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Zine Open Assignment Guidelines For Mmp460, Anna Pinkas

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Contra La Guerra Contra Las Madres: Una Revisión Feminista De La Figura De La Madre En Las Obras De Gabriela Wiener, Marta Dillon Y Las “Madres De Soacha”, Fatima Velez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation critically examines how the figure of the mother appears across a set of contemporary Latin American cultural productions. Through the analysis of the work of Peruvian writer and performer Gabriela Wiener; the literary, journalistic, and cinematic production of Argentine writer and activist Marta Dillon; and the collective work of the Colombian human rights group known as the Mothers of Soacha—particularly the participation of three of its members in the play Antígonas, tribunal de mujeres—this study proposes the concept of a “war against mothers.” In dialogue with the term coined by Rita Segato (2016), “war against women,” this …

Trans-Cyber Cinema: Digital Embodiment In Science-Fiction Films, Sophia R. Schrock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to define the trans-cyber genre within cinema. By looking retroactively at a selection of nine films made across various decades and countries, this genre connects these films through their visualization and thematization of both trans and cyber embodiments, whereby the trans-cyber being emerges. Before the cinematic analysis and explanation of the three generic conventions selected for this thesis – transformation of body/gender; altered reality, memory, and temporality; and, radical death – the two intertwining theoretical frameworks will be established. This includes a brief summary of applicable transgender theory, and an introduction to cyborg theory (using Donna Haraway’s …

The Soviet New Wave: A Comparative Analysis, Katarina Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to assert the Soviet New Wave into the global New Wave cinema movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on three Soviet films—Marlen Khutsiev's I Am Twenty (1965) and July Rain (1967), and Georgiy Daneliya's I Walk the Streets of Moscow (1964)—this study proposes that these works fully commit to the New Wave expression in form, sensibility, and content, despite the aggressive censorship of Soviet authority. By comparing the Soviet films with the French Nouvelle Vague, as well as with British, Polish, and Czechoslovakian New Wave cinemas, the thesis identifies recurring motifs: the centering of young …

Gremlin Theory: A Film Art Of Joe Dante, Frank Falisi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to establish the work of the filmmaker Joe Dante as a catalyzing and anarchic force let loose inside larger, dumber superstructures: linear narrativity, Hollywood, America, etc. It works to read the genre films he worked on—many of them made as popular entertainment for mainstream movie studios—as moments of actual subversion, allocating status quo (studio system) resources to create a biting-back against American imperial norms in the lingua franca of Marx and the Marx Brothers: gummy leisure-seeking stupidity and Gremlin transformation. This thesis seeks to argue that to understand Dante’s work is to understand pop transfiguration itself. This …

Three Degrees Of Representation: How Genai Filters, Retrieves, And Remixes Lesbian Film Data, Maria G. Baker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates how generative AI systems assemble, filter, and represent Lesbian film data. Through auditing GenAI outputs across multiple dimensions (text, images, metadata), 3°R explores what gets included, excluded, and transformed in the process.

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Three Degrees of Representation is a public website (https://mgb513.github.io/lesfilm-meets-AI/) featuring an investigation of AI-generated images and texts in response to Lesbian film data. Filtering simple prompts based on Lesbian film titles through the algorithms of AI image and text generators makes visible how these systems digest and remix existing (training) data, and how aspects of Lesbian representation are either amplified or suppressed …

Materializing The Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art, Erin Livingston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Materializing the Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art is a data-studio capstone project that reconstructs elements of desktop and mobile interfaces as handmade mixed-media artifacts, then digitizes them as an interactive website where generative text and images are fed by personal data flows. Twenty-one paper collage windows — built from cardstock, risograph-printed paper, and mixed media — were photographed, digitized, and activated using code to become the interactive surface of a desktop view driven by browser history. A corresponding mobile view renders a corpus of 500 Instagram advertisement screenshots through a risograph print aesthetic, fed by a hand-tagged emotion and …

