News/Research

Announcing our 2016 Graduates

19 May, 2016

Announcing our 2016 Graduates

The BCNM is excited to share the myriad accomplishments of our graduate students who this year received their Ph.D.s and Masters diplomas. We're sad to bid them farewell, but look forward to following their success in their new endeavors!

Designated Emphasis

Kiera Chase

Kiera Chase (School of Education) explores how tools and technologies that are used in education to support learning (specifically algebra) with an emphasis on discovery-based approaches. Using a design-based research approach, she explores alternative approaches to introducing learners to important aspects of algebraic cognition. Her dissertation focuses on how technology-based learning activities can facilitate emergent algebraic understanding that is subjectively transparent, and proposes a new pedagogical approach called reverse scaffolding. At the BCNM Kiera consulted on the Turing Test Tournament chatbot for the On The Same Page program, bringing her expertise in student learning to this online forum. She was also the recipient of summer research funding to design a discovery-based app to engage students in algebraic modeling. Kiera will continue her work at ConnectEd California, a non-profit organization that supports schools districts to design and implement integrated curriculum using the Linked Learning pathway model, with an emphasis on Deeper Learning. She will specifically focus on developing capacity-building models for professional development for teachers and administrators. In addition, she will be designing and developing blended professional development opportunities that leverage the power of technology to engage learners and provide rich adult learning experiences.

Sivan Eldar

Sivan Eldar (Music) has accepted a post-doctorate residency at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in Paris, France. IRCAM is one of the world’s largest public research centers dedicated to both musical expression and scientific research. Associated with Centre Pompidou, under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, IRCAM is a unique location where artistic sensibilities collide with scientific and technological innovation. Sivan is a composer who uses instrumental, electronic, and found sounds to create compositions for live concerts, dance, theater, and gallery spaces. Sivan has been the recipient of awards from the Fullbright Foundation, ASCAP, the Hearst Foundation, the European Broadcasting Union, the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, the J. Dorfman Composition Competition, the Nicola di Lorenzo Composition Competition, and the Ladd Prize. Sivan has worked with many leading ensembles, including the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony, the International Ensemble Modern Academy, the Divertimento Ensemble, and Ensemble Mise-en.

Ashley Ferro-Murray

Ashley Ferro-Murray (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) has accepted the position of Curator of Theater/Dance at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and will begin this exciting position in June. EMPAC, located in Troy, New York, hosts artists and researchers to produce and present new work that combines arts, sciences, and technologies. Four venues and studios allow audiences, artists, and researchers to inquire, experiment, develop, and experience the ever-changing relationship between ourselves, technology, and the worlds we create around us. At UC Berkeley, Ashley investigated the intersections between movement, digital culture, and interactive technology, making her the perfect candidate for this position. At the BCNM, Ashley conducted extensive research on online education and arts, for which she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning dissertation research grant. The research led to an online course entitled American Cybercultures and original choreography titled MOOCing?. The BCNM was proud to support her latest solo Through Practice this past semester, with an undergraduate research assistant. For the last four months Ashley has also been working at the public arts organization Creative Time in New York City where she conducted curatorial research as the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Time Global Fellow.

Christopher Goetz

This coming year, Christopher Goetz (Film and Media Studies) will be an Assistant Professor of Film Studies and New Media in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, where he will teach Introduction to Film Studies, as well as a senior seminar on videogames and cinema. The Department of Cinematic Arts provides students with the critical tools necessary for the theoretical and historical analysis of cinema as well as the creative skills required for the production of film, video, and digital media. At UC Berkeley, Chris has been a driving force behind the Queerness and Games Conference, an annual, community-oriented, nationally-recognized event dedicated to exploring the intersection of LGBTQ issues and videogames, and the Queerness and Games Design Workshop, an artistic and interactive program in which undergraduates engage with LGBT issues in the production of digital interactive games.

Sooyeon (Rosie) Han

Sooyeon (Rosie) Han (Architecture) studies New Media Urbanism, the cross-disciplinary approach to the theory of architecture, urban design and information communication technology. New Media Urbanism attempts to examine new sites of urban techno-social engagement, derived from the emergence of social, spatial and temporal reconfigurations of the lived urban experience in an increasingly digitally mediated city. In addition to exploring the physical and social stimuli discussed in and by other urbanisms, it new media urbanism also takes into account digital stimuli. No longer does a city change only through physical interaction, face-to-face social life, and economic exchange. Physical and social aspects of cities are being reconfigured in the new media paradigm on the shoulders of advances in ICT.

