Announcing Our 2021 DE & Certificate Cohort
Art by Xincun Du.
We are thrilled to welcome this Fall's graduate cohort – an amazing group of interdisciplinary scholars from Architecture, Art Practice, City Planning, Computer Science, Education, Ethnic Studies, Design, Landscape Architecture, and Public Policy!
Designated Emphasis
John Kim
John Kim is a first year doctoral student in special education in the Graduate School of Education. John has a background as a speech pathologist and is interested in language acquisition for individuals who employ augmentative and alternative communication systems. Specifically, John hopes to bridge the gap between core language and narrative discourse. At BCNM, John hopes to train in user interface development and the interaction of technology that creates access for individuals with disabilities to have a voice. John intentds to combine embodied design with new media to create access to language acquisition for individuals with significant disabilities.
Eric Rawn
Eric Rawn is a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate in Eric Paulos' Hybrid Ecologies Lab. Eric is a digital artist whose research in Human-Computer Interaction centers on using the computer as a creative material to develop novel tools and theoretical frameworks for design. Eric's previous work has explored techniques for laser cutting lighting gels, enabling experimental lighting designers to prototype complex filters and lighting effects within a studio, gallery, or performance space. Currently, Eric is working on a version control tool which supports artists in the highly iterative exploratory process of making digital arrt with code. As a joint practice with tool building, Eric is tracing the intellectual history of human computer interaction. Eric received an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, working under Jingyi Li, a former BCNM Certificate student!
Aneliza Ruiz
Aneliza Ruiz is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies. Aneliza's previous research on women in artistic and political communities and professional experience in the entertainment industry have helped foster her passion for community building and storytelling through digital media. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and archivist/oral historian for the Chicana por mi Raza digital archive, Aneliza's research experience has centered around interdisciplinary scholarship and creative use of technology. Specifically, Aneliza's Mellon Project on Latina artists in Los Angeles sought to identify and evaluate the different digital methods such as photography, film, and social media that women use to document their communities. Aneliza's current research project focuses on “bad” Mexican American women. Aneliza studies how nonconformist women in Mexican-American communities perform identity through style, art, and iconography and how those visual schemas get reproduced, archived, and valorized through different forms of media. This interdisciplinary study will allow for a better understanding of Mexican American women’s mobilization of style and visual culture for political purposes and document a history of gendered resistance within Chicanx communities.
Graduate Certificate
Amanda Barnett
Amanda Barnett is a dual graduate student in City Planning and Landscape Architecture, investigating how governance can shape decisions around infrastructure and design. Amanda hopes to explore how generative participation in design processes of the urban environment can be enhanced through technology, and seeks to use interdisciplinary methods of analysis, representation, and data collection. Amanda received a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Resource Engineering from Syracuse University and previously served as a Consultant Water Engineer and Civil Engineer.
Jingyi Chen
Jingyi Chen is a Landscape Architecture graduate student, interested in human centered design. Jingyi has taken numerous new media courses, including courses focusing on Interface Aesthetics, Product Design, and User INterface Design. Previous projects include working with ImmigrantHelp to revise their products and optimize their user experience, working as a UX & UI design intern at VMLY&R Ford China, and designing prototypes to reduce food waste.
Salih Berk Dincer
Salih Berk Dincer is a Masters in Design student at UC Berkeley, and an artist and engineer from Nigde, Turkey, who bridges the gap between engineering, media, and visual arts. Salih Berk is interested in Digital Media, Interaction Experience Design, Tangible User Interfaces, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics, Wearables, and Bioinspired Design. Salih Berk received his Bachelors degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Koc University. He is the head designer in a US startup Vagon.io, which provides high-performance computers that work on the cloud. He has served as a tutor and GSI for numerous Berkeley design and prototyping courses. Previous projects include developing an Arm-Worn device and interactive device to enhance the RPG experience, and a smart bottle to motivate people to drink more water, and a wrist band to prevent sports injuries.