The New Middle Cinema: Aesthetic Restraint, The Urban Middle Class, And The Reconfiguration Of Mainstream Bollywood (2007–2017), Hasnatun Nabi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 2007 and 2017, a distinctive wave of mainstream Hindi films, termed here as the “New Middle Cinema”, employed aesthetic restraint to reconfigure Bollywood’s identity in response to a rapidly changing India. Rejecting the industry’s traditional spectacle, melodrama, and visual opulence, these films embraced naturalistic visuals, grounded performances, character‑driven narratives, and a muted color palette. Drawing on industrial analysis, close textual reading, and audience reception data, this thesis examines seven representative films (Chak De India, Wake Up Sid, My Name is Khan, The Lunchbox, Piku, Kapoor & Sons, and Lipstick Under My Burkha …

Catalyst, David Steck

Theses and Dissertations

Catalyst is a short documentary that explores why Hip Hop happened much later in Chicago than in other cities. It focuses on the story of Duro Wicks, a young Black music lover who overcame the city’s segregation to launch the first weekly Hip Hop open mic night. At the weekly $3 Sunday Hip Hop Show held at the Lower Links, young people came together from across the divided city to create a community. Though more successful than anyone could have imagined, Wicks’ dream proved unsustainable. However, it forever transformed the lives of the people it touched and launched a sustainable …

The Knock That Never Leaves, Alvin Seenauth

Theses and Dissertations

Peter Asan, a father and small business owner in New York, faces uncertainty after immigration agents arrived at his home in 2021. A decades-old conviction resurfaced, threatening his family life. The Knock That Never Leaves follows his daily routine as he lives between stability and the ongoing fear of deportation.

The Storyteller: Concealment, Memory, And The Architecture Of Exile, Dylan Hirsh

Theses and Dissertations

The Storyteller is an expressive documentary investigating the life of Francis Kalnay (1899–1992). A Jewish-Hungarian intellectual, Kalnay lived as a socialist, an X-2 Counter-espionage chief for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, an architect in Mexico, and a celebrated children's book author. The film's central conflict lies in his hidden identities and exploring how, despite his position as a high-level spy, he failed to save his sister and mother from death at the hands of the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross government. As a filmmaker investigating a lost part of my own Jewish-Hungarian heritage, I believe Kalnay …

The I Need More Time Machine, Suzanne L. Schulz

Theses and Dissertations

The I Need More Time Machine imagines alternatives to gendered overwork and exhaustion. Incorporating animation and the interviews of twelve NYC-based female and nonbinary artists who are caretakers and full-time workers, the film dwells in spaces of fatigue and repetition — from the vantage point of commuting — then draws on forgotten feminist and utopian housing blueprints to create science fiction-inspired, fantasy-imbued sites for gendered flourishing. The animated fantasy segments imagine elastic time, deep rest, experiments in collaboration, and liberating feminist spatial possibilities

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

Course Syllabus. Spn 415 Transatlantic Cinema, Álvaro Baquero-Pecino

Open Educational Resources

Course syllabus. SPN 415-Transatlantic Cinema.

This seminar explores the relationship between film, culture, and society in Spain and Latin America through a discussion of representative texts and films, and their historical and political contexts. The course provides an interdisciplinary survey of cinema as an art form, a component of the entertainment industry, and a medium of communication via screenings, lectures, and readings on modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and U.S. Latino cinema. This class will be taught in Spanish

Funded in part by the CUNY OER Initiative.

The Ghosts Of Times Square: A Zine Exploring Representations Of Times Square Through Film, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

My zines are often an extension of my research—either a jumping off point or a way to create a more visual project (or both). They are in their own way a form of excess - they are often too scandalous, too smutty, too much — everything that is spilling out of the margins.

My zines and research focus on lesser known queer histories, trying to highlight them and bring them to a new audience and new generations.

