The Center is thrilled to offer fellowships to members of our UC San Diego community in support of research or production for cinema-related projects. Click the drawers below to learn more about our diverse fellows and how they are putting the fellowship to use.
Graduate Student
Leila Abdelrazaq (b. 1992, Chicago) is an artist, author, and researcher who is currently a Ph.D. student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism + Art Practice at UC San Diego. Her scholarly work explores Arab and Palestinian visual culture and political futurity, especially the role of art in configuring collective imaginaries that reach beyond paradigms of nationalism and political modernity. Leila’s debut graphic novel Baddawi (PM Press, 2015) has been translated into three languages, and her prints, zines, and artist books are housed in public collections including the Arab American National Museum, The Center for Book Arts, and the Special Collections at the Met Museum Watson Library, among others.
Fellowship Project
Spanning four continents and three generations living in exile, "A Disturbed Earth" is a story about imagining and ‘imaging’ a place that no longer exists. Seventy-five years after their family’s village, Safsaf, was destroyed during the Nakba, filmmaker Rihab Charida and graphic novelist Leila Abdelrazaq (Visual Arts PhD student) work together to trace the memories of its scattered survivors, uncovering a story of exile, loss, and the enduring presence of a home that no longer exists. Fellowship funds will support Leila’s visual archival research as she leads the development of animated portions of the film, which will help to imaginatively and speculatively fill gaps in the archive. This includes travel to the Library of Congress, where she will review photographs and collect visual references from historic Palestine.
Graduate Student
Evan Apodaca's practice deconstructs U.S. imperialism and the militarization of Southern California. In video installations like Monumental Interventions he uses facial motion-capture combined with testimony to create an interplay between dream-like illusion and polemic critical attack on the hyper-patriotism of San Diego's social fabric and the region's built environments. Correspondingly, Apodaca assumes the role of historian, reconstructing first-hand accounts of anti-imperialist activism in Southern California.
Apodaca received his Bachelor's of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. His work has shown at Grand Central Art Center (2025); El Paso Museum of Art (2024); Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez (2024); Athenaeum Art Center (2024); the San Diego International Airport (2023); Best Practice Gallery (2020); The New Americans Museum (2017); the Chicano International Film Festival (2017); the Tijuana Film Festival (2017) the PBS Online Film Festival (2016); and the San Diego Latino Film Festival (2016). Apodaca was a recipient of San Diego Commission for Art and Culture’s Far South Border North grant in 2023; a Reclaiming Border Narrative Fellow at the Center For Cultural Power in 2023; a recipient of the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture’s Border Narrative Change Grant in 2021; and a San Diego Foundation Creative Catalyst grant recipient in 2019.
Fellowship Project
"Waiting For Godfrey" reconstructs the trials and tribulations of Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM) a multiracial collective of active-duty marines and civilians who ignited a movement against the military industry from 1969 to 1972. As Apodaca uncovers a series of attempted murders committed against MDM, the story builds an overwhelming amount of evidence against one right-wing vigilante and ex-FBI informant.
Undergraduate Student
Esme Brigham is an undergraduate Media major at UC San Diego. Originally from Santa Cruz and deeply connected to the surf community, she developed a love for capturing moments around her. She is a filmmaker, photographer, and multi-disciplinary artist. During her time at UCSD, Esme has created numerous short films that explore the inner workings of the subconscious mind. Her work is driven by strong visual storytelling, and she continually seeks new perspectives and innovative ways to portray ideas.
Fellowship Project
This fellowship will support the production and distribution of Esme’s Senior Media Thesis, SOLACE, a quiet, intimate short film about isolation, resilience, and the small human moments that help us heal. Set in an empty community pool after hours, it follows Logan, a young man recovering from injury, and Lydia, a pool employee chasing her own dream, whose brief connection becomes a shared moment of stillness and vulnerability.
Faculty
Bernard Brown is an assistant teaching professor of Dance, with an emphasis on Black Dance Aesthetics and Culture in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego, and is a performing artist, choreographer, filmmaker and arts activist working at the crossroads of Blackness, Queerness and belonging. As artistic director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves, a social justice dance theater company, Brown choreographs for stage, specific sites, film, and opera which work has been presented across the globe, including the Centre de Développement Choregraphique La Termitière (Burkina Faso, Africa), The Getty Museum, Seoul International Dance Festival, REDCAT, Royce Hall, Dance Camera Istanbul, Dance Camera West, American Dance Festival’s ADF Movies by Movers, Oscar-qualifying African Diaspora Cinema Festival (Florence, IT), across Japan, India, and Spain, among others. Commissions and residencies include institutions such as The Music Center, Dance Italia, The Wende Museum, the City of Los Angeles, danceBox (Kobe, Japan), Santa Monica Symphony, South Chicago Dance Theatre, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and PST.ART, a Getty Initiative, and more. A first generation college graduate, Brown earned his BFA in Dance from Purchase College and an MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Brown is a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique instructor, a California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow, and was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times has called him “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”
Fellowship Project
The Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts Fellowship will allow me and my collaborators to build an archive of time capsule style interviews of notable and everyday icons of Black Queer Los Angeles. These poetic short films will serve as a legacy for queers of tomorrow, and will be part of a public exhibition at Pieter Performance Space alongside portraiture, devised installations, live DJing and live dance performance.
