Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Film For Jeanette, Brice Goldberg

Theses and Dissertations

Film for Jeanette is an experimental documentary concerning grief, memory, and what remains of those who have left this physical plane. The film paints the portrait of my late sister, Jeanette Lee Goldberg, who died in a car accident when she was 19. What begins as a memorial becomes a celebration of her life and an exploration into the complexities of her character that led to her death. Jeanette’s story is told through interviews with family members, while the visuals, created with various alternative 16mm film techniques, depict my own journey through the filmmaking process. I was only 3 when …

The Ethereal Being That Is Me, And Maybe You, Hwiy Chang

Theses and Dissertations

The Ethereal Being That Is Me, and Maybe You is a 23-minute video collection of short stories accompanied by an installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. This thesis explores the work’s creation as a visual and narrative meditation on self-transformation, drawing from personal experiences in therapy and philosophical texts including Carl Jung’s concept of the unconscious. The paper examines how each story represents a distinct stage of transformation—from recognizing patterns to confronting setbacks to reshaping internal dialogue—and how watercolor’s fluid, unpredictable nature serves as a visual metaphor for the process of change. The installation component …

In-Between Echoes, Jiayi Liang

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I explore memory, diaspora, labor, and intergenerational trauma through constructed photography and experimental film. Informed by Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space, I examine how identity is shaped through displacement, cultural negotiation, and inherited memory. Drawing from my relationship with my grandmother and my experience as a Chinese woman living in diaspora, I consider labor as both survival and care, tracing how domestic gestures and emotional structures continue across generations. Through collage, reconstruction, and animation, I rework fragments of family archives, colonial landscape imagery, and personal photographs to address grief, racialized perception, belonging, and the …

Spilt Milk, Fatima Kaleem

Theses and Dissertations

Spilt Milk explores how institutional discipline is rehearsed across the Pakistani home, school, and television soap opera. These seemingly domestic spaces converge at the military-industrial complex, where media propaganda (ISPR) and consumer commodities collaborate to manufacture a unified national identity.

Through an installation of school desks and re-fabricated cereal boxes, this project examines the ‘cereal/serial’ as a site of ideological consumption. By refabricating these boxes with embroidery, drawing, lace, and synthetic hair, the work subverts state-mandated narratives. These material interventions replace assembly lines with spills of hair and sweat to highlight the vulnerability of the body under surveillance. This project …

The Mundo I Imagine, Angeliky Castrellon

Theses and Dissertations

My work investigates the human experience of belonging and how the force of displacement alters the perception of one's present and enables dissociation. After leaving my home and starting a new life overseas, coming back never felt the same; I couldn’t find peace and comfort anywhere. This made me create an imaginary world called “Mundo.” Shelters for the souls of the displaced, looking for comfort. As I became a graduate student in the Craft/Materials Studies department, my perspective widened, and my work itself answered a question for me: I want to be comfortable everywhere; how can my home be everywhere …

‘Politics! Not My Thing!’:The Misrepresentation Of Anne Boleyn In Six: The Musical, Natalie M. Bowen

UROP Posters

With the rise of Hamilton and Come From Away, stage musicals have become the next hottest form of historical reenactment, and the six wives of Henry VIII are no exception. These modern spins on Tudor history are typically riddled with inaccuracies that leave audiences with a skewed idea of Tudor England. The wives of Henry VIII, in particular, are the victims of centuries of historically inaccurate fictional media. Six: The Musical is a modern musical spin on this centuries-old story, following the six wives of Henry VIII as they reclaim their narratives in a pop concert competition on who had …

“A Couple Days In The Life Of What It’S Like In Washington Heights:” The Representation Of Latine Immigrants In Lin-Manuel Miranda’S In The Heights, Natalie M. Bowen

UROP Posters

The United States of America is a nation built by and made up of immigrants, being home to one-fifth of all migrants across the world. Anti-immigrant prejudice and xenophobia have long defined the American people and national policy, but the target demographic is constantly changing to reflect current narratives and fears. In recent years, Latine immigrants have been a prominent topic of concern in American politics. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2021 movie musical In The Heights aims to celebrate the existence of immigrants in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City. Using peer-reviewed scholarly sources and movie reviews, this comprehensive literature …

Glitched Humanity: A Digital Media Arts Advocacy Project, Shelly Maloney

Teaching Resource Archive

This lesson includes an original sample project and website that directs students towards learning how to utilize digital glitch art to create advocacy or raise awareness for the social, cultural, environmental, or political issue of their choice. It is designed to engage students in critical thinking skills, cross-curricular connections, reflective writing, digital art making, group discussion, and peer review.

Artists can use video and other media sources to explore the self-destructive tendencies of human nature (i.e. violence/war, consumption, and/or carelessness/environmental neglect) or other social, cultural, or political issues using digital manipulation, layered imagery, sound, and video.

