Graduate Research Grant

Rebecca Oh
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My thesis is an interdisciplinary collection of work that explores womanhood, mental health, queerness, and identity within the Korean-American diaspora. Together, these paradoxical pieces probe the balance of cultural expectations and autonomy, inviting viewers into a layered experience of concealment and revelation.

David Guarnizo
Photography & Film
Proposal: I investigate the ways in which the fauna, flora and geography are represented in numismatic elements to gain insight into the formation of value systems, as well as the particular conditions of different communities and geographies. In this research, the term “numismatics” is employed to signify the study and collection of currency, including coins, paper money, medals, and even digital money. I consider these numismatic or trading objects as evidence of our cultural, social, and political constructions.

Sina Ahmadkhani
Photography & Film
Proposal: _Forough_ is a short narrative fiction film that will be screened daily at the ICA auditorium as a part of my thesis. It explores themes of class, power, and social alienation through the story of an Iranian intern at the party of her wealthy employers. Drawing on personal experiences, the project examines how socioeconomic divides shape identity. Using visual metaphors the film reflects the exclusion of outsiders in privileged spaces, blending realism with a subtle, dreamlike atmosphere.

Aya Khalife
Graphic Design
Proposal: My thesis project interrogates how western media often obscures and conceals the realities of middle eastern conflicts. The project centers around a series of double-sided posters that critique the ways media simplifies complex narratives. Inspired by the powerful voices of Arab writers – whose words remain as relevant today as when they were written – this project seeks to reclaim the depth of these narratives, contrasting lived experiences with the often reductive language of western media.

Annie Sarachan
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: A series of videos with multiple narrators share their groups’ adoration of an object: a Mars rover, a violin… The video edit is structured by a shift in musical tuning systems, which reveal Western priorities: the erasure of dissent to privilege comfort, at the expense of reimagined futures. The video is projected in a circle of acrylic sheets. An interior area of music stands slowly sink lower over the course of each day under the weight of projectors and sculptures.

Weitong Sun
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: *Ideal Home* is an immersive Mixed Reality (MR) installation exploring immigrant collective memory of loneliness and the meaning of “home.” Using Quest 3, participants navigate a non-linear narrative shaped by interviews and a large language model (LLM), transitioning from reality to a utopian exploration of an ideal home. Integrating prints, publications, and MR storytelling, Ideal Home fosters empathy, reflection, and cross-cultural dialogue, redefining how immersive narratives connect individuals and communities.

Molly Garrett
Graphic Design
Proposal: “Ghosted” is a research project about political communications in the 21st century and the power dynamics of being heard. When a campaign sends a political text, all response texts are received and recorded but not necessarily read. This hidden database is a record of how we feel about politicians, political communication, and their access to us.

Emily MacKenzie
Art History
Proposal: I am applying for a VCUarts Graduate Research Grant to travel to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, and the North Hertfordshire Museum in Hertfordshire, England, to examine how museums approach non-normative gender presentation in antiquity. This research will allow me to complete my qualifying paper on using queer-inclusive museum practices to aid audiences in understanding how female Egyptian pharaohs employed masculine iconography to legitimize their rule.

Suzy Lykins
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: For the thesis exhibition, I propose a dual set of works including a multi-part performance and video installation called Post-Opera, and a series of bag-like silicone objects. These gestures co-operate to unpack embodiment, medical systems, consumer desire, group ritual experiences and power exchange. This project helps advance my research by providing access to performers, props, materials, and space to experiment with forms which merge my expansive methods of making.

Diego Pablo Beckhart
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My thesis show will be a sculptural installation using my car’s interior to critique American car culture and explore how marginalized people can redefine oppressive systems. It’ll feature a life-sized, painted wooden windshield with a monitor displaying 15 hours of dash cam footage of my drive along I-95 from Richmond to Miami, symbolizing my own migration from Peru. The video will incorporate text from diary entries and car advertisement excerpts.

Hasler Gomez-Perez
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: The gestures, objects, and film that make up _IN THE WAKE OF THE DESIRING PATH_ aim to mine the power embedded within institutional spaces as well as re-incorporate temporality and specificity into the architectural body of the ICA. This closer examination of the way architectures, objects, and bodies inform and influence each other reveals themes of displacement, refusal, desire, power relations, and colonial strategies embedded in (art) history.

