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How To Make A Jumpsuit, Xue Huang

Masters Theses

Through interdisciplinary artistic research combining illustration, embroidery, garment construction, and installation, this thesis investigates how patriarchal narratives become internalized within the female body and disconnect women from embodied forms of feminine knowledge and vitality.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, Jungian psychology, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and feminist writings by Audre Lorde and Karina Blancarte, the project examines how systems of productivity, control, and gendered ideology shape both psychological experience and bodily perception.

The thesis culminates in a large-scale textile installation titled How to Make a Jumpsuit, consisting of embroidered silk panels, commercial jumpsuit pattern pieces, meridian imagery, sculptural …

Aer, Qiyi Cai

Masters Theses

I began this project from a recurring perception: that simple, everyday elements carry distinct and often unexpected qualities. For me, the number six is green and tastes like grapes; the number two feels deep blue. Even bottled water from different brands seems to possess specific forms of character, some sharp, some rounded, some soft like cotton. I first encountered the word synesthesia in elementary school writing classes, where it was introduced as a literary device frequently used in classical poetry and prose. For instance, a gentle rain might be described as “soft as pastry,” translating a visual phenomenon into tactile …

All The Hours Of Light, Isabel Horgan

Masters Theses

My wisdom teeth were extracted in November 2025. I put it off for 5 years. In 2019, my first wisdom tooth emerged as a blood blister. It grew through a vein. I attempted to pop the blister, but instead pulled on the vein, which was so viscerally disturbing that I almost fainted. Every night that followed, I stood at the mirror over the bathroom sink and poked at it. Eventually, enough of the tooth showed that I needed to scrape stuff out of the crevices. It resulted in about a year of having a hole in my mouth that I …

The Porous Auto Body, Banshee Maria

Masters Theses

Balances within the human body and auto mechanical structures share a staggering amount in common. The two are intrinsically linked through their shared reliance on intricate internal and external systems to be in balance in order to function. Our biological makeup consists of electrical, fluid and chemical systems which mirror the machines we have chosen to forge. I am plagued by the human need to see ourselves mirrored in metal form, or perhaps we are just unable to create too far outside ourselves, resulting in the leeching of human structures into all technology we construct.

The Old Testament of the …

The Root Over My Eyes, Shiyeon Monk

Masters Theses

What does it mean to have a body? To touch, to breathe, to taste, and perceive all the things that make up a person, how does it feel to recognize the physical bounds your mind is enclosed in? To me—a woman, a bisexual woman, a biracial bisexual woman, an immigrant biracial bisexual woman, a Black and East Asian immigrant biracial bisexual woman—each of these markers feels heavy with its own context of history, location, and interpretation. Too many times have I wondered what it is like to be within a body accepted as a midpoint.

I make work out of …

Huh? Wow!, Lieyah Dagan

Masters Theses

I view design as a series of gestures: actions through which ideas are processed, refined, and communicated. Barbara Tversky, an American psychologist, describes gesture as a way of thinking through action, where movement becomes part of how understanding is formed (Tversky). In this sense, gesture is not only a means of communication between people, but a way of understanding and responding to the world through action.

My process begins with noticing—observing things in the world and returning to moments that hold a particular quality or possibility. Many of the things that draw my attention carry traces of movement or manipulation: …

Sous-Bois, Spencer G. Peterson

Masters Theses

This thesis explores furniture as a dynamic site of belief production.  Compressed theatrical ecosystems where image, object, and body collapse into one another.  These objects will not offer clarity and they will not restore order.

But they also mask nothing.

Compress, layer, stage, repeat.

Oscillate between seen, felt, and believed.

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Countersense, Avrie Allen

Masters Theses

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience, the conditions that shape it, and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making in graphic design, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, and always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Situational 情境中, Jo Zixuan

Masters Theses

The Chinese title of this book 情境中 (qíng jìng zhōng) translates directly to within the situation. Yet separately as three individual characters, qíng jìng zhōng means emotion, scene, within. A situation in my language is inherently an emotional scene, which requires us to account for more than the objective conditions, such as the geographical, economic, and social circumstances, as well as the subjective and affective experiences of individuals.