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Sunlight, Veiled, Sina Ahmadkhani

Theses and Dissertations

Sunlight, Veiled is a narrative short film exploring themes of displacement, class, and identity through the lens of an Iranian intern navigating a morally ambiguous company party in the United States. This written component traces the evolution of the project from development through post-production, while reflecting on the personal and political frameworks that shaped the creative process. Through cinematic references, cultural analysis, and production insight, the paper aims to contextualize the film within a diasporic experience and a growing awareness of social power dynamics. It also reflects on the challenges of filmmaking as an outsider, where self-doubt, cultural translation, and …

From Ink To Code, From Binary To Boundless Reality—Until All Returns To Emptiness, Weitong Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.

Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.

Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, …

Orb Weaver, Quinn Standley

Theses and Dissertations

Orb Weaver is a 24-minute experimental video/lm. This essay does not explain its meaning, as viewers should feel the power to trust their own interpretations. Instead, it reflects on the process of making the lm interwoven with autobiographical thoughts.

Liner Notes On Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music As A Praxis Of Self-Fashioning, Shawn J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Liner Notes on Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music as a Praxis of Self-Fashioning interprets Black musical performance in identity-making, with a focus on how music and Black trans identity intersect and informs Black trans girlhood. As such, Black trans girls render ourselves legible, i.e. understood without shame or judgment, by constructing our identities through the music by Black women we listen and dance to, or watch and sing. These musical connections affirm the possibilities of Black femme expression. This expression of Black femininity is due to what I call an Afrofuturist affect, by which I refer …

The Romanticization Of Human-Vampire Relationships: How 'Twilight' And 'The Vampire Diaries' May Prime Young Women To Accept Dating Violence, Natalie M. Bowen

UROP Posters

The first literary vampire can be traced back to 18th century Germany, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Die Braut von Korinth,” but the stereotypical features of a vampire are traditionally accredited to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Modern vampires, such as Edward Cullen and Stefan Salvatore of the Twilight and The Vampire Diaries series respectively, have managed to win the hearts of teenage girls all across America with their sex appeal and charismatic nature. According to Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, individuals learn new behaviors by modeling and imitating the actions of those around them. This comprehensive literature review investigates the connection …

That Girl Vs. New Girl: The Perils Of Choice Feminism, Katherine Noble

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

In recent years, Elizabeth Meriwether’s television show New Girl has begun to reach the status of a cult classic. The show’s sharp humor and quirky protagonist have captured the hearts and minds of many. But is this all for the good? New Girl features a controversial protagonist, Jessica Day, whose personality grates on some and resonates with others. Jessica represents stereotypically feminine interests and ideals yet takes on a leading role and independence not always afforded to female characters. This opens her, and the larger show, up to feminist readings and critiques. Surprisingly, little scholarly research has been conducted on …

Moonshine Babies, Arghavan Heydareslam

Theses and Dissertations

Moonshine Babies is a two-screen film made of collage/cut-out stop-motion and live-action. It is a visual poem based on my journals from when I recently started living in the US as an outsider. The experience left me feeling divided between the empty present and memories of the past. suggesting that there are collective memories among a group of interconnected individuals that unite them within a single narrative.

There was a moment when I asked, "If you are your memories, what does it mean to be somewhere you have no memories of and no one has memories of you there?"

Memories …

Expect: A Speculative Documentary Filmed In Vr Utilizing The Role-Playing Method To Explore Disabilities And Ableism In Science Fiction, Leilei Xia

Theses and Dissertations

Expect is a speculative documentary filmed in Virtual Reality (VR) that features Chinese actors with disabilities to explore, challenge and reimagine the conventional ableist Sci-Fi tropes and the transhumanistic tendency to “fix” or eradicate disabilities through technological enhancement. I invited people with disabilities who are interested in Sci-Fi to do a Role-Playing with me in Virtual Reality (VR), in which they imagine themselves to be living in a future civilization, an alien planet, or an alternate universe. The participants came up with their own fictional characters and built their own world views. I interacted with them by asking questions and …

Exposing The Camera: The Pedagogical Possibilities Of Critical Camera-Based Arts Curriculum, Oscar Keyes

Theses and Dissertations

Cameras are a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, especially in schools, found in students’ smartphones and state-of-the-art surveillance systems. This research project emerged from an iterative redesign process of a Photography for Art Education course, structured around the camera’s dual nature as a tool for creative expression and social control. While cameras have long been used to address social issues through documentary techniques; this critical eye can be turned onto the apparatus itself. This study drew heavily upon the historical work of Allan Sekula (1986), who observed how easier access to cameras resulted in both democratization (for the People) …

Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is penned by a young adult who is generally confused about a lot of things regarding life, but has one singular focus that is perhaps larger than life—trying to find the bridge between a future already lived, and a past yet to happen. These are his findings so far.