Undergraduate Student
Cameron Cao is an undergrad fourth year honors Communications and Marketing student at Elenor Roosevelt College. She is an aspiring film and creative director, utilizing her skills and knowledge of art, media, culture and fashion in the creation of all her projects. Her work consistently explores themes of nostalgia, self image whilst engaging with complex relationships and deep love for her Vietnamese heritage. She hopes that with her current project "To be a Man" she can shed light on the complexities of her communities multiculturalism and relationship with gender identity and assimilation.
Fellowship Project
"To Be a Man" is a comedic drama short film following Paul Nguyen an angsty teenager with an appetite to prove his worth to his friends, his family, his crush and most importantly himself. Whether or not Paul follows the right advice to get there is to be explored.
Faculty
Ricardo Dominguez was a co-founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (http://critical-art.net/) and of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (https://anthology.rhizome.org/floodnet). With Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, micha cardens, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand created in 2007 the "Transborder Immigrant Tool" - https://tbt.tome.press/ - (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Dominguez is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department. He was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2017-18), a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio Center, Italy) during the summer of (2018), and a UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Fellow with EDT 2.0 (2021). EDT 3.0 was a part of the MexiCali Biennial's "Border Activations" in 2023 and in 2025 with friends produced the ICE Watch System: https://vencino.is His articles and essays can be found at: https://ucsd.academia.edu/RicardoDominguez
Fellowship Project
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin was a photocopy of a photocopy, hurriedly handed to Georges Bataille, theorist and ritualist, in 1940, in secret; stuffed under a floorboard at the Bibliothèque in Paris, where Bataille worked as a librarian. This massive tome-as-collage was an attempt to understand modernity and capitalism by attending to unattended things and almost unusable objects, these wandering writings. The Konvoluts also functions as critical scholarship, a spectralpoetics, and using Super 8 as the key filming method, while also working in collaboration with poet and scholar Dr. Amy Sara Carroll, as well as, un-documentary film maker Césaire Carroll-Dominguez, and my own research in para/Un/normal gestures of the ghostly matters of undead media.
Undergraduate Student
Hannah Gurne is a multi-disciplinary artist with varying works across genres and disciplines. As a double major in Literature/Writing and Theatre, her passion for the intention of words and how that can be conveyed, translated, misinterpreted, and altered, guides all of her artistic endeavors. Many of her works engage in and explore the relationship between the written and performed word, and blend a multitude of crafts, including theatre, poetry, prose, music, and film making. Through her time at UCSD she has found her love of cross-media and cross-department collaboration, often blending her creative stories into performance for stage and screen. Her debut short film CUT! was a product of the Triton Television Internship, and Best Narrative Film at the UCSD Film Festival, and cemented her love of filmmaking and her thirst for creative collaboration.
Fellowship Project
Lasso is a narrative short film, based in and paying homage to the Southwest. Exploring the theme of escapism, Lasso will immerse audiences into the double-edged sword of daydreams, and how a simple coping mechanism can overrun daily functions and inhibit our relationships with each other, and ourselves.
Graduate Student
Tatum Howey is a doctoral candidate whose work circles around questions of visuality and the political implications and potentials of risk. Both their scholarship and practice explore the de-individuation of risk, where risk is understood as the vulnerability of being in relation. In 2021, they graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an M.F.A. in Critical Studies and a specialization in Integrated Media. In the summer of 2022, they were the collections assessment assistant for Vtape, a long-standing video art distributor in Canada. Their in-progress documentary was selected by the Research & Development Lab led by Su Kim at UnionDocs in August of 2022. They have also been afforded opportunities such as attending the 2023 Open City Documentary Festival’s “Another Gaze Critics Workshop” run by Daniella Shreir. In 2024, they were invited to participate in Banff International Curatorial Institute’s Art, Writing, Practice residency with scholars Macarena Gómez-Barris, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and Jack Halberstam. Their work has been featured in Wonder Press, The Capilano Review, Commo Magazine, Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine, Momus, Fieldnotes, and LUX. Their poetry manuscript was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Metatron International Poetry Prize.
Fellowship Project
Support from the SICCA fellowship will help with the production and post-production of “Objects,” a narrative short that meditates not only on mourning and its various valences, but on the difficulty of making sense of someone’s life after death through the objects they left behind. In this short, Howey casts their siblings as themselves, and returns to their father’s home on the six year anniversary of his death, exploring how a filmic lens and loose reenactment can process the unnamable parts of grief in a visual medium.
Faculty
Jackson Kroopf is a filmmaker and educator working across fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms. Their films explore identity formation, place, and the social impact of storytelling. His work blends improvisation, interviews, scripted elements, and archival material, using cinema as a space for relationality, emergence, and reflection. Jackson’s films have screened at BFI London, Clermont-Ferrand, Outfest, and SFFILM, and have been featured by Vimeo Staff Picks, Short of the Week, and broadcast on PBS. His short film NASIR won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC and was distributed by the Los Angeles Times. They have created community-centered nonfiction work as a Sundance Institute/NEH Fellow (Penny, Here; The Arc of Survival), collaborating closely with elders to explore memory, performance and intergenerational storytelling. Jackson has taught filmmaking at USC, Vassar College, and Cal Arts, as well as in youth and community programs across California and New York. Supported by the Sundance Institute, NEH, Mellon, and Getty foundations, Jackson is developing The Arc of Survival and Late Bloom, two hybrid feature projects set in Southern California. He is currently a Lecturer in Cinematic Arts at UC San Diego.