How can design analyze the context of given situations and construct new situations? The key terms organizing this book describe a movement. Site establishes the levels of context in which any …

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …

Mirth, Lauren Schell Farias

Masters Theses

In an era defined by unease, uncertainty, paranoia, distrust, and literal, limitless, and constant surveillance, the human condition has been sliced in half, scraped out, and plopped down to rot under a microscope and then sold skincare because we can see it’s crow’s feet. It’s not a pretty picture. If we zoom in a little and look at the minutiae…it’s even worse. But! If we zoom out a little bit after we zoomed in and try to get the focus right, it’s possible to distinguish the little squiggly shapes of joy.

If you can’t quite make that out, you might …

Seeking Ground, Shrishti Chatterjee

Masters Theses

Design increasingly sits within modern systems that reduce the world to narrow, instrumental categories. A tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And a graphic designer is a visual marketer optimising for reach and engagement. This leaves the designer without a sense of their place in the world.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived. To be grounded is to be connected to real-world implications …

The Second Horizon, Roger Labib

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the obsolescence of heavy industry as a spatial and infrastructural condition through which the contemporary metropolis can be reimagined. In Chicago, the grain, lumber, steel, and meat industries, along with the railways, rivers, and logistical systems that connected them, produced a first horizon: a metropolitan landscape organized by material production, labor, extraction, and the movement of goods. These industries did not only shape the city physically; they generated forms of collective life through their excesses; heat, smoke, water, neighborhoods, union halls, taverns, and labor communities.

Today, a new industrial force is emerging through data infrastructure. Computation, artificial …

Re-Assembly, Tonia Zhang

Masters Theses

Graphic design is bound by invisible defaults — software suites, standardized formats, and interfaces optimized for speed, profit, and frictionless output. Re-Assembly treats these standardized technologies not as neutral scaffolding, but as the primary material for critical inquiry. By dissecting this “default” infrastructure, the work exposes the logic of extraction and control baked into our templates and grids. Through a practice of subverting and rebuilding these everyday systems, design is pushed to operate under decentralized and open terms. This repositioning rejects the role of the designer as a surface technician, instead defining them as an active agent and an architect …

Another Palace For The People, Kate Holbrook

Masters Theses

Coined the “Palace for the People,” the American public library was established as a free, democratic haven for the public’s literary and educational needs. Adapting to the changing needs of its patrons, the public library’s services have extended beyond book access to provided services ranging from tool rentals to warming centers, postal services, and more. As both an essential landmark of the physical city through its exterior and provider of social infrastructure on its interior, public libraries seek sustainable avenues to continue their tradition of gathering, idea exchange, and provision. Expanding upon the identity of the public library as a …

Mediated Landscapes, Image Road Trip, Faith Kim

Masters Theses

I do whatever I can to not work on my laptop. But when I do, I'm greeted with the pristine landscape of Mac OS Tahoe — it was Mac OS Sequoia for a long time until recently. These default wallpapers are engineered layers composing an image: mediated, highly designed, presented as though they were simply found. Where an image lives determines what it means.

From the digital camera to the phone camera, effortless distribution, infinite storage: photography has reshaped not just how we make images but what we think they're for. I'm as interested in moving existing images around as …

The Disappearing Shore, Marguerite Kreuzkamp

Masters Theses

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In The Becoming, Lingyi Hu

Masters Theses

What is molten glass when it is not asked to become a functional object?

What can glass become when it is breathing and moving on its own will?

What does it feel like to be alive at 1650°F?

