Undergraduate Research Grants

Performativity vs. Performance: Understanding the Difference in Contemporary Performance Art
The team is researching the inaccessibility of the language surrounding critique and discussion of performance art. The project will culminate with a curated exhibition that conveys the findings of the team’s research and will make available a risograph-printed booklet for free to attendees of the exhibition. The booklet is intended to make this type of contemporary art more accessible and educate audiences about its history.

Award: $650

Stories You Never Told Me
This is a multidisciplinary exhibition that is a continuation of a two-year ongoing body of work that Brienna has been working on for her senior thesis titled “Stories You Never Told Me.” The exhibition will draw from family archive images to create new, untold memories through the combination of text, photography and screen printing. Photographs will be submerged in blackberry preserves, then taken out, creating a layer of crystals on the image after drying. This accumulation of crystals and the residual fruit pulp is a metaphor for the cumulative process of memory. The exhibition will also use AI to produce computer-generated stories based off of a photograph that has been scanned and fed into a machine-learning model.

Award: $747

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Using the contemporary drama, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, as their source material, Drewe will explore how modern society views organized religion and how that view is changed with the casting of diverse actors playing symbolic biblical roles. With the support of VCUarts and the research grant program, Drewe will be able to explore themes, including how to increase diverse representation in theatre, in the setting of a full scale professional theatrical production with a general audience.

Award: $4,000

What Lies in Your Reflection
This will be a publication that explores the severity of lying, its gravity and consequence, and examine the desensitization and normalization of this compulsive behavior in society. This will be produced through numerous in-person interviews, which will generate a significant amount of the publication’s content. This limited-edition publication will display people’s lies adjacent to their underlying truths. It will include both interpersonal and intrapersonal lies, further exploring the psychological, physiological, and moral aspects and implications of lying. This publication will inform readers about their subconscious habits, while simultaneously succoring these individuals to better understand people around them.

Award: $4,000

Three Kilometers East
Film seniors Noah Carpenter, Alli Wilkins, and Victoria Lowry will travel to Northern Sweden to film a 15-20 minute short documentary about one of the largest urban transformations of our time, the relocation of the Arctic city of Kiruna due to land deformation from iron ore extraction on the city’s western border. The team will investigate the “city on the move,” speak with the parties involved, and document the process.

Award: $1,920

Contemporary Asian Ceremonial Vessels
This is will be an interdisciplinary project that explores ideas of Asian representation, dislocation, and racial identity formation. The team will explore traditional Chinese bronze-age piece molding as well as contemporary casting practices to create two vessels. The first, a duplicate of an existing ceremonial vessel from the VMFA collection, and the second, an original collaborative design. The collective of young Asian artists aims to create a connection to their cultural heritage through material, labor and the re-performance of traditional skills.

Award: $2,600

Flight School
Flight School is an animated film about a young demon who wants to apply for admittance into a prestigious flight academy. However, the demon doesn’t have wings so they must figure out how to construct their own prosthetics in order to attend. The film will tell a story of persistence despite disability or social shortfall.

Award: $600

It Came from the Sea
The goal for this project is to create a four to six-minute animated short film that will focus on two LGBT characters, in a setting that melds Scottish folklore with modern fantasy. This film is meant to be entrancing for a diverse audience and show representation for same-sex attraction in a genre where such topics are sparse.

Award: $1,934

Depot Acoustics
This project will solve acoustic problems in the first-floor classroom space at the Depot.

Award: $1,710

The Beast in the Cave
The team will produce a student-led short film, shot digitally, in a Virginian cave. The script is an adapted and modernized version of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, titled The Beast in the Cave. The team aims to gain experience on how to create an independent film.

Award: $4,600

“L’homme avec Deux Chiens”
In this 10-minute short narrative drama, “L’homme avec Deux Chiens” (The Man with Two Dogs), Claude, a 61-year-old retired fisherman with three older children has been recently widowed. Except for his two French bulldogs, Ernest and Otto, Claude now lives alone in a modest New England home. This story follows Claude as he grapples with feelings of grief and loneliness surrounded by his wife Emily’s belongings and memory.

Award: $1,525

James R. Gregory Prize for Creative Entrepreneurship

Accessible “Pop-up” Shop and Reading Room
Responding to the lack of an accessible and permanent space to display and sell student work, the team will develop a highly curated “pop-up” shop and reading room. The shop will feature student zines, posters, art objects, apparel, totes, and other items with potential commercial value. Furnished, merchandised, and run by students, participants will gain real-world skills at the intersection of fine art and retail.