Fellowship Project
The Suraj Israni Fellowship will support production costs for Late Bloom, a coming-of-age short centering two adolescents navigating grief, gender expectations, and cross-racial friendship as they run away into the Los Angeles canyons. Shot on a mix of 16mm and digital, the short serves as a proof-of-concept for a feature in development, with fellowship support also enabling casting outreach and improvisation-based rehearsals with the teen leads.
Undergraduate Student
Vaishnavi Kurupath is an Economics Major, with a minor in Cinematic Arts. She is currently the Director of Staff Development at Triton Television, the only student-run filmmaking organization on campus. In this role, she trains the organization's intern cohorts in the fundamentals of filmmaking and the operation of the studio's equipment. During her time on-campus, Vaishnavi has assisted on numerous student film sets and directed a comedy short of her own, which was selected for the 2025 UC San Diego Film Festival. Vaishnavi's interest lies in using humor as a medium to explore themes of identity, generational conflict, and cultural hybridity across the South Asian diaspora.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship funds will support the production, specifically the art direction and staging, of TAAL, a short dramedy about a young Indian American comedian struggling to relearn an instrument they abandoned in childhood. The project reflects on the dichotomy of the performer’s identity: the tension between appearing palatable to an audience and remaining honest to oneself.
Undergraduate Student
Isabelle Liang is a Cinematic Arts student at UC San Diego. As a writer, director, and actress, her craft moves between production and performance, shaped by her background in writing and literature. She started with screenwriting and now builds her work through the Cinematic Arts major and her experience at the Media Teaching Lab. Her latest show was Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing directed by Shyama Nithiananda, and her most recent film projects were shot on 16mm black and white.
Isabelle crafts stories centered around relationships, exploring the messy but honest coming of age narratives, always with a touch of sarcasm and wit. She loves showing conversation and the dynamics of a relationship through writing and performance. As an Asian American girl, her stories naturally carry a cultural touch. She is drawn to girlhood and to moments that feel nostalgic, frustrating, and precious in the bigger picture of growing up.
Fellowship Project
The Suraj Israni Fellowship will support select scenes captured on 16mm film, covering the cost of film stock, processing, specialized equipment access, cast and crew meals, and transportation for on-location shoots. The project aims to blend the traditional medium of film with fast-moving digital platforms and adapting them for social media. This allows space for experimentation, gives classmates hands-on experience with film, and connects an older format with current media in a way that supports the Center’s values of collaboration, representation, and creative innovation.
Graduate Student
Maya Machado is a PhD candidate in Sociology whose work combines digital ethnographic approaches with traditional sociological methods to examine contemporary social life. Her research centers on the formation of Afro-diasporic identity in Latin America, with a particular focus on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and international migration. These interests ground her dissertation, which explores the evolution of Blackness in Panama and the cultural, political, and historical forces that shape Afro-Panamanian identification today. Before beginning this project, she produced a short ethnographic film documenting the experiences of Panamanians living in Southern California. The film, Panas & Palm Trees, was well received and earned the award for Outstanding Ethnographic Film by a Graduate Student from the African and African American Studies Research Center (AAASRC). She now plans to expand her visual research by creating a feature-length ethnographic film on Afro-Panamanian identity during her upcoming fieldwork, aiming to capture the dynamic and ever-changing nature of Afro-Panamanian culture in Panama.
Fellowship Project
My project is an ethnographic documentary film that explores Afro-Panamanian identity, cultural pride, and community formation through the everyday lives and cultural practices of Panamanians in Panama. Fellowship funds will be used to purchase essential filming equipment, including a documentary-style camera, tripod, and microphone, to support on-the-go fieldwork and high-quality audio-visual recording during production.
Faculty
Lorena Mostajo is a lens-based artist whose recent projects examine the intersections of vernacular and historical photography, national imaginaries, global and local economies, and ecologies across the Americas, with a particular focus on Mexico, the United States, and Bolivia. She is the founder of Taller California, a small press that supports artists and writers in the Tijuana–San Diego region. She has written about photography for the renowned Mexican journal Luna Córnea, as well as for various magazines and newspapers in Mexico. With Mara Fortes, she co-edited Inmemoria, a volume of essays on the French filmmaker Chris Marker, and the first Spanish translation of Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, both published by the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival (Mexico) and the National Film Archive of Mexico. Mostajo earned her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Hispanic American Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will provide support to Dos islas (“Two islands”), an essay film that intertwines the ecologies of two lakes: Lake Texcoco, located in central México, and Lake Titicaca, in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. It explores the tensions among imaginaries, mythologies, time periods, and ecologies by showcasing a chorus of human and non-human voices that will weave a sensory tapestry of the diverse practices and histories within these lacustrine spaces.
Faculty
Joanne Mony Park is a Korean- American writer/ director from Los Angeles. Exploring human connections and hyphenated identities, Mony’s films have screened at Tribeca, Slamdance, Edinburgh, Urbanworld, Frameline, SDAFF, and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival where she won best director for her film, Fish Bones.
She has participated in the AFI Directing Workshop for Women+, Torino Film Lab, Cine Qua Non, CAPE Short Film Competition, and Soo Hugh’s Thousand Miles Project. Mony is currently developing her upcoming feature film with the support of the CJ + TIFF K-Story Mentorship Program and the 2025 Sundance Screenwriting Intensive..
She earned an MFA in Directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BFA from the University of California, San Diego.