Using zines as a creative form of research, I am able to reach a broader audience both inside and outside of academia. I …

Sometimes I Picture You Dreaming: How American Female Directors Use Women-In-Prison Films As A Pathway For Public Education And Activism In The Era Of Mass Incarceration, Nicolette Natale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the role of female directors in creating media that showcases how prisons perpetuate sexism or gender-based violence. As mass incarceration began to take off in the 1970s, this paper begins with an analysis of Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), which often served as the model for women-in-prison (WIP) exploitation films. While Hill perpetuated the white and male gaze in The Big Doll House, Stephanie Rothman subverts oppressive gazes in her WIP film, Terminal Island (1973), and demonstrates a concern with the historical gendered realities of prison – moving beyond representations of prison on the …

O Esqueleto De Um Romance, Lanna Leite

Theses and Dissertations

In O Esqueleto de um Romance: The Film (2025), a Berlin legal dispute between a mayor and evangelicals sparks filmmaker Lanna Leite’s reflection on faith, memory, and belief. Using archival, 16mm, and 8mm footage, the experimental film frames filmmaking as an ephemeral, performative practice resisting closure and conventional narrative finality.

One Stone's Journey, Satoko Saito

Theses and Dissertations

One Stone’s Journey is a participatory, experiential thirty-minute documentary about uranium. By using an embroidered world map and appealing to participants’ senses—especially touch—the project explores the possibility of telling the story of radiation, which is invisible, intangible, and silent. Uranium is a radioactive material used by the United States in the development and production of the atomic bombs during the Manhattan Project. This year, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011 was on a scale comparable to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and the threat …

I Know You Are Watching, Camilo Salas Kusulas

Theses and Dissertations

I Know You Are Watching is a short documentary film that examines the evolving history and scope of mass surveillance, and how to resist it. The film introduces two local New York City artists, Bill Brown from the Surveillance Camera Players, and Sam Lavigne, who misuse technologies designed to watch us, exposing these systems and fighting back through digital art and performance.

Blending interviews, observational footage, personal narration, archival images, and news clips from different eras, the film interrogates the mechanisms of control, and positions art as a method of both understanding and talking back to surveillance.

The Bmt: Will This Time Be Different?: Red Hook Braces For A Mega-Project On The Waterfront. Can It Avoid The Mistakes Of Atlantic Yards?, Steve Kastenbaum

Capstones

"The BMT: Will this time be different?" investigates how New York City's push to rapidly build housing is reshaping communities. A $3.5 billion mega-project at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal promises transformation through 6,000 apartments, a modernized port, and waterfront improvements, but residents are split on whether it represents progress or displacement. The development uses a controversial "general project plan" process that bypasses normal community review, the same approach that enabled the still-unfinished Atlantic Yards project. Local voices in Red Hook range from excitement about investment, jobs and amenities to fears about gentrification and broken promises. This pilot episode launches a …

Queens College Paranormal Investigation, Ash Marinaccio

Open Educational Resources

This two-week module for MEDST 343W (Nonfiction Forms) invites students to explore the “paranormal” as a nonfiction form through experiential, critical, and creative engagement. Framing paranormal investigation as a documentary and narrative practice, the module examines how the genre functions across media (particularly television, podcasts, and documentary film) and how it intersects with questions of belief, storytelling, evidence, and place.

Through a site-based paranormal investigation on the Queens College campus, students will engage directly with the conventions and techniques used in nonfiction media to construct truth-claims, stage suspense, and shape narrative authority. Students will document, interpret, and reflect on their …

Creating An Ofrenda, Sara Hinojos

Open Educational Resources

You do not need to be Mexican to celebrate Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). What you need however is a deep and thoughtful cultural understanding of the practice. This lesson plan teaches students what Dia de los Muertos is, the influence of colonialism (past and present), how mainstream media understands the celebration in the U.S., and how local communities honor the celebration. This approach is from a media studies perspective and a particular focus on art, specifically altar making or making an ofrenda. Writer, philosopher, tejana Gloria E. Anzaldúa details that altars are “‘the sanctuary of the …

Double Exposure: Motherhood And Filmmaking, Eddy Berzak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project explores the intersection of motherhood and filmmaking through a reflexive documentary that examines how women directors have historically navigated the tensions between creative careers and raising children. Drawing on feminist film theory and autoethnographic methods, the fourteen-minute video essay analyzes three pioneering autobiographical documentaries from the 1970s—Joyce at 34 (1973), Nana, Mom and Me (1974), and Women Are Naturally Creative: Agnès Varda (1977)—alongside original footage documenting my own experience as a mother with deferred filmmaking aspirations. The project employs reflexive documentary techniques to weave together film analysis and personal narrative, investigating the central question: why didn't I …

