Congratulating Our Spring 2023 Graduates
Congratulations to our Spring 2023 BCNM graduates! We are sad to say farewell to these amazing graduate students who have played crucial roles within BCNM life. But we’re so proud of their accomplishments here at Cal and can’t wait to see all the incredible scholarly work they produce in the future.
Designated Emphasis
Harry Burson
Harry Burson is graduating with a PhD in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. He works in the areas of digital media, sound studies, and film and media theory. His dissertation, "The World in Stereo: A Genealogy of Immersive Media," examines the development of digital media through the methods of sound studies, arguing that listening cultures have shaped both our understanding of and embodied relationship to networked technologies. At Berkeley, he co-organized the conferences Medium/Environment and High/Low: Taste, Quality, and Resolution in Film and Media. He also was an organizer of the Unintelligible: Noise Against Capture Conference at UC Santa Cruz as a founding member of the University of California Humanities Research Institute “Critical Research in Sound Studies” Working Group. He coordinated the Townsend Center working groups on Sound Studies and Film at Berkeley. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Lemelson Center of Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the Baird Society, The Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Jessica Adams-Grigorieff
Jessica Adams-Grigorieff is graduating with a Ph.D. in Education and a Designated Emphasis in New Media Studies. Her dissertation, “Grounded critical digital literacies: Youth countering algorithmic and platform power in school and everyday life,” is one of few studies to empirically explore how youth are shaped by and shape educational platforms and social media algorithms in and beyond school. This dissertation work was funded by the Soroptimist Foundation and University-Community Links Network. Jessica has served as a graduate student representative on the UC Berkeley Student Technology Council and won the UC Berkeley Outstanding GSI award in 2021. She has published her research in the E-Learning and Digital Media journal and an edited volume and she has presented over 20 academic talks at conferences like the American Education Research Association and the Literacy Research Association.
Ryan Ikeda
Ryan Ikeda graduates with a PhD in Rhetoric and a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Ryan has served as a research fellow for BCNM and has been the recipient of both summer and conference grants while part of the program. His article "Excavating Logics of White Supremacy in Electronic Literature: Antiracism as Infrastructural Critique" was published by the Electronic Book Review. His research is located at the intersection of poetics and pedagogy and examines how institutions, infrastructure, and groups construct race through policies, cultural practices, circulations of value, policies, and artifacts.
Xiaowei Wang
Xiaowei Wang is graduating with a PhD in Geography and a Designated Emphasis in New Media. In Fall 2023, they will join the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice as a postdoctoral fellow. Their dissertation, "Caring at the End of the World: Inscriptions of race, place and space in the electronic health record," looks at the centrality of place based struggles in the long history of digitization within healthcare systems, and the ways technology has shifted an ethics of care more broadly. Xiaowei was a winner of the National Book Award's Science and Literature category for their work Blockchain Chicken Farm. Xiaowei was also a founder and is a current co-leader of Logic Magazine.
Certificate
Calvin Lee
Calvin is graduating with his Masters of Information Management and Systems from the School of Information, with an emphasis on user experience and user interface design. After graduating, he will return to designing in the technology sector. Calvin was previously a design creative at Apple, IBM, and Linkedin, solving challenging design problems.
Chrisper Liu
Chrisper Liu is graduating with a Master of Architecture and a certificate in New Media. Fascinated by the intersection of architectural design and new media technology, he has explored this connection through various experiences, including working as a product manager for a project that combined NFT and real estate that sought to leverage new media to create engaging and interactive experiences. His background in architecture has given him a solid foundation in design theory, allowing him to explore how new media can enhance traditional design practices. He believes that new media offers architects new avenues to create engaging, interactive, and dynamic spaces. He is grateful to have the opportunity to participate in the New Media Certificate program which enables him to deepen his understanding and develop innovative, socially responsible approaches to new media and architecture.
Dahan Xiong
Dahan is an architectural designer who has always paid attention to the different backgrounds and identities of people and their stories. From Architectural Silent Propaganda to New media, he believes the intersection of disciplines' designings may lead to a solid impact on people's recognition of different cultural backgrounds. Previous projects include "Dam Good", a proposal to preserve cities and identities of Three Gorges Immigrants from the construction of Three Gorges Dam, "The Silent Majority" which celebrates traditional activity while recognizing the cultural consumption involved, the interface of the Chinatown Community App about its history and better business connection for a stronger community. Dahan is graduating with a Master's in Architecture and a Certificate in New Media from Berkeley.
Eli Pleaner
Eli is graduating with a Masters in Education in Learning Sciences and Human Development. His studies are at the intersection of embodied cognition, material-engagement theory, phenomenology, and queer sense-making. During his Master's degree, Eli explored the role of tactility in learning and the synaesthetic nature of meaning-making in classrooms. Eli also collaborated with the Berkeley Center for New Music to create large-scale, immersive and interactive audiovisual installations, with an emphasis on full-body collaborative instrumentation. Eli is working with the Embodied Design Research Laboratory and the CHROME Lab in Saint Louis University to explore ways of creating accessible tangible user interfaces for amorphous haptic engagement in learning contexts. Eli is deeply grateful for the wonderful opportunities to collaborate and be supported in many ways over these last two years.