Fellowship Project
The Windiest Day is a narrative feature film centered on two Korean immigrant women working as surrogate drivers in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Through conversations and interviews with surrogate drivers and other Korean community members across Southern California, this project seeks to authentically represent their lived experiences and illuminate a world rarely portrayed on screen. The fellowship will support this outreach and on the ground research, allowing these stories to meaningfully inform the emotional, cultural, and visual texture of the film.
Graduate Student
Sarah Rose is an artist-geographer focused on how knowledge production systems shape understandings of climate proxies. She engages the archive, histories of extraction, and imaging technologies to explore the gaps where abiotic and biotic materials resist clear categorization. Rose’s work has been exhibited at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; Filter Space, Chicago; Weinberg/Newton, Chicago; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago; SITE Galleries, Chicago; and the University of New Mexico Sevilleta Field Station, La Joya. Rose holds a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Anthropocene Studies with distinction from the University of Cambridge’s department of geography and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) with distinction from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she served as a Presidential Scholar. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Art Practice concentration and the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research (PIER) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.
Fellowship Project
This fellowship will help advance an exploration of the transportation, storage, and analysis of physical materials that capture past climates, like ice or sediment, that are originally from Antarctica but are now stored in research facilities across the United States. The conditions surrounding these materials, from the hum of the cryostorage rooms to the buzz of the bandsaw, will be captured in an experimental film.
Undergraduate Student
Veronica Springer is a Cinematic Arts Major and CASP scholar here at UCSD. She has loved the world of film since she was a little girl. From fantasy worlds to powerful documentaries, film is a powerful tool that has helped many around the world. Veronica grew up here in San Diego (Chula Vista specifically), but her mother is from Santiago, Chile, and grew up during the Pinochet dictatorship, a nearly 17-year reign. It has now been over 35 years since the end of the reign, but the effects of Pinochet’s regime can still be seen today. Notably, Chile’s incoming president, José Kast, is one of the first since Pinochet’s reign ended to outwardly support the former dictator. José Kast has also aligned himself with Donald Trump, and some have called him ‘Chile’s Trump’. Veronica plans on talking with people on both sides to understand and explore the effects and lasting impacts of Pinochet on Chile and the United States’ influence on it.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will help fund film and travel expenses in Chile and the gear provided will help push my project to the next level cinematically. I plan on shooting for 2-3 weeks in Chile, primarily in Santiago, and plan on shooting some scenes in 16mm and 8mm.
Graduate Student
Michelle Sui is an artist, composer, and director. Their work exists at the intersection of film, opera, dance, theater, installation, oral histories and new technologies and draws upon the body and voice in relation to cinematic icons, language in translation, and the dislocations and reconstitutions of memory.
Their films, experimental operas, site-responsive performances, dance scores and immersive multimedia compositions have been presented across the United States and internationally since 2014.
Past performance venues and residencies include Museum of Contemporary Art, LA Music Center, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Chinese American Museum, Walker Art Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Rubin Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, BAM, La MaMa Umbria International (Spoleto, IT), and Cité internationale des arts (Paris, FR).
Michelle is a member of the inaugural 2024-2025 Public Artists in Development (PAiD) Artist Council, a group of 8 artists selected by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture to develop recommendations to improve public policy. In Aug 2024, LA County commissioned the artist to create a public artwork in the historic building Pico House in downtown Los Angeles inspired by Anna May Wong’s legacy.
They hold a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts with further studies at Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Michelle is a programmer at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, presented by Pacific Arts Movement.
Fellowship Project
Seaweeds is a new film by Michelle Sui inspired by the 1922 silent film The Toll of the Sea, in which twentieth century Hollywood icon Anna May Wong played her first leading role. In this “remake” of the film’s ending scene, actors audition for Anna May Wong, who herself runs off to Paris and Tijuana to pursue her on-again, off-again girlfriend. The SICCA fellowship will help fund a portion of production and post-production costs for this project, and fellowship equipment will be used for the next round of filming.
Undergraduate Student
Arnold Villagrana is an undergraduate filmmaker majoring in Visual Arts Media with a minor in ICAM at UC San Diego. As of January 2026, he serves as a senior producer at Triton Television, UCSD’s student-run film studio, where he has gained hands-on experience working on projects such as "Killjoy", "Rumination", and the UCSD Film Festival 2025 narrative winner Cut! He also won the "Manny Farber Termite" award for his documentary "517 Movies". He is particularly interested in telling impactful stories through short films, crafting narratives that immerse audiences and invite emotional connection.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will support the production and distribution of "Make It Count", a mixed-media short film that blends live-action and animation through a buddy-cop comedy. The short follows a college student who unexpectedly reunites with his childhood imaginary friend, pulling them both into a case that challenges their understanding of growing up. Through its comedy, it explores themes of family, mental health, and the balance between maturity and keeping one’s inner child.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Sophia Cleary is an interdisciplinary artist focused on performance and liveness. Making her work through the lens of the fool, or trickster, Sophia uses play as a method and critical position to engage her audience in a system where power dynamics necessarily shift. Sophia has presented her work in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in New York City at Danspace Project, The Kitchen, and the Center for Performance Research, and in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, MoCA, REDCAT, and Human Resources Gallery. She is the founder and coordinator of works-in-progress performance series REHEARSAL, where she has advised over 75 performing artists in the development of their work. She holds a BA in Dance and Art History from Marlboro College, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and is currently working toward her MFA in Visual Arts at University of California San Diego.