Award: $3,740

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For Mindful Musicians: A 6-Week Guide to Overcoming Negative Self-talk & Performance Anxiety

After their research, this team discerned that the majority of music students are struggling with negative self-talk and performance anxiety. How is this affected when students are given tools to develop a harmonious mind-body connection that sticks with them both in the practice room, and on the stage? The planned outcome is to publish two workbooks for young musicians, one for young adults and one for children. The workbooks will focus on the power of the mind, and how our thoughts influence our performance anxiety and self-talk. With this award, they plan to give those in our music community the tools that they need to understand and combat performance anxiety, freeing them from the suffering of an unsound mind. The team will then send workbooks to and present at five colleges and five public schools.

Award- $3,000

Amora Faith Mikell, Music

Julissa Martinez, Music Education 

Faculty Mentor- Dr. Tiffany Valvo, Music

The Lee X

Through the production of a digitally shot documentary film, this team plans to reconstruct the lifespan of the Lee X, an adult cinema in operation from 1965 to 1993 that is now the Grace Street Theatre. This project aims to briefly revive and celebrate the significance of a bygone form of public eroticism, and explore where and how similar phenomena arise in Richmond today. The film will examine the theater’s link to Richmond’s queer history and sexual economy, contextualizing the rise and fall of the Lee X within the history of the sexual revolution, civil rights, gay liberation, the AIDS epidemic, the culture wars and contemporary Neo-conservatism.  

Award- $2,475

Andre Medina, Sculpture

Mish Bendersky, Painting & Printmaking

Alyx Ward, Communication Arts

Faculty Mentor- Dr. Liz Canfield, Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

Ronnie Makes a Rocket

This team plans to create a short film with a unique visual style that can provide working experience to Cinema and associated arts students. By relying heavily on practical special effects such as miniature scale models, rear screen projections, matte paintings, and composited traditional animation, the film will have its own unique look based on choices made by the art department. With the goal of screening this film at festivals and publishing it online, Ronnie Makes a Rocket will be a film about navigating a hostile adult world with the power of make-believe: a positive, hopeful message for a troubled generation in a troubled time.

Award- $3,000

Brandon Langley, Cinema

Carleigh Ross, Communication Arts

Faculty Mentor- Yossera Bouchtia, Cinema

El Eterno Femenino

The proposed project is to create a staged, bilingual production of El Eterno Femenino, Farsa (The Eternal Feminine, Farce) by Mexican playwright Rosario Castellanos, while also researching the background of the various societal and historical forces at play within this work. The intended outcome is a full scale theatrical production, performed in a combination of English and Spanish that explores the themes of feminism, both through our modern lens, as well as through the lens of Mexican history and culture that is presented in the play. The production will be filmed and then distributed to audiences virtually.

Award- $2,950

Casey Clauberg, Theatre and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Luci Harris – International Studies and Foreign Language, minors in Statistics and Political Science

Kylee Márquez-Downie – Theatre 

Faculty Mentor- Bonnie Brady, Theatre

Busker Jones

VCUarts students will create an original short film titled “Busker Jones,” about a deaf, homeless pantomime with a kind heart and passion for silent film who learns that even he deserves love. The creation of this short film will provide VCUarts students with the opportunity to improve their filmmaking skills and other creative goals. Because “Busker Jones” is about an individual who is both deaf and homeless, the team believes that it is their responsibility to increase their understanding of these communities in order to portray them appropriately in the film. So, the students will reach out to deaf organizations and homeless shelters around Richmond during pre-production to learn and volunteer their time to give back to their community. They intend to donate a portion of any profit made from the festival circuit to local non-profit organizations that help these communities.

Award- $3,000

Colton Johnson, Cinema

Jesse Dominguez, Theatre 

Darren Johnson, Theatre 

Autumn Brain, Cinema

Allie Ochsner, Cinema

Sydney Robinson, Fashion Merchandising 

Joseph Puccio, Cinema 

Ronaldo Antezana, Cinema 

Rachel Benfield, Cinema 

Kenneth (Foster) Mellott, Cinema 

Aerin Fortes, Cinema

Paul Nolan, Cinema 

Phillip Martter, Cinema 

Lindsey Paulette, Cinema

Jake Bruno, Cinema

Jaden Lips, Undeclared

Faculty Mentors- Yossera Bouchtia, Cinema 

Daniel Caporaletti, Cinema 

The Penelopiad

Continuing their research on using theatrical performance to integrate sociological research into an accessible format for audiences, this team will develop a multidisciplinary approach to the creative process. The group’s main goals are to follow a three-sectioned process modeled off the standard sections of sociological journal articles, produce and stage a socially, scientifically, and artistically relevant show using a mixed-methods and cross-disciplinary approach, and synthesize this process into a sociological journal article, measuring the impact the production had on the actors and audience members.