Fei Pan
Fei Pan is graduating with an MFA in Research based interdisciplinary art practice from the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, along with a graduate Certificate in New Media from BCNM. Fei Pan works interdisciplinarily and interdimensionally, moving across painting and new media. Rooted in nature as the original pivot of truth, knowing and the spiritual space, her work focuses on the contemporary built landscape that is mediated through cultural and technological interfaces. Her recent works, Garden of Forking Paths (2022 - ongoing) painting series and its live screening Wandering in the Garden (collaborative) explore the perceptual relationships between virtuality and reality of generative landscapes and systems from different positions and perspectives temporally and spatially, will be shown on BAMPFA. She has both education backgrounds in Science of Engineering and Fine Art in Painting, as well as multicultural living experiences of the Eastern and the Western. Her works have been exhibited globally in countries such as the United States, China, Singapore, Germany, and Turkey. She received the Berkeley Center for New Media Summer 2022 Research Fellowship.
Gareen Puglia
Gareen is graduating with a Masters in Information Management and Systems from the School of Information. At Berkeley, she was interested in exploring the intersection of technology and storytelling with her studies— this brought her to the Berkeley Center for New Media, where she earned a Graduate Certificate in New Media. While at Berkeley, Gareen reimagined the digital borders of Armenia, analyzed the ethics of data collection in war, and worked to use data to visualize the Housing Crisis. She is extremely thankful for BCNM, where she combined her love of narrative and her academic pursuit to make information digestible with technology. She is also thankful to her family and friends for always being there for her- she could not have gotten this degree without them.
Pratiti Ketoki
Pratiti will be graduating with a MA in Asian Studies with a Graduate Certificate in New Media and Urban Humanities. Pratiti's research at the Masters level focused on urbanity, media and contemporary Calcutta. Pratiti's master’s thesis titled, Ghost(s) of Calcutta: Undead, Requiem and Beyond, has been supported by the BCNM Conference Grants. It was also supported by the CCI Rapid Response Grant and SERC ECO Fund. Pratiti is also a GSI for Reading and Composition, primarily focused on South Asia. As a teaching model, Pratiti has developed a new media project titled, India as a Multi-Lingual Space. Pratiti has also extensively worked on the French Comic Tintin, resulting in a conference paper at the British French Studies Association Post Graduate Conference. Pratiti will be pursuing a PhD in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Pratiti will primarily be working with popular scientific writing, contemporary media and detective narratives in Bengal.
Rebecca Levitan
Rebecca Levitan will graduate in Summer 2023 with a PhD in History of Art and a certificate in New Media. Her research is object-focused and interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of Art History and Classical Archaeology and employing tools from the Digital Humanities. Her work focuses on the creation and display of ancient sculptures and the legacy of these monuments in Europe and the United States. Her dissertation,The Pasquino Group: Sculpture, Conversation, and Resistance from Ancient Greece to Renaissance Rome, constitutes one such effort to situate an ancient monument within a larger social history. Alongside dissertation research, Levitan maintained an active role in archaeological fieldwork in Greece and Italy, with further research in Turkey and Jordan. She was also highly involved with Digital Humanities initiatives, both at Berkeley and internationally, and helped to coordinate a BCNM/DH symposium on New Technology and Archaeology in 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (2018-19), American School of Classical Studies in (2019-20), the American Academy in Rome in (2020-21), and the British School in Rome in (2023).
Tiare Ribeaux
Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka Maoli filmmaker and artist. Her artwork and films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds - creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. Her films use visual narrative and components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, lineage, place and belonging. She integrates immersion within community, ancestral/personal narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her films. She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Sundance Native Lab Fellowship, Indigenous Film Fund, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the NEA, among others.
Ziyu Song
Ziyu is set to graduate with a Master of Architecture degree and a Graduate Certificate in New Media, specializing in HCI in physical space and Design Justice. Throughout his master's program, Ziyu conducted research projects on topics such as accessibility to new technologies, improving authenticity in the Tinder community, and the application of digital technologies in spaces that interact with visually impaired individuals. He also collaborated with the UC Berkeley Student Information System to enhance the accessibility of the Berkeley SIS website and CalCentral. In addition, Ziyu actively engaged in design practice with external organizations, with a specific focus on design justice and climate change. After graduation, he is passionate about pursuing a career as a product designer, leveraging his interdisciplinary design knowledge to further improve design justice.
Ziyuan Ling
Rita Ling is a highly accomplished graduate with a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture, whose passion for design has led her to develop a keen interest in UI/UX design. She has honed her skills in crafting beautiful and functional spaces that seamlessly integrate with the urban environment. Her unique perspective on the interplay between form and function, gained from her background in landscape and urban design, enables her to create user-friendly and intuitive digital products that are aesthetically pleasing and functional. With her expertise, Rita brings a fresh and innovative approach to the challenges of UI/UX and product design.