Fellowship project
The fellowship will help advance investigation of live performance into the space of camera and screen, discovering how her research lands within this medium and how it is informed by, and impacts the field. She will do this work via her experimental documentary, Are You Having An Intimacy Problem Right Now? (abbreviated title: Intimacy Problem?), that explores power and its shifting permutations, intensities, and trajectories as they manifest between dramatis personae and the people who play them.
FACULTY
Aniket De is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean. His work, broadly speaking, has critically addressed global debates on race, sovereignty, federalism, and border-making from a South Asian and anti-colonial perspective.
De’s first book, The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances across Borders in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), draws on archival research as well as ethnographic fieldwork to study a popular theater form called Gambhira, performed by both Hindus and Muslims in regions of both sides of what is today the India-Bangladesh border. The book, which originated as his undergraduate thesis, analyzes how people on both sides of the border grappled with the trauma of Partition through performances of humor, laughter, and parody, that created what he calls “shared cultural spaces” across borders drawn by the colonial and post-colonial states who governed the region. The book received honorable mention in the American Folklore Society ‘s 2022 Wayland D. Hand Prize for the best book in Folklore and History, was longlisted for the inaugural 2022 Karwaan Prize for the best book in Indian History, and was the basis for a handmade artist book by the visual artist Tammy Nguyen. He is currently working on a film based on this project.
Fellowship Project
This documentary on performances across South Asian borders aims to create a visual and sonic journey through popular performances in one of the most militarized borderlands in the world. Moving beyond the conventional textual modes of scholarly production, I aim to explore the performance tradition known as Gambhira, performed by Hindu and Muslim peasants in present-day India and Bangladesh.This will be captured via audio-visual documentation, which pays attention to the perception of social life, makes it possible to explore new social and political meanings of performances.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Lennon Lilienthal-Wynn is a Visual Arts Major. He is the current Project Manager at UC San Diego's student run film production studio - Triton Television. His films have screened at UC San Diego, UCLA, and De Anza Film Festivals. Lennon is interested in creating films that have a strong social/political standpoint.
Fellowship Project
Support from the fellowship will help finance the production and distribution of his upcoming feature-length comedy/mystery film which follows two private detectives investigating a string of disappearances surrounding a young and erratic billionaire. Filmmaking has always been an important vessel for projecting political commentary and this film will explore the corrupt American ideology of excess wealth through a witty and entertaining mystery.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Alexander Lowe is a student filmmaker pursuing a degree in Media under the Department of Visual Arts. During his time at UC San Diego, he has worked extensively on several award-winning student productions, including UC San Diego Film Festival winners "Heimlich" (2022) and "O's" (2023), as well as the Suraj Israni Fellowship projects "Monique" (2023) and "Another College Musical" (2023). In 2022, Alexander became the Director of Staff Development of Triton Television, teaching filmmaking to the organization's intern cohorts. As of 2024, he is the Co-Station Manager of Triton Television and Co-Director of the 2025 UC San Diego Film Festival. His work is characterized by a tendency towards the absurd, relishing any opportunity to flip the most mundane of scenes of human interaction on their head.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will finance the production of Alexander's Senior Media Honors Thesis, with funds allocated in particular to set design and equipment. This narrative short film explores the clash of self-assertion against nature versus nurture as they uncover the interplay between external and self-validation.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Wentao Ma (He/Him) is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at the Department of Literature, UC San Diego. His research interest lies in the theory and culture of care in media practices. Wentao’s scholarly writing and translation have been published in several journals, such as Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Contemporary Cinema. In addition to his academic career, he is dedicated to film curation and has worked at San Diego Asian Film Festival and CineCina Film Festival in New York.
Fellowship Project
This project theorizes the term "media care" which explores the culture of care in media practices, including VR therapy, food porn, sleeping cinema and white noise app. Under "media care," care as a form of relationality contains a double bind of being healing and therapeutic, yet at the same time, violent and coercive. This project merges ethnographic research with analysis of media content and industry data, resulting in a written dissertation, a short video essay, and a podcast that prolongs the Media Care events SICCA hosted in the year of 2022-2023.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Myles Ortiz-Green is a multidisciplinary artist, pianist and composer and explores the ideas of interconnectedness, digital identity, decadence, and the “in-between” in their work. As a pianist with a background in classical and jazz studies, they combine analogue and digital electronics and improvisation to manipulate samples and field recordings. A native of Los Angeles, they’ve been able to collaborate on a variety of films, multimedia projects, and installations. In 2020 Myles was a part of the "Inaugural Black Future Creator Program" that was created by Beats by Dre. This program has led them to collaborate with film directors from many HBCU’s in the states. Green’s film scores have received nominations and have been included in notable events such as the Atlanta Horror Film Festival, San Francisco Short Festival, Black Truth Film Festival, Black Film & TV Collective Selection, Launderthestars, Cult Critic Movie Awards, and the 28th Annual DGA Student Film Award. Myles holds a BA in music from Tulane University, and is an alumnus of the prestigious POSSE scholarship program. Currently they are pursuing their PhD in Computer Music at University of California San Diego.