Quinn Standley
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Orb-Weaver is a diaristic documentary film that explores mental illness as well themes of grief, reconciliation, and the personal struggle to understand myself and the world in which I live. It is a venture into the unknown, a descent into emotions and feelings I’ve never before encountered. It has become not only a meditation on my own struggles with life and mental health, but also a reflection on mortality and mental illness in contemporary society.

Wren Tiffany
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: The proposed thesis project titled _The Green Room_ is a live green-screen keying drag performance art and expanded cinema event. Myself as host with 4 other drag performers will explore our inner worlds and lives behind the performances we show to the world. In the spirit of Brechtian theatre, the dressing room for performers will instead take center stage, as a means of shedding our personas in order to foster deeper connections within our own queer community and the audience.

Brooklin Grantz
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: I will construct a false floor with a trapping pit, layered with unfired clay and sod to mimic natural terrain, with a fence made from branches and unfired clay in front. The false floor serves as an installation space, where a netted ceramic decoy lures in the viewer. A surveilling ceramic figure looms in the shadow at the back corner of the floor. Additionally, I will create weavings and nets made with high-vision materials that signal caution.

Aleckxi Dorhofer
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: _Suggestion_, an installation of objects, sculptures, and “machines” centers the observation that my life has been focused around relationships between desire, control, and power. The idea of hypnosis is used as a mediator for my desire and a tool for gaining, possessing, and reclaiming power. The work in _Suggestion_ flows from the Greek gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Morpheus (Dreams). Its goal is to obliviate the viewers desire and replace them with my own.

Tyna Ontko
Sculpture + Extended Media
Tyna Ontko’s thesis exhibition, mutual realm, explores the role that institutional set-building plays in collective memory construction and preservation both within and outside of archival structures. Instead of bringing the fringes into the center, this installation of new sculpture interrogates the institution as the destination by asking which histories are maintained here? Whose futures are being prepared for?

Clara Cruz
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My work spans painting, sculpture and immersive installation to address memory, memorials and the relational nature of meaning within my experience as a mixed-race Chicana from New England. Recently, I have investigated the process of re-remembering a moment until it turns into a talisman, distinct from the original memory. My work is often built up and worn away so that it breaks into moments of visual static and brown noise.

Abigail Ogle
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Through simulated wind, the science of breathing, and silk, Metronome, an exploration of breath, will make visible the inner landscape. This large-scale installation will manifest as a 660 square foot piece of silk that is manipulated using the wind from fans. The viewer will be invited to engage with the installation by walking on top of it, thus creating billowing landscapes that undulate around them. The work will interact with a “score” in which a series of fans will be coded to evoke different types of breath that will be visually and auditorily represented.

Aida Lizalde Rios
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: My studio research began as an investigation of identity in relation to geographical and socio-political situations. The body and the consciousness are the focal points of unfolding of these inquiries. My thesis will be composed of two installations interpreting conscious and subconscious metabolizing (or failing to metabolize) data like sensory data, emotional, nutritional, and environmental factors, and social codes. Through materials like porous low-fired clay, fibers, and found objects.

Nyasha Chigama
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Nyasha Chigama is a second-year Graduate student from Zimbabwe, she has been creating work at VCU in Richmond for almost two years now. Her body of work involves the use of different types of clay as mediums of expression and research. She explores ideas of transformative labor and reclaims agency by subverting the traditional function and aesthetic of clay vessels.

Fanxi Sun
Photography + Film
Proposal: Consisting of single-channel film projection, multi-channel soundscape, and live performance, my thesis project deconstructs individual cinematic elements and reconstitutes them both on screen and in real-time. It experiments with the concepts of time and space, and investigates the idea of subjective metaphoric reality with bodily movements and interactions. By breaking from the traditional experience of a silver-screen in a black box, this project aims to provide an immersive visual and sonic experience while eliciting the viewers’ active engagement.

Natalia Andrea Mejía Murillo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: The project is based on an investigation and production of astronomical images, mapping, and data. I will materialize the images through the use of digital and analog engraving techniques. The result will be an installation made up of multiple parts: large-format prints, printed on different supports; in addition to pieces in glass and wood. The engraved surfaces (wood. plexiglass) will be printed on supports such as paper, bioplastic and bioceramic.

Kaitlyn Paston
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: My research explores relationships between images and the body through sensory experience, performance, and moving image. I primarily present my work as installations of projection and sound. I begin by filtering ideas through the body with movement, mark-making, and vocalizing, then edit in an ongoing process of collage. The thesis project will bring several image making modes into relationship with one another in an installation to deepen understanding of different languages of images. I am working with 16mm film and cyanotypes to study the literal relationship between light, time and image. I am also researching ways to access embodied knowledge through animation and performance.