Susannah Hays

Susannah Hays (Interdisciplinary Studies) is an experimental photographer, book artist, and educator, who reveals essential systems connecting our universe. Susannah’s doctoral thesis, Nature as Discourse: A Co-evolutionary Systems Approach to Art and Environmental Design, argues that Transdisciplinarity, an international education movement exploring pathways to a coherent epistemology beyond all disciplines, cannot become a sustaining vital force in human development without implementing co-evolutionary phylogentic principles of human-brain and autonomic nervous system functioning. Only then can individuals experientially evolve to the levels of reality the “Moral Charter” entails. Susannah served on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute’s photography program from 2002-2012, and received a two-year grant from the University of California at Berkeley to complete her doctoral research. She taught abroad at the Shenkar College of Art and Design in Ramat Gan Israel and Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg, Germany, during 2013-2014, and received a fellowship at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy.

Caitlin Marshall

After filing her dissertation this August, Caitlin Marshall (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies) will be headed to the University of Maryland where she will begin a 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellowship in Theatre and Performance Studies. There, she will transform her dissertation, " 'Power in the Tongue': Staging American Voice" into a monograph on race, disability, and what it meant to "sound American" during the nation's first independent century, and how American citizenship was established as an exclusionary vocal limit in the antebellum era. At UC Berkeley, Caitlin has also fostered her own artistic practice. Recent acting and directing projects include “Dear Love,” a short film, and Kid Simple: a radio play in the flesh. Caitlin has co-led VoxTAP, the Voice Studies Working Group, with Robbie Beahrs since 2009.

Danielle Svehla Christianson

Observing tree seedlings and measuring the physical environment in Sequoia National Park, Danielle Svehla Christianson (Energy and Resources Group) addresses ecological questions around microclimate: how vegetation responds to it; how it may occur in a warmer future; and how it scales up to climate represented at coarser spatial and temporal scales that are commonly used in models. Since one of the issues in understanding phenomena is seeing, Danielle explores new ways of demystifying complexity through visual representation, as shown through her innovative co-authored field guide to the plants occurring in the major Southern Californian watershed, “Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs.” Danielle continues to investigate visual communication, seeking new techniques to illustrate often-forgotten, yet fundamental dependencies between human society and the natural world — such as terrestrial laser scanning (LIDAR), which she used to create a 3D model of her ecological study site in the Sierra Nevada.

Certificate

Lark Buckingham

Lark Buckingham (Art Practice) is a filmmaker, performance artist, and critical designer. Using humor within a critical queer framework, Lark tackles subjects as diverse as privacy of health data, compulsory engagement with social media, and sexual violence culture. Some of Lark’s projects the BCNM has been thrilled to support include Everything After, an ongoing art installation and community organizing platform, which held an important Survivors symposium on the topic of sexual violence at UC Berkeley; and Babump, a business card holder that displays health data from compatible heart monitors to track employees’ cardiovascular system in real time, calling into question our reliance on wearables.

Clement Hil Goldberg

Clement Hil Goldberg (Art Practice) is a hybrid artist primarily working in film, sculpture, and animation to cultivate a fabulous extinction aesthetic. Clement recently created the stop motion animated web series The Deer Inbetween and produced the 20-filmmaker collaborative experimental feature film Valencia, which won Jury Awards for Best Experimental Feature at the Polari Film Festival and Best Narrative Feature at Chicago Reeling in 2013. Clement’s current and ongoing project Our Future Ends is an iterative stop motion animated and cinematic sculptural installation work that connects the near extinct lemur primates of Madagascar to an imagined queer prehistory set in the mythical land of Lemuria. The latest iteration of Our Future Ends will be exhibited in the Berkeley Art Museum in the UC Berkeley Art Practice MFA show opening July 1st.

Baxter Smith

Baxter Smith (College of Environmental Design) plans to pursue the fruitful crossover of architecture and new media through an extension of his architectural thesis titled, Fluid Structures. He plans to extend his research, which focuses on 3D printing and parametric design, into the built environment to produce new methods of producing habitable forms. These methods utilize the ability to print water soluble filament in order to create hollow and lightweight concrete forms, as well as forms that are impossible to realize without a 5-axis CNC mill. These forms can aggregate to create a larger structure or can work as single structure, and could also be used to create floating environments. Once cured, the formwork on these structures would dissolve in a water environment. All of these experiments help test the ability for the built environment to extend from the ground plane to the water plane. While at UC Berkeley, Baxter was a member of the winning UC Berkeley team that submitted Nest We Grow to LIXIL’s 4th Annual International University Architecture Competition, which capitalizes on the natural beauty of Taiki-cho in Hokkaido through the creation of a space that draws visitors by appealing to all five senses. Baxter and his group were responsible for building out the project at Memu Meadows, which was completed in November 2014.