Award- $ 3,000

Emily Tomasik, Theatre and Sociology

Olivia Knight, Theatre and English

Faculty Mentor- Dr. Jesse Goldstein, Sociology

Games In Light: Public Play
This duo will conduct an investigation into public light and projection as a means of play. The focus of this research will be to produce simple, interactive, and socially distant games that can be played by interacting with the projections. These will also be accessible for users to play online if they wish, allowing for further interactivity and participation. The purpose of this project is to offer a space for safe play within reach of both the public and private. The project will be modular and will move across different areas of Virginia, expanding the audience safely, while exploring the application of this game across divergent areas.

Award- $820

Lawson Cumming, Kinetic Imaging

Abigail Bannon, Sculpture

Wormhole

Interested in subverting forced perceptions and guidelines of gender and breaking from its societal norms, this duo plans to create a space reflective of an obsessive psyche. They will create an installation activated by video and performance art. Documented performances of the two interacting with the sculpture and the projections will be displayed on a monitor opposite of the installation. The video documentation will be turned into three music videos to contextualize the space for the audience, while also archiving the project to exhibit online.

Award- $1,800

Nadine Jambois, Sculpture

Adam Dabbs, Kinetic Imaging

Faculty Mentor- Massa Lemu, Sculpture

Performance Check

Performance Check is a serial livestream performance art piece with an emphasis on the use of cross-disciplinary multimedia. The group will utilize the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, as a framework to test the limits of entertainment and human connection in a digital environment. The team intends to release an episodic video product in two forms: one live-streamed and one with heavy post-production editing. Using a maximalist approach, they will release a series of narrative performances with elements of theatrical design, improv, music, digital media, and illustration, envisioning a holistic, immersive, and experimental experience for the viewer.

Award- $2930

Samuel Wagner, Kinetic Imaging

Tomya Pryor, Theatre

Noah Reynolds, Communication Arts

Sarah St. John, Theatre

John-Henry Holden, Electrical Engineering 

Alex Trouslot, Music Education 

Noah Brown, Communication Arts

Faculty Mentor-Christopher Raintree, Theatre

Southern Daze

A team of VCUarts Cinema students will create a 12 minute short film. The film deals with themes of healing and frustration as two young black women reckon with their harmful, yet beautiful environment. It expresses the perspective of many southerners, growing up around statues, plantations, and fields, and the histories that these hold.

Award- $1,798 

Syd Scott, Cinema

Christian Heiche, Cinema

Aerin Fortes, Cinema

Leilani Curran, Cinema

Gigi Jacobsen, Cinema

Joshua Arroyo, Cinema 

Bryce Pride, Cinema

Amaya Fuentes, Cinema

Faculty Mentor- Yossera Bouchtia, Cinema

Antiquity Scrolls

Using traditional printmaking and textile techniques in unconventional ways, this duo will re-depict classic myths with contemporary relevance. The finished work will consist of three scrolls, telling the stories of Narcissus, Icarus, and Persephone. In re-telling these stories through the language of abstracted imagery and symbolism, they hope to create a visual embodiment of persistence. The team will use printmaking, sculpture and craft to combine techniques and materials which are not typically brought together or have not been brought together in this particular way.

Award- $1,549

Alexandra Mihalski, Craft, minor in Painting + Printmaking 

Peter Skudlarek, Sculpture

Faculty Mentor- Hillary Fayle, Craft

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Noises Off

This group of Theatre Performance majors plans to produce 6 shows of the comedic farce Noises Off. They want to truly research how comedy is used in everyday life. Therefore they came up with fundraising plans that will investigate comedic coping while also raising money for the show, such as pieing, a stand-up comedy night, a scavenger hunt and an awkward family photo contest. 

Award- $3000

Caroline Mae Woodson, double major in Theatre Performance and Psychology, Creative Writing minor

Sam Heller

Love, Mai

By researching and learning more about Buddhism and Vietnamese culture, this team will create a short film entitled Love, Mai, complete with a screenplay and all elements of pre and post production in filmmaking. This project will help VCU students of differing backgrounds and interests collaborate on ideas of motherhood, sisterhood, and grief. In creating and distributing this film, they hope it will challenge and affect people’s views of Asian-Americans. A main goal of this project is to give more humanity to Asian lives and to depict them as full, fleshed out characters. They want to push forward a new narrative of the diasporic experience and show Asian lives through a different lens, a main character lens.