Medst 343w - Nonfiction Forms (8 Week Async Section), Ash Marinaccio

Open Educational Resources

In this course, we will explore how various forms of nonfiction storytelling represent reality and shape our understanding of the world. Over the semester, we will examine how “the real” is represented across different mediums, including theatre, film, photography, and literature. Through critical readings, case studies, creative exercises, and Brightspace discussions, we will examine the intricate interplay between truth, ethics, form, and authorship in documentary and nonfiction works.

The course is divided into five units. The first unit introduces foundational questions of ethics, authorship, and cultural responsibility in nonfiction storytelling. The following units focus on specific forms: documentary theatre, nonfiction …

Manny The Barber: Transitioning The Neurodivergent From High School To Workplace, Julia Barlas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a documentary short film. The narrative focuses on Manny, a young man on the autism spectrum, who dreams about working in a barber shop. He lives in New York City and attends a specialized public high school. The film empathizes with Manny and with his community at large, illustrating the need for further job training and hiring initiatives acknowledging the potential and value of the neurodivergent. The observational mode of this documentary with some participatory elements serves to present the neurodivergent behavioral nuisances, patterns of speech, and interactions with the surroundings. Pieces of interviews with teachers …

Transmedial Econarratology: Environment And The Subject Of Science Fiction, Joseph R. Boisvere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that narrators are constructed by their interactions with diegetic space and time in an ecological relationship. This argument draws upon Erin James’s work on econarratology, particularly her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, putting her theories of narrating time and place in dialogue with contemporary “unnatural” narratology as theorized by scholars such as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. Science fiction (SF) offers a rich complement to these theoretical stances. I also focus much of my dissertation on how narratology works across and is influenced by specific media, featuring literary, audiovisual, and digital media, including novels, …

Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks …

Cuny In The News: A History Of Reporting On The Humanities At The City University Of New York, Jacqueline R. Cahill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project compiles newspaper articles concerning humanities at the City University of New York, placing them on a timeline to establish patterns and changes within media reporting and public perception. The archival research of this project explores four distinct eras, grouped around major events in the history of the university: 1961-1971, for the founding of the university and open admissions struggle; 1980-1990, for the response to the ‘70s fiscal crisis and introduction of the Board of Trustees; 2000-2010 for the post-open admissions era and the centralization of CUNY; and 2020-present, for COVID and a new fight for racial equity. Examining …

The Reimagined Past: Investigating Generational Trauma Through Visual Semiotics And Visual Autoethnography Of Recreated Family Photographs, Josephine A. Barnett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Family photographs, and particularly the curation of family photo albums, serve as a source of data, providing researchers with the opportunity to illustrate the role of the visual in reproducing certain social norms and ideals by dictating the depiction or representation of specific types of families and experiences. Arguably, what is left outside the frame of a photograph is more revealing about familial norms, memory, and narrative than what is deliberately captured within it (Hirsch, 1997a; Kuhn, 2002a). In other words, the hegemony and standardization of family photos shed light on the need for an alternative visual narrative that depicts …

An Interactive Walkthrough Of Richard Kostelanetz’S Library, Martin Glick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My project utilizes the visual novel game engine Ren’Py to create an embodied virtual walkthrough of Richard Kostelanetz’s personal library. Kostelanetz is a pioneering avante-garde artist, critic, and anthologist whose work spans multiple decades and artistic practices. This interactive experience introduces users to the astounding collection of 25,000 books that Kostelanetz has amassed in Ridgewood, Queens over his decades of publishing avant-garde literature. While scholars might be familiar with his anthologies such as Scenarios: Scripts to Perform (1980) and Texts-Sound Texts (1980), my project allows users to browse through sample pages of his original “Book Art”.

This New Media Object …