an alumna of the Stanford in New York program, where she interned at Firelight Films, and spent two quarters abroad with Stanford in Berlin and one quarter with Stanford in Cape Town. Natalie has also previously studied and interned in China and Taiwan. Her travels have significantly influenced her development as an artist, thinker, and activist.
On campus, Natalie acted in a devised production of The Mammaries of Tiresias (2017), directed by Davis Leonard (’19) and Gianna Clark (’19), and The Black Ratchet Imagination (2017), written and directed by Mysia Anderson (’17). She also participated in a 2020 Levinthal Tutorial in fiction with author and Wallace Stegner Fellow F. T. Kola. Natalie is also a 2019-2020 Student Fellow at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, where she has been at work on an artistic and emotional exploration of her childhood home.
Natalie was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is the youngest of six daughters.
Natalie Johnson will spend the summer writing a speculative fiction novella, extending her creative writing journey at Stanford and engaging with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The world of her novella is also steeped in a pandemic, but unlike the coronavirus, this virus does not spread through contact with infected persons. Rather, it preys on people not living close enough together in large enough communities. Instead of necessitating widespread social distancing, this virus forces people into small, densely populated communes for immunity and survival, reshaping society for some and, for others, reinforcing the way the community has always lived.
Natalie seeks to develop a disciplined writing practice that will prepare her for a Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. She spent significant time during undergrad studying and writing in the genre of speculative fiction. Writing such a novella during this great social upheaval feels urgent and important to her.
SARA CARRILLO | Creating the Archive of Patssi Valdez: Uncovering and Cataloging Works for a Retrospective
Sara Carrillo is a senior studying Art History at Stanford University. She is interested in U.S. Latinx Art, particularly queer artists of color based in Los Angeles. Sara has worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a curatorial intern in Painting and Sculpture and hopes to continue to pursue curatorial work in the future. She is on the board of the Professional Arts Society of Stanford (PASS) and has worked as an editor of Untitled, Stanford’s only undergraduate art history journal. In Fall 2020, she will begin her graduate studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
This project seeks to create a digital archive that will house multi-media artist Patssi Valdez’s oeuvre, some 300+ works, which are currently stored in her garage. Carrillo has worked closely with the artist over the course of a year, making studio visits and interviewing her. The majority of her work has been photographed and digitally uploaded to the artist’s personal computer, but none are easily accessible nor do the photographs have any useful archival information (size, date, provenance, medium) attached to them. Carrillo will create an archive that allows the artist to access her pieces and share them with educators, collectors, curators, etc. in an easy and accessible manner. Especially in the time of COVID-19, the artist’s digital library is their most valuable tool.
STARR JIANG | How to Bury My Father
Starr Jiang is a designer and director from the Bay Area. She received her B.S. in Computer Science at Stanford University.
At Stanford, Starr served as the Executive Producer of Asian American Theater Project, an Asian American activist theater company founded by David Henry Hwang in 1978. Past productions on which she has worked include Guards at the Taj, by Rajiv Joseph and The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe.
Starr has also collaborated with JUST ART, an artist/activist collective based in Palo Alto. With the group, she co-produced Lighten Up, a comedy festival centered around colorism, and CENTRIFUGE, a three-part theater experience brings together stories of displaced individuals from Vietnam, Central America, and Palestine and Syria.
Outside of theater, Starr is interested in exploring the intersections of design, technology, and storytelling. She co-created the online explainer Brand Play, an interactive ad design interface that illustrates the gender biases behind advertising. Starr is also a poet and writer working to reimagine family narratives in a world without borders. She was a Levinthal scholar and worked with poet Safia Elhillo on her upcoming chapbook.
An avid believer in the power of education and mentorship, Starr teaches and organizes for Girls Teaching Girls to Code, which provides mentorship in digital design and engineering for high school girls. She has previously taught English and computer literacy at Center of Science and Technology in Cape Town and visual arts for elementary school students at Lord of the Light art studio.
Drawing from mythology and personal memory, How to Bury My Father is an imagination of Jiang's dad’s funeral where his dead body goes missing. Through ghost stories, mysterious prophecies, and a fairy tale gone wrong , this solo performance/radio drama attempts to fill in the gaps of a broken family legacy, revealing how the trauma left by the dead continues to violently ravage the living. The project builds on the productions Jiang did with Asian American Theater Project, where Jiang learned to use the theatrical medium to create the world we desire to live in. Academically, its foundations lie in the presence of queerness in non-Western contexts and the implications of female performance in song and dance.
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