Award- $2,950

Danielle Phan, Cinema

Aerin Fortes, English and Cinema

Ashley-Nicole Meadows, Cinema

Michael Nolan, Cinema

Camden Walent, Cinema

Shawn Bond, Cinema

Cheryl Anne Fries, Cinema

Alexiana James, Dance and Cinema

Hannah Cantrell, Cinema

Stephen Ingram, Cinema

Amani Hagmagid, Cinema

Terre Nguyen, Cinema

Jordyn Roberts, Mass Communications

Colton Johnson, Cinema

Alex Bagoly, Cinema

Faculty Mentor- J. M. Tyree

One Wing

One Wing is a short film revolving around feelings of grief, isolation, and new beginnings. It focuses on the specific period of grief that occurs before the loved one being mourned has passed away. The intended outcome of the project is to exhibit a strong father-daughter relationship in film and to display the pain and resilience required in the face of terminal illness and new beginnings. 

Award- $1,550

Gillian L Moses, Cinema

Rachel Christina, Cinema and Mass Communication

Brianna Singleton, Cinema

Carlos Chavez, Cinema

Madeline Wade, Cinema

Noah Vickers, English

Stuart Smith, Cinema 

Faculty Mentor- Danny Caporaletti

“Chữ và Lời” (Letter and Word)

Society is created and bonded through the way Vietnamese address each other using “tiếng Việt.” Drilling into this aspect, as an interdisciplinary collective of Vietnamese artists, this team is fascinated to research the nuanced and complicated connection that “tiếng Việt” brought up among Vietnamese-Americans on America’s soil. Together as inheritors of such a rich language, they aspire to preserve the Vietnamese’s handwritten script, its traditional folklore and to create a connection to our culture and its people through the project by creating a kinetic sculpture that involves Vietnamese text, wood, sedge mats and traditional bamboo weaving technique.

Award- $2,850

Hien Nguyen, Sculpture, Art History minor and Craft minor 

Quynh Nguyen, Graphic Design

Faculty Mentor- Anthony Nguyen

Eden, North Carolina

In 1967, the three small towns of Draper, Spray, and Leaksville, N.C, were merged into one and optimistically named Eden. The town is representative of the American Dream- an “Eden” belonging to hard-working Americans. However, in the wake of corporate restructuring, it has become much less of a paradise than the name suggests.  With this grant the team will be able to create a comprehensive collection of portraits of the town and its residents compiled into a book, of which a copy will be donated to the Eden Public Library. They also plan to give back to the Eden community by hosting free photography workshops for children to expand and inspire their creativity.

Award- $3,000

Kayleigh MacDonald, Photography + Film 

Elise Wojtowicz: Photography + Film and Art Education

Faculty Mentor- Mark Boulos

Stress and Strain

Stress and strain as well as tension and compression are terms with a specific engineering meaning that are also used in social context. These concepts unite on a physical and cellular level as well as on a larger social and psychological level. Making physical and biological ideas more approachable in an artistic format is important to this team. The overall outcome of this piece is to create a visual and sound piece that explores the patterns and relationships that form in non-Newtonian fluids. They hope to offer more sensory experiences than in a typical gallery setting, with interactive visual, tactile, and auditory pieces and works that connect people.

Award- $2,150

Niki Jiang, Sculpture and Craft minor

AV, Biomedical Engineering major and Math minor, who also studies Product

Innovation with the da Vinci center

Sustainable Production Methods

As a duo, this team is interested in creating sustainable products through alternative means of production. Previously, they conducted research and collected information on how to create paper using recycled materials and inks using plants, fruits, and vegetables as a way to make art sustainably. They aim to create various products that include but are not limited to: posters/flyers, books, zines, stationery, and sculptures using their made materials. Their intended outcome is an exhibition showing a collection of varying production methods and ideas that culminate into an array of sustainable products and environmentally conscious practices. This team plans to make an additional manifesto of their findings that will be created and published for the exhibition that people can take with them, made through their sustainable production methods.

Award- $606.48

Shayla Pham, Graphic Design and Painting & Printmaking minor

Wes Ramsey, Graphic Design

Faculty Mentor- Brooke Inman

PHYSARUM

Physarum will be an artist book focused on slime mold, fractals, and community care. They plan to draw on disabled and queer practices of found family and mutual aid to create a manifesto of interdependence as survival strategy. The artist book will also serve as a toolkit, offering cards to guide and inspire discussions around reciprocity and care in relationships and instructions to use them, encouraging the reader to create their own community ecosystem.

Award- $1,428

Syd Lewin, Sculpture and Extended Media

Faculty Mentor- Emily Sara

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