Fellowship Project
Myles Ortiz-Green (Music PhD student) and Kai Tattersall (Filmmaker/Animator) are collaborating on Insular/Mango, a 40-minute mixed-media animated film exploring themes of heritage, diaspora, and cultural identity. Set in Neo-Los Angeles, the story juxtaposes the fantastical elements of a children's tale with the quiet realities of observational cinema, centering on a mythical, unreachable island as a metaphor for lost connection to one's roots. Combining live-action performances and hand-crafted animated backdrops, Insular/Mango highlights Puerto Rican postcolonial experiences and resilience, drawing on agroecological movements as a framework. Fellowship funds will support film production, including equipment, actor compensation, and immersive storytelling at UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Blake Riesenfeld is a Visual Arts - Media major with a minor in Communication. Based in Philadelphia and La Jolla, his recent photographic and video practices explore constructed landscapes through layered imagery. As a Film Festival Coordinator at TTV, he is adept at culling various ideas into a cohesive deliverable. His work has been exhibited at the Adam D. Kamil Gallery during the 2024 Adam D. Kamil Media Awards and in a fall 2024 solo exhibition. Additionally, in 2024, he screened his video works at the UC San Diego Film Festival, the UC San Diego Art Joy Festival, the UNPOP Film Festival, and the Magikal Charm Experimental Video & Film Fest. As of January 2025, he received the Best Experimental Award at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship funds will support the production of an 8mm experimental short documenting the closure of Gillian's Wonderland Pier in Ocean City, New Jersey, and its implications for local infrastructure in a shore town.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Joe Riley is an artist and historian pursuing a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism (Art Practice Concentration) and the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research (PIER) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His writing, grounded in archival research and fieldwork, focuses on the hydro-politics of knowledge, inclusion, and documentation in the ocean sciences, the commodification of ocean life forms such as kelp, the design and engineering of seacraft, and histories of maritime social practices. Joe’s artwork and collaborations with Audrey Snyder and the collective Futurefarmers have been exhibited at venues including Getty Pacific Standard Time, Clockshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artes Mundi 7, and Sharjah Biennale 13. He has been a fellow with the UC Humanities Research Institute, UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics, TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Joe holds a BFA from Cooper Union and has taught at UC San Diego, CalState San Marcos, The Cooper Union School of Art, and Stevens Institute of Technology.
Fellowship Project
He will use fellowship support from the Suraj Israni Center to create an essay film tracking the course of an offshore oceanographic cruise in the Pacific Ocean. The project explores the everyday practices and instruments of doing scientific research at sea and attends to the overlooked/unseen operations of a “research vessel.”
GRADUATE STUDENT
Erika is a dancer and experimental video artist currently living on earth. Their work deals with how we inhabit, move through, form, and (re)(con)figure bodies: physical bodies, bodies of a place, bodies of language, and relational bodies. They have presented and performed works at Saint Louis Art Museum, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (Saint Louis), LAKE Studios (Berlin), Bread + Salt (San Diego), and Project Blank (San Diego), among others.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will support the research and production of "DILATIONS," an experimental movement-based 16mm film that explores material (dis)integration and erosion through bodily relationships to geologic and oceanic formations. This is part of a long-term body of work that explores the ways in which materials for documenting and archiving movement — specifically, celluloid film — are (also) bodies of dance and movement.
FACULTY
Jorge Sánchez Cruz is assistant professor in the Department of Literature specializing in 19th to 21st century Latin American literature, culture, and thought, with an emphasis on Mexico. As a scholar of queer, trans*Decolonial studies, they have been exploring how queer and Indigenous experimental art and film rethink questions of race, gender, nation, and canonicity. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, ASAP/Journal, and other venues. They are co-editor of Teoría Queer/Cuir en México (Editorial Signos, 2024) and translator of Néstor Perlongher’s The Specter of AIDS (forthcoming with Punctum Books, 2025).
Fellowship Project
The Fellowship will facilitate a visit to film archives in Berlin, materials and resources for “Queer Latin American Cinema” (Winter 2025), attendance to the San Diego Latino Film Festival with students from “Queer Latin American Cinema,” and research support for an article on Mexican queer experimental film creator Teo Hernández.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Hande Sever is a writer and research-based artist whose work explores the excavation of lost texts and distant images, examining how their production and dissemination inform historical revisionism and shape archival practices. Grounded in theories of sovereignty and necropolitics, Sever's research interrogates the ways in which historical narratives are shaped and manipulated, particularly in the context of military violence, surveillance, and censorship. Often drawing from her own family’s history of persecution, her lens-based practice explores the intersection of personal and collective memory, uncovering how visual culture is used to both erase and construct historical narratives. Sever’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Hauser & Wirth in Somerset (2018); Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna (2021); Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin (2025); Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam (2025); Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Seoul (2021); REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (2025) and the Wende Museum of the Cold War (2025) in Los Angeles, among others. Sever’s work has been supported by grants from the Félix González-Torres Foundation, California Arts Council, Eidolon Center for Everyday Photography, Allianz Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Hrant Dink Foundation.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will help to cover post-production costs of a video essay examining German imperialism in West Asia during World War I through the lens of a vernacular photo album entitled Meine Liebe Pauline.
