Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

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.

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 …

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 …

4 In 10 Tiktok Users Find Their ‘For You’ Page Extremely Or Very Interesting, Aashish Gadani

Theses and Dissertations

Using video supercuts, sculptural forms, and digital prints on textiles in my work, I explore how images/videos can be used to reflect on cultural and personal trends. In this paper, I discuss how the structure of software recommendation systems combines with ideas of the post-internet image and creates unintended cultural consequences.

One Can Only Dream, Sophia V. Yacca

Theses and Dissertations

One Can Only Dream is an interactive installation in which players are invited to navigate a liminal, dream-like game, engage with a branching series of questions, and introspect upon the relationships between unconscious expression, conscious self-perception, and the inherent difficulty of depicting, sharing, and understanding subconscious thought.

Rooted in both my personal experience with a rare neurophysiological condition and in my desire to create, this project examines dreams not only as a medical and cultural phenomenon, but also as a means to form identity, reflect trauma, and inspire creativity. Drawing from modern interactive storytelling and my lived experiences, this work …

As Above So Below, Robin Smith Fedock

Theses and Dissertations

As Above So Below is a short experimental documentary film that reveals an unexpected world of entanglements connecting life, death, and fungi in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Fungi are nature’s decomposers, turning dead trees into soil so new trees can grow, for example. Mycorrhizal fungi perform acts of collaboration and mutualism, delivering water and nutrients to roots of plants through their underground networks of mycelium. As we struggle to find ways of living in and beyond this time of planetary crisis, rife with loneliness and grief, what can we learn from fungi and their entanglements? How can we move beyond dominant …

Body Of Light, Lucy C. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Body of Light is a two channel video installation, incorporating a combination of archival material and present day footage to explore and speculate upon the traces of Audrey Munson’s life that remain, a ghostly presence creeping into our current world.

Serious Music With Bea Witkin: An Upper West Side Audio Walk, Megan Hattie Stahl

Theses and Dissertations

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side produced by Megan Hattie Stahl. This immersive, musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime residence on West End Avenue. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 string quartet piece by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music begins and ends.

Witkin, who graduated …

Equity's Garden, Nicole A. Barreras

Theses and Dissertations

Equity’s Garden is a narrative-driven video game that explores fairness and communication through the framework of a community garden. Players take on the role of the director of a garden's allocation committee, responsible for distributing planting spaces among neighborhood residents. Through branching storylines, players navigate the consequences of their decisions.

Free Fall, Mariam Bolkvadze

Theses and Dissertations

Free Fall, a mixed media project, addresses the horrifying cases of infant abduction experienced in the country of Georgia over the last 40-50 years, and how the nation's systemic issue became one of the causes of illegal child trafficking in the country. The project features an infant room setting with video projections, TV screens with interviews, and custom sound effects. The setting of Free Fall is a visual metaphor of the experiences of those affected by the abductions and illegal child trafficking drawing from the iconography of early childhood. Ultimately, my installation seeks to advocate for justice and support …

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.

A Taste For The Distasteful: The Aesthetics Of Gore In The Giallo And Horror Films Of Mario Bava, Thais Casado Bignardi-Engstrom

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Italian experience with horror in cinema in both psychoanalytic feminist and cognitive Marxist critical film theories through a study of visual renderings of excessive violence and sex in gothic and thrillers known as giallo films created by the film director Mario Bava. This is an art historical study that looks at Bava’s work against the Italian cultural landscape in the post war period.

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor), Tansy Xiao

Theses and Dissertations

LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is a non-linear virtual environment with a non-anthropocentric approach. Streaming real-time biometric data from performers' movements, brain activities, and bioprocess data from living microbiomes such as slime mold and yeast into the virtual ecosystem, LUCA explores the collective agency and interconnectivity among diverse living entities.

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Pricks And Pills, Anna A. Charles

Theses and Dissertations

"Pricks and Pills" is a collection of audio pieces designed for an online platform where individuals with diabetes can listen to and find emotional support from others who share their experiences. This audio project provides an intimate look into the lives of people navigating the challenges of diabetes. Through heartfelt interviews with individuals and their families, the podcast highlights their journeys, showcasing both their struggles and triumphs.

Blurring The Boundaries: The Filmmaking Approach Toward Remission, John M. Mastriano

Theses and Dissertations

Remission explores the filmmaker’s personal experience with grief and fatherhood as well as the importance of a shared connection with the natural world that transcends life and death. Though primarily a first-person, reflexive short documentary film, Remission draws from other documentary models and modes, blurring the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

間, Lele Dai

Theses and Dissertations

LeLe Dai makes contingent participatory public interventions using sensory materials such as sound, flickering light, and water. This paper examines their works through the lens of Chinese character Jian (間), meaning “gap/slit/incision,” to investigate the concept of “in-betweenness.”

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.

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 …

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, Jess Shane

Theses and Dissertations

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is a 4-part creative non-fiction podcast that problematizes the use of personal stories in the documentary industry and examines the power dynamics between documentary-makers and their subjects. The series features a story within a story: it follows me, documentarian Jess Shane, as I craft short documentaries about four individuals’ lives— individuals who have applied to participate in my project by responding to an online ad. It also dives into the behind-the-scenes decisions required to tailor individuals’ life experiences to conform to industry standards of what makes a “good story.” In tandem, these two narratives— of me producing …

Cashing Out (Documentary), Girard Tecson

Theses and Dissertations

My 30-minute documentary film, Cashing Out, explores my journey into the world of sneaker culture and the major impact it made in my life.

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... …

Anamnesis: A Film About Forgetting, Neville Pullar Elder

Theses and Dissertations

In the film Anamnesis I bear witness to the injury and death of my childhood best friend Dominic, when I was 11. The film is a quest: A search for a visual memory that I have forgotten or perhaps, deliberately hidden from myself. Can remembering the events in their entirety and chronological order help me heal? Is searching for the lost memories nothing more than a smokescreen to avoid the steps I must take to deal/heal the trauma?

I communicate the relationship between the interplay of memory-making and sense-making and the reconstruction process that enables our past and present to …

Freestyle's Forsaken, Sage D. Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Freestyle is a genre of music born in the mid-1980s from Latino and Black communities in the urban epicenters of the United States. This project spotlights a freestyle music artist “Corina," and how she suffered a patriarchal construct but finally got the moment of significance she deserved.

Slaying The Dragon: Dances Created During The Time Of The Pandemic, Regina Nejman

Theses and Dissertations

Regina Nejman’s paper details a dance artist’s negotiation of art-making in a global pandemic. It focuses on her improvisational dance films that were combined with live performance and animation in a gallery-like viewing environment. She situates herself among the many screendances and digital archives shared during NYC’s lockdown.

Black And Silver Screens: Afropessimism And Filmic Appropriation In Contemporary Video Art, Madeleine A. Seidel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the video works of artists Ulysses Jenkins, Ina Archer, and Garrett Bradley and their appropriation of images of Black actors in Classic Hollywood films through the theoretical framework of afropessimism.

Meet And Run, Gia M. Binner

Theses and Dissertations

A defense for Gia Binner’s MFA Thesis, Meet and Run, argues that accessible art, known in this paper as commercial dance, is a meaningful vehicle for social change and that it has the ability to dismantle the outdated, European concert dance dominance by modeling the interdependency of both worlds.

Letters To Medusa, Maiya Redding

Theses and Dissertations

This context paper for the MFA thesis dance film Letters to Medusa connects the mythology of Medusa as a narrative of trauma. Engaging #metoo and Micaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Misfits, Redding discusses the power of art to serve as a vehicle for healing and forgiveness.