Irene Cox, Lindsey Arturo

Theses and Dissertations

This document explores the question of “Who is Irene Cox?” as a jumping off point for creating an artwork which navigates online information landscapes and their logics circa 2023. By using thirteen unique but similar found paintings of the same floral still life by an artist named “Irene Cox” I create a visually meandering, absurd, haunting, and comical pathway for thinking through who exactly is Irene Cox via the internet. How such a question is even asked becomes the art in which a myriad of visual techniques are used to explore the nature of the question. Included in this paper …

Rooted In Between, Manavi Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Rooted in Between is a personal project that explores the complexities of belonging and the emotions that come with navigating between spaces that we call home. This written thesis is in support of the carefully curated video based and photographic work presented at an exhibition of the same title. The project's primary objective is to delve into the physical and emotional baggage that we carry with us as we move from one place to another. The project highlights the coping mechanisms adopted by the different generations in my family while struggling to find a place where we truly belong.

To, From: Of Time, Of Distance, Of Body And Mind, Fanxi Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This paper introduces the concepts, theories, and techniques associated with my thesis project “To, From.” The paper consists of three parts: Time as Structure, Distance as Premise, and Body and Mind. Each chapter is written in a mixture of personal narration and a general introduction to materials that are directly or implicatively relevant and important to the creation of my project. In this experimental narrative comprises film screening and live performance with multi-channel sound, I tell a story of non-story. Words and the exchange of words, movements and non- movements, objects that are being handled and subjects that are handling... …

Until One Resembles The Other, Chad E. Mundie Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition titled Until One Resembles the Other, conceived during the years 2021-22 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from April 9-22nd.

The following writing explores themes of labor within the home, generational knowledge, interiority, exteriority, and emotional residue through a series of essays surrounding areas of interest within my practice. The writing concludes with documentation of the show and an accompanying explanatory text.

Revenge Of The Lawn, Jason James Wallin

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

A great irony of the present moment involves the return of objects long thought rallied to the will of man. As growing consensus in climate change research submits, the world presumably given to the mastery of man today returns as an alien force of material and conceptual upheaval. It is against this backdrop of rapid ecological transformation and its cultural impacts that Revenge of the Lawn is situated. As a work of speculative philo-fiction, Revenge of the Lawn surveys the horror of being “read” from the vantage of the non-human as it exists astride and yet withdraws from human melodrama …

What Sound Reveals To Our Eyes: The Intersection Between Subconscious Thought And Real Imagery In Experimental Film And Sound Design, Mireille G. Heidbreder

Theses and Dissertations

The impetus for making films that conjure up atemporal, interconnected spaces suggestive of a unique reality has been influenced in large part by Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, or the creation of a new world by joining together discursive spaces. As such, my practice begins with the collection and re-imagination of these discursive spaces through a combination of an in-depth exploration of little-known landscapes and the organic observation of the natural realm in relation to the human world. By combining various mixed media including digital, film print, as well as re-purposed archival footage, I alter the filmic quality of the …

Salt At Dawn, Salt In My Veins, Cecilia Hankyeol Kim

Theses and Dissertations

A contemplation on expanded time, over generations along my maternal lineage;

on being on the borders, embodying homeland;

on inheritance and shared labor;

occupying a void that is dense;

looking towards dawn.

Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo

Theses and Dissertations

I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …

Letters From The “Gentlemen Of The Press,” 1810-1845, David E. Latane

English Publications

A collection of letters by men and women associated with the periodical press in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, transcribed, annotated, and presented with scans of the original letters. Notable contributors include Times editors Thomas Barnes and John Delane, Fraser's Magazine writers William Maginn and John Heraud, Charles Molloy Westmacott editor of The Age, Stanley Lees Giffard of The Standard , and Mary Russell Mitford.

Internalizing Data Collection: Personal Analytics As An Investigation Of The Self, Neal R. Swisher

Theses and Dissertations

Personal analytics, aka self-tracking, is the practice of using a digital device to track aspects of behavior, such as exercise habits, heart rate, sleep patterns, location, diet, and a host of other data points. This dissertation is an exploration of “self” in self-tracking, informed by theories of subjectivity, autonomy, power and knowledge. As a technological intervention, self-tracking devices change how we experience our own body and behavior. They also serve as methods to digitize human behavior. This data is combined with other data and processed using computational methods. Self-tracking devices are both personal and bureaucratic. They are devices used for …

Prey Begins With Play, Seren C. Moran

Theses and Dissertations

My work examines the lasting psychological and emotional torment of trauma focusing on sexual violence against women. My thesis consists of five short animated films recounting non-fiction experiences of sexual assault. To contextualize my work within cultural and historical representations of sexual violence, this text reflects my research on the mishandling of rape in Western art history as well as contemporary politics and cinema. In both my work and research, I address the complicated, and often contradictory, internal reality of experiencing and remembering trauma and how this relates to artistic strategies such as collage and maximalism. My personal struggles recovering …