Xincun Du
Xincun Du is a Masters candidate in Landscape Architecture, who has been immersed in new media. Xincun participated in a project to popularize plants with VR technology and to showcase the scenery of Siheyuan through VR 360-degree panoramic displays. Xincun designed an app combining artificial intelligence and VR interactice technology to provide insight into leaf color and growth states of plants. Xincun has won numerous landscape design competitions and has already grounded this work in the theory of new media through NWMEDIA 200.
Wei Hu
Wei Hu is a Masters of Architecture candidate with a Bachelor of Architecture from Tianjin Chengjian University in China. Wei has interned at several architectural studios and is interested in using the tools of architecture to address larger societal issues, especially around access for refugees and migrants.
Jessica Kim
Jess Kim is a Masters of Design candidate with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Textile design. Jess is interested in exploring e-textile and wearable electronic design. Jess is interested in AAPI diasporic movement and the translation of multigenerational culture and identity. She is interested in developing textiles as a tangible user interface through which users can recreate, imagine, and dream of connecting to oneself through communal healing and bonding.
Yushu Kong
Yushu Kong is a Masters of Architecture candidate with a Bachelor of Archtiecture from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. Yushu has won numerous architectural design competitions and is interested in using new media technologies to create inclusive public spaces.
Billy Kwok
Billy Kwok is a Masters Candidate in Design, with a an undergraduate education in Computer Engineering and Design. Billy engaged in interdisciplinary projects with a range of media, including 3D printing, Arduino, modeling, and more. Professionally, Billy interned and worked at organizations such as EventX and Uber as a visual designer and software engineer, before taking a position as a software engineering/design associate at J.P. Morgan, working on data visualization and human-AI interactions. Billy is also an open-source contributor in a number of web ecosystem projects on GitHub. Billy is eager to to create projects that provoke critical thinking and foster mutual understanding.
Fei Pan
With undergraduate background in both Science in Engineering and Fine Art, Fei Pan is an MFA candidate in Art Practice. Fei Pan's works includes thought experiments, scientific objects, organic elements, video/ images, text, and drawings in the form of trans-media installation. By providing the methodology of deconstruction and remediation, art provides possibilities of reimagining scientific narratives and methodology from history to the future. Fei deconstructs scientific knowledge, equipment, and methods and re-frames them to create new dialogues between the material language of art and the language of science. The purpose is to build new narratives and new ways of seeing in a contemporary age. Fei is excited about the tension between aesthetics and objectivity generated by the simultaneous participation of art and science. Fei is interested in the agencies and ontology of science and the fundamentals of nature. Such as time, space, maps, light, waves, micro, and macro scales, graphs, models, binary, machines. Fei examine the ways of seeing and epistemologies of the eyes by individuals， such as cartography and archives, fiction and reality, originality and replica, perspective, gravity, time and memory, language. At the same time, Fei feels intimate with non-human agency, such as flowers, plants, grass, stars, clouds, and the sea. Fei believes that in this modern age of rationality and science, the pursuit of natural ontology and its spiritual space is an alternative way of appealing to morality.
Eli Pleaner
Eli Pleaner is a Masters student in the Graduate School of Education. Eli is pursuing the certificate to explore the relationship between human cognition, learning processes and emerging interactive technologies. Eli's research focuses on the role of intuition and pre-rational thought in our sense-making processes, and ways in which we may design educational approaches that support the awareness and expression of these preverbal processes for students, educators, and researchers. As a computer science undergraduate and software developer, Eli integrates technical skills for enacting holistic and humanistic values in a techno-centric world. As a teacher of creative coding, Eli designed and taught a curriculum for middle-schoolers for learning Scratch, a visual programming language, through embodiment and story-telling.
María Francisca Romero Pezoa
Maria Francisca is a Chilean sociologist and Master of Public Affairs student. Maria Francisca worked in Cinéfilos Oficial as an international film and tv critic and as a sustainable consultor with Indigenous Communities in Chile. Her research interests are: How to use media as a tool to include the indigenous people's traditional ecological knowledge and heritage stories in the development of environmental and climate change projects and policies to promote equality and environmental justice. She is also interested in gender and new media.