Katherine Thompson
Photography + Film
Proposal: Jamaica: REINSTATED” is a visual exploration that connects missing links while finding patterns and parallels within the immigrant family and others. I plan on sparking the conversation of the universal message of a shared interconnectedness with the immigrant experience that potentially could be borderless and blur the lines of what constitutes a dual transnational identity, as well as a social critique of the American and Caribbean (Jamaican) material space.

Ali Kaeini
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: This body of work borrows from Irano-Islamic architecture, decorative arts, and crafts that have been displaced from their origin into the museum context. I use these ornamental objects as an allegory for the displacement experienced by the contemporary Iranian diaspora. I recreate decorative elements such as Persian vases, ancient Persian/Islamic structures, thrones, walls, stairs, windows, and gates by utilizing online museum archives. The silhouette of broken and dusty vases are a metaphor for the displaced body. As a result, the jars and other objects in my works are a symbol of human beings with an identity belonging to the past.

Tendai Mupita
Sculpture + Extended Media
Tendai Mupita is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work includes Sculptures, site specific installations, printmaking, and painting. Mupita’s works explores Shona indigenous philosophy, cosmologies, epistemologies and phenomenology. Tendai is an MFA student in sculpture currently working on bronze and aluminium as his material of interest.

Yameng Wang
Graphic Design
Proposal: My thesis project《讳》will be an immersive video projecting concurrently on two opposing walls. On the first wall, there will be a 3D dancing model, which is expressing how an individual’s spiritual figure struggles with unescapable control and force. On the opposite wall, a huge fractal object will echo the movement of this model. They change drastically and struggle together but finally get a peaceful moment, in the end, returning to a cathartic natural state.

Erin Yerby
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Using photographs as indexical entryways, I meet fugitive sensation and forces of the past emitted through the image. My paintings concern the return of pasts as animate forces haunting the present. Childhood worlds, vernacular and imagined landscapes of the west/Western; the ruins of culture; forces of nature within an apocalyptic now; spectral inheritances of settler colonial history; converging geological, mythical and historical time: all these are subjects of my work.

Samson Stilwell
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Win Conditioned is an exhibition consisting of a pneumatic tube system that shuttles a taxidermied ferret at high speed around a loop. Accompanying the tube system will be a VR video. The video will be a stylized recreation of the end state of Fortnite (an ultra popular battle royale video game). Win Conditioned is an exhibition concerned with the aesthetics of the narcissistic, depressive, self oppressive subject of contemporary capitalism–and asks where, in our ceaseless, solipsistic loop, is love?

Stacy Sabady
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: My work is about experimentation through repetition of construction and pattern. While repetition has made it easier for me to escape into the world of creating, it has taken a toll on my aging body. Ailments have developed that are the natural result of repetitive motion. Of utmost importance in my life is focusing on activities that encourage good physical habits. One needn’t ruin their body to make great work.

Ajana Bradshaw
Art History
When using a visual arts database, the image of a nude Josephine Baker appears with the title “The Black Venus.” After viewing the image, I wondered why the title centralizes Baker’s racial/ethnic identity and how Baker’s portrait was created. Through the research to answer my question, I began to uncover the complex, incomplete, and nuanced story of Josephine Baker as a nude model for Jean-Gabriel Doumergue. This research grant will help aid the in-person research of the socio-political structures surrounding Domergue’s portrait of Josephine Baker.

Sarah Reagan
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Using the language of contemporary architecture and queer theory, my thesis exhibition features site-specific works honoring the extant idealism of the inner child. From childhood, I learned to regulate my response to aggressive behaviors through defense mechanisms: fight, flight, fawn, freeze… and humor. The work expresses simultaneously comical and tragic depictions of hope, hopelessness, and rebellion through inflatables, architectural scale children’s toys, and a space where fear is confronted by fantasy.

Mark Tan
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Object as Atlas is a site-specific installation that relates to my personal migration narrative to the United States. The work expresses the emotional value of preconceived notions, disconnectedness, and longing for place and acceptance within a community. Incorporating memory, personal narrative, emotion, and perception, I manipulate data into lines, forms, and materials through the subjective human experience of a non-citizen.

