Announcing Our Fall 2024 DE & Certificate Cohort
We are thrilled to welcome this Fall's graduate cohort – an amazing group of interdisciplinary scholars from Architecture, Comparative Literature, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Environmental Design, Ethnic Studies, Hispanic Languages and Literature, Music, and Rhetoric!
Designated Emphasis
Hila Mor
Hila Mor is a researcher, designer, and artist pursuing her Ph.D. at the Hybrid Ecologies Lab in EECS. Her work centers on Human-Computer Interaction and the design of interactive computational materials, specifically low-power sensors and displays that leverage material dynamics in novel ways. Hila’s research explores new forms of interaction and human augmentation through programmable materials, with a focus on democratizing these technologies to make them accessible to diverse communities.
She holds a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she was part of the Tangible Media Group, and a B.Des Cum Laude in Product Design from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Lydia Millhon
Lydia Millhon is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literature at UC Berkeley. She completed her M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and received her B.A. with Honors in Spanish at Wake Forest University. Interested in the poetry and visual arts of mid-twentieth-century Cuba and Brazil, Lydia studies concrete art as a vehicle for transnational discourses of modernity, race, identity, and cultural production. A fervent period of global modernization, the decade of the 1950s marks her area of focus with concrete practices catalyzing sonic, semantic, and visual experimentations that employ early manifestations of new media. Her research analyzes the role of media in connecting diasporic communities across the Transatlantic and exchanges of politics, art, and representation.
Paz Regueiro
Paz Regueiro is a writer, filmmaker, and first-year PhD student in the Comparative Literature department. Broadly, their work strives to locate and promote technologies of embodiment which offer dissenting alternatives to technocratic capitalism, colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy. They completed a feature documentary, My Body is a Paradise (2022), about trans individuals in the Metro Detroit area and their relationships to sex, love, and pleasure. Their thesis, “On Advocating Cannibalism and Eating Shit”, explores the subversive capacity of the “queer monster” trope in horror media through the oeuvre of filmmaker John Waters. Their current research seeks to address how real-world changes in body-altering technologies alter cultural representations of sex and pleasure in erotic narrative media across the American continent. Before coming to Berkeley, they completed their undergraduate studies in English and Film, Television, and Media (FTVM) at the University of Michigan.
Tianyu Zou
Tianyu Zou is a composer, sound artist, video art practitioner and music theater creator. He has received education of music composition theory and practices from Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing), Hochschule für Künste Bern and University of California Berkeley.
Tianyu Zou's artistic practice weaves together composition, visual art, and audio-visual synchronization, exploring global social grievances, political maltreatment, voiceless invisible vulnerable groups, and our relationship with technology. He integrates pop culture and noise music with a personalized aesthetic, extending his language. Additionally, his practice ranges from the instrumental to the electro-acoustic, audiovisual and theatrical fields. He has been awarded several grants from Nicati de-Luze foundation (Scholarship 2022-2023), Ernst von Siemens Grants and Nadia Boulanger foundation of Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau (fellowship 2019). In recent years, his music has been programmed at festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Crossroads/ Liminal (AT), Musikfestival Bern(CH), MIXTUR (SP), Kalvfestivalen (SE), New Music Week Rome 2019 (ITA), outHear New music week (GR) and Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau (FR). He has been invited by the Festival Rümlingen to participate as an artist-in-residence in 2023 and composer-in-residence of Visby International Centre (Sweden) in 2025.
Zina Wang
Zina Wang is a PhD student in Rhetoric. Her research revolves around the history of digital media, East Asian visual culture, and postwar French philosophy. Her current work explores Information Fever, a paradigmatic approach to technology as images of excess during the season of Maoism and booming of semiconductor production in Cold War East Asia. She studied medieval Buddhist art and quantitative economics at UChicago, and is currently on the editorial board of the journal Qui Parle.
Certificate
Irene Franco Rubio
Irene Franco Rubio is a scholar-activist, writer, organizer, and first-generation PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research investigates intersectional coalition building and cross-cultural solidarity within multi-racial social movements, with a focus on how and why coalitions emerge and sustain themselves amid the challenges of movement siloing. Irene’s work examines the role of the state in perpetuating racialized violence, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia, as well as the historical and contemporary conditions that necessitate multi-racial solidarity.
Irene uses participatory action research and critical ethnography to engage community members as co-researchers. Her research has been informed by archival studies of historical coalitions such as the Black Panther Party’s Rainbow Coalition and the Brown Berets, alongside contemporary movements in the American Southwest, where the border shapes racial and ethnic identities.
Irene aims to leverage digital tools and storytelling platforms to amplify her community-engaged scholarship. Her community projects, including the #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast and collaborations with Detention Watch Network through #UnbuildWalls, explore the intersections of digital media, abolitionist frameworks, and grassroots community organizing. Irene is committed to making critical scholarship accessible and fostering multi-racial solidarity in pursuit of collective liberation, aiming to challenge systemic inequalities and state-sanctioned violence.
عمر محمد Omar Mohammad
عمر محمد Omar Mohammad is a designer working with Afghan & Islamic architecture, visual/material cultures, and technology. This work manifests itself through practice and theory; outputs such as archives, graphics, exhibitions, publications, objects, and software build relationships to define historical pasts and speculative futures. He teaches design at the California College of the Arts, designed at cultural institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and studied design at UC Davis. He is currently a graduate student at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.
Yichen Li
Yichen is a student in the M.Arch (Master of Architecture) professional program. They are interested in new media, queerness, architecture of disability, autistic space(s), and Troy and Abed's apartment from the show Community. They have a BA in art and art history.
Yixin Xiong
Yixin Xiong is a Master's student in Architecture with a background in Environmental Design and Interior Design. Her research interests focus on exploring the boundary between architectural space and human behavior, including user experience and human motion. She has experience as an architectural designer and interior designer, with a passion for integrating new media into architecture, particularly in interactive space design and VR/XR environments.Yixin is committed to using design as a tool for positive change, addressing social and environmental challenges through innovative solutions.