Glass, in its molten state, exists in continuous flux, neither stable nor with a fixed boundary. It resists direct apprehension. In this thesis, I approach glass as a material whose vitality emerges through motion, reaction, and change. Glass thinks, remembers, and carries time within its movement. Actions taken in the molten state—interruptions, reactivations, and pauses—are not preserved as gestures, but translated into …

Meadowkeepers, Molly Lefanowicz

Masters Theses

New England’s cities cover the lowlands where meadows once dotted the landscape. These meadows were among the first spaces lost to development— hidden today beneath layers of concrete foundations, asphalt roads, and diligently mowed turfgrass lawns. Meadows are critical ecosystems: they support pollinators, act as seed banks for local plants, filter rainwater, sequester carbon, and build soil. But their steady disappearance is more than an ecological loss. As stewards and inhabitants of meadows, people hold a longtime cultural connection to their presence. Meadowkeepers is an effort to renew that connection.

Meadowkeepers introduces a community-scale model for meadow reestablishment in urban …

Margin:Finding Coexistence Within The Marginalized Habitats Of Cities, Zihan Sun

Masters Theses

Marginal spaces can be found throughout cities, yet they are often ignored and overlooked. Despite this, these areas play a crucial role in urban environments due to their unexpected vitality. The overlapping uses of dominant and marginal actors, including humans and non-human species such as pedestrians, pigeons, and plants, create spatial conflicts within these spaces. How can the existing conditions of marginal spaces be subtly reworked to mediate these tensions without erasing marginality?

This thesis investigates three sites in Providence across different scales, using consistent observation and documentation to understand their marginality. Different actors serve as lenses for analyzing and …

Ark-Ipelago: Or, The Voluntary Prisoners Of Archaeology, Michel Song

Masters Theses

By the end of 2200, Venice becomes a submerged archaeological specimen. Ark-ipelago rejects defensive preservation, weaponizing heritage into an offensive spatial regime. An elevated macro-grid re-contains urban life within climate-controlled tubes, transforming catastrophic climate exile into a total voluntary exodus of planetary survival.

Temporary Constructions, Elliott Golden

Masters Theses

Temporary Constructions is a photographic series made by a process of multiple exposures, material assembly, and surface intervention on large format film. Working in a photographic lighting studio, I build provisional structures from scrap wood and metal and photograph the structures in multiple possible forms to produce images that are visually intelligible but spatially impossible. In my writing, I situate these images within a longer lineage of artists using photography to recast our relationship to surface and depth, and consider what that lineage reveals about contemporary mediation and the increasingly blurred boundary between image and object.

Productive Armature, Gabriel Ofem Peter

Masters Theses

What if water was all you had, what if your only source of survival was a body of water? I shudder to think that some people get to be put in this situation in the world we live in. As I understand the importance of water to survival, it is obvious that water can be the only lifeline of survival for a community. This is the experience for residents of Makoko, Lagos. Their survival depends on the Lagos Lagoon, a large body of water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. This research looks beyond the surface of what this community …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

A Charging Station As Part Of The Island's Energy Metabolism, Kaya Lee

Masters Theses

In an age of energy scarcity, Jeju Island faces an opposite condition. It produces more renewable electricity than it can absorb during the day. This thesis explores how architecture can respond to that surplus.

As Jeju moves toward its Carbon Free Island vision, electric vehicles become more than transportation. They act as mobile batteries, absorbing electricity by day and returning it at night. Through this rhythm, the charging station becomes part of the island’s energy metabolism.

The project reimagines the EV charging station as living infrastructure. It is not only a technical device, but a place of rest, food, and …

Weaving Grounds: Connecting Canyons And Empowering Borderland Communities, Maria D. Lopez Vazquez

Masters Theses

National policies materialize in the United States-Mexico political divide, also known as the borderlands. Willow Canyon is a dissected land form inextricably linked to the Tijuana River watershed, forming with the adjacent landforms on both sides of the border one landscape. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty¹, signed in 1848 by the US and Mexican governments, traced an arbitrary line across these landscapes, disregarding their relationship. The consequences of these actions are visible in the physical deterioration of the landscape and ecology, as the hydrological cycle has been modified. In the 1940’s, the picturesque flow of Willow Canyon was dissected by urbanization, …