Bella Kubo
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Salt rejection is a performance and immersive three-channel video and sound installation of archival family films and my own home videos. Through video projection and an immersive soundscape, the audience will reckon with repressed memories, absence, and refuge. Extension from this will include a performance of the voice, contact microphones in relationship with site-specific elemental materials, and the amplification of sound through  cups. This will take place on Governors Island in New York City.

Muthi Reed
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: I shall become a collector of me. And put meat on my soul. says the poet Sonia Sanchez. I will develop a suite of queer bodied attempts at thrive survival methods in critical conversation with social topographies overwhelmed by the collection and inheritance of violent things. A print publication will accompany the embodied work and serve as a companion text of qr coded geo locations, vernacular maps and sonic architectures.

Chad Mundie
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition, Crabapple, is a dive into the collision of flesh, fixture, and the mundane, exploring the connection between the home and the inhabitants within. By allowing these connections and boundaries to blur, forms begin to morph and mutate together. Body and spirit become one with the home and we are audience to all stages of this process.

Megan Ratliff
Media, Art & Text
Proposal: This interdisciplinary research addresses the perceived immateriality of digital data and DNA data storage by way of various chemical-based photographic processes (such as gum bichromate, silver gelatin, carbon printing, inkjet printing) and bringing awareness to the state of data storage. This project serves as a means to situate a creative body of work within this emerging technology, which is still in a state of flux, by undermining the often-arbitrary line dividing analogue and digital photographic technologies. The makeup of these photographic prints will simultaneously embody forgotten processes and materialize ones yet to be seen.

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Rituals Here is a gallery space, a publication, a series of conversations. An ecosystem for my greater communities to be in dialogue about the places/people/networks that provide safety for us. Gathering around a table, in the gallery, the streets, over a meal. How do we grow our utopic spaces? How can we sustain queer communities? How does it feel to read a story that tells your story?

Julliana Bustillo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Childhood Reliquary De Una Catracha Entre Nopales (mexicatracha, catrachamexi) is a sensory based installation consisting of nine large and three small scale mixed media paintings with two performances. It is informed by my upbringing in Boyle Heights in the projects during the 90s, followed by East LA in the mid 2000s. It is the reliquary for my discomfort in institutional spaces and why I have found comfort in dystopian-like installations. This is the landscape in which I exist, regardless of where I am now. It is where I place my work. It is the context in which I celebrate the powerful delicacy of Brown Femininity.

Ekaterina Muromtseva
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: In my work I expand the possibilities of figurative painting and drawing by using documentary elements and performative gestures. This expansion creates an enriched form of visual narrative that introduces an interplay of storytelling elements and static images.

Caroline Minchew
Photography + Film
Proposal: Strange Meeting explores how landscape posits itself as a site for transcending reality. Unearthing becomes an instrument for decomposing pain; the material of mud transforms into eco-poetics, and ephemeral pools become evidence of deep time. My work investigates ecological darkness and the extreme falsehood of untainted, pristine nature, and our collective impulse to “other” nature. Did nature ever really exist?

Michelle Albertson
Photography + Film
Proposal: The Silent Rage of Being Loved is a multimedia site-specific installation working primarily with photography, video, and sculpture. It explores the nuanced ways in which memory, grief, and veneration manifest physically in my life through objects and my body. My proposed thesis installation is intended as a place of refuge for my audience amongst a shrine-like space and for us, collectively, to reexamine and widen the ways in which we experience mourning and grief.

Saar Shemesh
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: The installation is two-fold: an architectural intervention consisting of sloping ramps that line the room, covered in foam tiles that extend past the ramps across the floor. Low platforms present several sculptures made of cast-silicone and epoxy clay, emerging from their flexible molds in configurations that elicit sci-fi visions of alien flora and fauna. The result is a sparse room of forms simultaneously unsettling and inviting.

Dylan Ahern 
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: This is a project proposing a sculptural installation to take place at the Anderson Gallery during the Spring of 2022. It includes several hundred clay monster heads and several gallons of Coca Cola syrup. The work intends to explore the correlation between material excess and psychological depression.

Manal Shoukair
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: My Proposed project is a site specific work installed on the island of Belle Isle Richmond, within the architectural structure of the ODIS (Old Dominion Iron Steel Co) factory Shed. This will be a 24hour immersive installation that is open to the public. This chosen site explores an installation that is sensitive to history, surrounding architecture and encourages viewers to navigate a conscious space of being and reflection of place.

Hannah (HH) Hiaasen
Visual Communications
Proposal: Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. “Spectrum of Shit” is an interdisciplinary installation of an office space interrupted by ruptures of grief.