FACULTY
Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer exploring poetic intersections of human and machine perception, particularly how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, ISEA, NeurIPS, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and HP. Twomey received his BS from Yale with majors in Art and Biomedical Engineering, his MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, and his Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Experimental Media from the University of Washington. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Computing in the Arts and an Applied Imagination Faculty with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. For more: roberttwomey.com | cohab-lab.net
Fellowship Project
This fellowship would support the production of an experimental video piece pushing the limits of computationally-authored cinema, anchored in machine observation of the everyday. The combines robotic imaging platforms, spatial imaging approaches such as Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splats, and AI-driven computer vision and image classification techniques. It explores the ambiguities of author, audience, and message arising in the complex interaction between algorithmic imaging systems and the real, lived contexts we situate them in. In doing so, it questions the human-centeredness of algorithmic cinema—given the autonomy of AI agents together with the inescapability of the human in the loop—asking who creates the resulting film.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Colby Vasquez is a Theater major with a Business minor at the University of California, San Diego, and a Regents Scholarship recipient. Drawing on his experiences as an actor, playwright, and director, Colby’s work delves into themes of vulnerability, humor, and human connection. His senior thesis, Tender Love & Care, is a heartfelt comedy inspired by personal experiences and his relationship with his partner. The project centers on Calvin, a picky eater navigating the challenges of a first date with a daring foodie, blending wit, relatability, and introspection. This production showcases Colby’s commitment to authentic storytelling and collaborative artistry. Support from the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts will allow Colby to expand his theatrical vision into a short film format, utilizing UC San Diego’s cinematic resources to create an engaging and visually dynamic work. He is eager to share this project with the broader artistic community as part of the fellowship forum.
Fellowship Project
Tender Love & Care is a comedic script exploring the awkward yet charming dynamics of a first date between Calvin, a picky eater, and Lena, a daring foodie. This original story delves into themes of vulnerability, humor, and connection, drawing inspiration from personal experiences. With the support of the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts Fellowship, this unperformed script will be brought to life as a short film. The fellowship will provide essential funding and professional-grade equipment to transform this written work into a visually compelling and relatable cinematic experience.
FACULTY
Meg Wesling is Associate Professor of US Literatures at UC San Diego, and an affiliate of the Critical Gender Studies Program. She is past faculty director of UC Education Abroad Program in France (2013-2015). She earned her doctorate from Cornell University (English) and her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University (French and Women’s Studies). She is the past recipient of a year-long faculty fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and of the Hellman and other faculty research fellowships at UC San Diego. Professor Wesling’s monograph, Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and US Imperialism in the Philippines, was published by NYU Press in 2011. She is also the author of numerous essays on American literature, sexuality studies, and feminist theory, published in American Quarterly, MELUS, Mosaic, GLQ, American Literature, and Feminist Review, among others.
Fellowship Project
The fellowship will help cover participation in a feminist film festival that highlights connections between US, French, and Francophone radical feminist work.
FACULTY
Amy Adler works across the disciplines of drawing, performance, photography, and film. Her practice explores media and process considering subjects that exist between paradigms and identities. Born and raised in New York City, Amy is a graduate of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. She attended Cooper Union and went on to receive her MFA in art practice from UCLA and film production from USC School of Cinematic Arts. She has had multiple international and national gallery and museum exhibitions including solo projects at MOCA Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Her drawings, films and photographs are included in permanent collections worldwide. Her short films have screened at international film festivals including Frameline, Outfest, and BFI Flare. Amy Adler is a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The fellowship will help to cover travel expenses for the production of a short documentary film titled “Rad Dolls,” which will be filmed in the city of Puebla, Mexico.
FACULTY
Mysia Anderson is assistant professor of Black Performance Theory in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Dr. Anderson is from Miami, Florida. She earned her Ph.D. from Brown University’s Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department and BA from Stanford University’s African and African American Studies program. Her work engages the fields of Black feminisms, Black Studies, Black Performance Theory, and Environmental Humanities, and draws upon critical ethnography, embodied practice, and archival methodologies.
The fellowship will allow her participation in the 2024 American Black Film Festival, a pivotal event for both academic and artistic development. Supported by major entities, the festival not only showcases the talents of Black filmmakers but also raises questions about local representation and the broader impacts of media portrayal.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Ruhail Andrabi is currently a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation examines the Islamic revival movements in South Asia, and how these movements have responded to secular empires in the aftermath of decolonization. His genealogical approach excavates the unique orientation of vernacular imagination, largely shaped by Islamic traditions that problematized secularism and its false promise of liberation in the post colonial states such as Kashmir. He connects these conversations at the intersection of Anthropology of Religion, Political theory and Intellectual History.
He is going to use this fellowship to reconceptualize the “time-space problem" by identifying, and collecting the ignored digital archives that have animated a distinct political imagination against India's secular empire in Kashmir.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Jamil G. Baldwin was raised in and has worked across the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. Baldwin’s work is an inquiry into the limits of the ability of the photograph to function as a force of liberation. The work asks audiences to practice gestures of reorientation, as a means of cultivating a constellation of practices that construct a value system. His images have been exhibited at the Sculpture Center, PioneerWorks, Webber Gallery, Belfast Photo Festival, Lagos Photo Festival, and included in Cultured Mag, Aperture, New York Times, Matte Editions, JRNL, and Callaloo.
He will use this fellowship to create a short, animated scene as part of a larger, long-term multimedia project.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Maddie Butler is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker. Across disciplines, her work explores how digital technology alters human conceptions of the self and the other. Her primary subject is the mediation of everyday experience – by screen, by psyche or by spirit. Butler received a BA in Sculpture from Yale University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Her work has been shown at the CICA Experimental Film Festival (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), Bread & Salt (San Diego), PAPA Projects (St. Paul), Artscape (Baltimore) and the Satellite Art Show (Miami).
Funds from the SICCA Fellowship will support the production of her first narrative short.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
James DeLisio is a Cognitive Science major with minors in Film Studies, and Digital Video & Film Production. He is a co-director of the UCSD Film Festival at Triton Television, and is interested in creating documentaries and essay films that explore the intersections between the ecological and the humanistic. His films have screened at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, the Adam D. Kamil Media Awards, and the UCSD Film Festival. His academic publications on transnational cinema and embodiment in film have been featured in Sight & Sound’s “Best Video Essays of 2023” list, and presented at workshops and conferences at UC San Diego, and Leibniz University Hannover.
