News/Research

Announcing the Fall 2020 DE & Graduate Certificate Cohort

12 Nov, 2020

Announcing the Fall 2020 DE & Graduate Certificate Cohort

Image credit: Jaclyn Tobia, detail of video stills from "Island Economy" (2020)

We are thrilled to welcome this Fall’s graduate cohort – a stellar group of interdisciplinary scholars from Architecture, EECS, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Film & New Media, the French Department, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies!

Designated Emphasis

Alexis Stanley

Alexis Stanley is a third-year Ph.D. student in the French Department. Alexis’s doctoral research engages with French Enlightenment discourse through the triple lens of literary studies, new media studies, and performance studies. Her dissertation uses the notion of “gesture” as a type of new media in the early modern period that unsettles the boundaries between word and sign, work and performance, referential and non-referential content, and reality and representation. Her work seeks to reconceptualize the historicized notion of New Media by attempting to come to terms with certain historical, artistic, political, and philosophical evolutions in the Occidental conception of the gestural body as a sort of signifying “machine”—a medium that has been systematically programmed to denote a range of aesthetic and political concepts about our common humanity.

Matthew Jamison

Matthew Jamison is a second-year Ph.D. student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. He is interested in the performance of identities in digital cruising cultures, the performativity of data, algorithmic biases, the surveillance of queer bodies and bodies with HIV on cruising technologies, and how these everyday digital phenomena play out against the backdrop of representations of gayness on commercial stages in the United States -- including the connection between Broadway theater and digital cruising cultures. His goal is to interrogate, in collaboration with other men who occupy digital cruising spaces and theater artists who tell stories about sex between men, the ways in which current cruising technologies and depictions of gay men foreclose pleasurable anti-racist and anti-sexist encounters and the ways in which they may broaden our horizons for ethical sex and sexualities as well as technologies.

Lani Alden

Lani Alden is a second-year Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages & Cultures focusing on texts and media related to Japanese kabuki theatre from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. Lani’s anticipated dissertation research explores the development of the figure of the onnagata (the “sexually male” performer of “female roles”) alongside the introduction of new media forms during the late Edo (1600-1868) and early Meiji (1868-1912)/Taishō (1912-1926) periods. Lani is especially interested in the ways in which existing modes of cross-gendered life or living survive or evolve in the presence of the development of new media forms and technologies such as photography, newspapers, or the fan-driven theatre journal.

Jaclyn Zhou

Jaclyn Zhou is a second-year Ph.D. student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. They are interested in intersections across racialization, tourism, and digital imaging technologies. Jaclyn plans to study the ways that the demands of racial capitalism determine touristic representations of particular minority communities and how digital technologies participate in and complicate those representations. In their capacity as a Graduate Student Researcher, Jaclyn has worked on projects including the alpha60 metadata tagging project and planning next semester’s Fandom + Piracy mini-series, an online conference by BCNM.

Caleb Murray-Bozeman

Caleb Murray-Bozeman is pursuing a PhD in Film & Media. He is interested in the politics of spectatorship and the ways in which spectatorial relations have been reconfigured by digital technologies. In his dissertation, he plans to trace the concept of participation from the Frankfurt School to the militant cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s and through to the technologies and practices of Web 2.0, where the term has been associated with an interactivity. Recently, he began writing about Cuba’s paquete, an offline digital distribution network developed in response to low internet connectivity on the island. His writing argues that the paquete enables users to rework the content they access, and that its partially non-nodal structure evades the techniques of surveillance and targeted advertising associated with the attention economy.

Masters’ Certificate

Abby Yue Gao

Abby Yue Gao is an interdisciplinary designer interested in architecture and human-centered design. Born and raised in China, she received her Bachelor of Architecture degree at Tianjin University in China before starting her Master of Architecture Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her spatial experiences of visiting different places during her exchange program in Barcelona and her academic exploration in users’ interpretation of the space brought her to the journey of multidisciplinary exploration related to architecture. As an undergraduate, she worked on an AR-applied historical preservation and rehabilitation project as her graduate project, which received high honors in China and guided her to new adventures in design innovation. During the pandemic, she is exploring launching a startup with a group of Berkeley graduate students, called Nimble Spaces, which aims to connect local communities small and big. Combining her background in architecture and enthusiasm for design innovation, she aims to create useful and delightful experiences through design that can make a difference in people's everyday life.

Edgar Fabián Frías

Edgar Fabián Frías is a first year student in the MFA Art Practice program and has an extensive history of working with New Media. In their practice, they have incorporated different forms of media and technology, from GIFs to digitally produced music, the geo mapping of projected images onto public sculptures, video & image manipulation, and the creation of installations that incorporate these mediums and other emergent technologies. Edgar has recently been learning how to code in the class Electro-Crafting with Instructor Chris Kubick and has been building animations, video games, and sound synthesizers and samplers. Next semester, Edgar will work with Farley Gwazada at the University’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery to create an installation that will incorporate sculpture, GIFs, printed textiles, video work, sound, and interactive online elements.

Deanna Gelosi

Deanna Gelosi is a first year Masters’ student in Computer Science with research interests in Human-Computer Interaction. She is also a Museum Educator with the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium. One strand of Deanna’s work is called computational tinkering, an approach that applies computational thinking towards physical making. Deanna sees code as another material in making, and seeks out hardware and software that facilitates playful and varied results.

Jaclyn Tobia

Jaclyn Tobia is in her second year of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the College of Environmental Design. Her background and interests span all aspects of design, from interior design to graphic arts. She is particularly invested in Landscape Architecture because of the inherent cross disciplinary nature of the profession, the inseparable inclusion of earth sciences, biology, and socio-political topics. Last summer, Jaclyn researched a historical case study on the cuneiform Map of the City of Nippur from 1,400 B.C. She is currently the 2020-21 ATC Liaison role at BCNM.

Philippe Li

Philippe Li is in his second year of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the College of Environmental Design. As an undergraduate at Beijing Forestry University, Philippe joined a student group called the New Media Center at the School of Landscape Architecture and has been pursuing new media alongside architecture ever since. Philippe is interested in computer science, data science and product design, and the multiple applications of design in digital interfaces.