The fellowship will support the production and distribution of his forthcoming film, which will examine the California Spiny Lobster through a series of disparate contexts. Situated within the tradition of observational documentary, the film seeks to question the dynamics of observation and subjecthood in nature documentaries.
FACULTY
Assistant Professor of Film and Media, Global South and Cultural Studies, Silpa Mukherjee received a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.Phil. in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research and teaching interests include feminist historiography, informal media industries, media beyond legality, South Asian cinema, South Asian media culture in diaspora, and South by South networks. She has also written on Bombay cinema’s hypersexualized song-and-dance sequences, popularly known as “item numbers.” Mukherjee has also served as the Assistant Editor of JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2018-2022). As part of the editorial team, she received a Distinguished Service Award from Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2023.
The fellowship will allow her to continue working on her book project “Cinema as Contraband: The Transregional Corridors from Bobay to Dubai (1977-1991).” Support will be used to conduct research and gather raw audio-visual footage for the pre-production stage of a video essay.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Zeke Ramirez is a San Diego based Chicano filmmaker and photographer. Born in Los Angeles, his artwork explores relationships between people, within workplaces, communities, and universities. He has a strong focus on exploring analog film both for motion pictures and stills.
The fellowship will support the production and distribution of a short visual piece, titled “Platoon.”
GRADUATE STUDENT
Nicoletta Vangelisti is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication with a concentration in Critical Gender Studies. Her dissertation research project, entitled “Making at the Margins: Cultural Labor, Value and Social Reproduction in an Alternative Independent Filmmaking Industry,” is a multi-disciplinary approach to naming and exploring the global industry of filmmaking which exists in the fringes of commercial production, supported primarily through philanthropy and community participation. Her study addresses the question of what value is produced by filmmaking labor when the purpose of a film’s production is for the benefit of a community rather than a desire for profit – a question critical to understanding a complex filmmaking history which informs a contemporary practice structured through social marginalization.
Nicoletta is also a film and media producer. The fellowship will allow her to begin production on “Stars of the Northern Sky,” a feature documentary which connects the lives, deeds and work of work of Marie-Joseph Angélique, Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth, women whose histories have managed to resist erasure, to contemporary movements which seeks freedom from incarceration, economic subjugation and cultural appropriation. Additional UC San Diego-based film projects include: “Pandemic Bread” (dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 2023, currently at festivals); “Sydney & Kim” (dir. Hazel Katz, 2024, awaiting premier); “Demsala Nan (the Bread Season)” (dirs. Emeer and Anvar Hassanpour, 2024, awaiting premiere); and “Compensation” (dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, restoration, premiering Oct 2024).
GRADUATE STUDENT
Manuel Carrión Lira (he/they) is a researcher, video-artist and curator from Pikunmapu/Qullasuyu (Quillota, Chile) of Mapuche, Aymara, and Campesino descent, and a Member of the Epupillan (queer/trans) Mapuche community Catrileo+Carrión. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Literature at UC San San Diego. Manuel is part of the Global Center for Advanced Studies Latin America Collective. Manuel’s work focuses on Indigenous Media at the intersection with Trans-indigenous/Transnational kinship networks beyond the nation-state framework, all of this with special attention to queer/trans/2S/epupillan Indigenous cultural production.
The fellowship will help to begin producing the first raw audiovisual materials for a video-essay project delving into the intricate interplay of migration, U.S. imperialism in Chile during the Cold War, and the emergence of migrant indigeneity amidst violence and displacement. After the first audiovisual footage is secured, the editing and post-production process will commence.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Emily Greenberg is a media artist, experimental filmmaker, fiction writer, and current MFA student in UC San Diego’s Department of Visual Arts. Combining both documentary and speculative approaches, Emily’s works often subvert or recontextualize mass media and surveillant imaging technologies to investigate the construction of authority, truth, and transparency. Her work has shown or is forthcoming at Festival ECRÃ, VideoBardo, Magmart Festival, Screener Short Films, Smack Mellon, BRIC, The Knockdown Center, Monticello Park Film Festival, The New Film Underground, and The Comeback Festival.
The fellowship will support production and post-production on two short films, a musician for one film, and software to upscale the resolution of five short films so they are suitable for projection, among other items to stage a series of film screenings in early May 2024.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
FACULTY
Todd A. Henry is Associate Professor of Modern Korean/East Asian History at UC San Diego, where he is also faculty affiliate in Critical Gender Studies, Film Studies, and Science Studies. He is the author of “Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945” (University of California Press, 2014) and “Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950-1980” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). Dr. Henry also edited “Queer Korea” (Duke University Press, 2020), among other publications.
After researching and producing his first documentary “Paradise” (2023; Director: Minki Hong), a 30-minute piece on Seoul’s history of gay theater cruising, Henry is embarking on a new film that examines how André Kim (1935-2010), South Korea’s first male fashion designer, connected disparate ethnic and political communities of the post-1945 world through his unique clothing. It also recounts how social groups in Hawai’i, the place this globetrotting icon visited most during his career, welcomed André to promote the goals of local organizers, especially Asian American women who invited him to Honolulu for nine fashion shows between 1972 and 2006.
The fellowship will support portions of the new film project, specifically related to travel and videographer support for filming in Hawai’i and Los Angeles.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Zakary Hori is a Visual Arts Media Major with a minor in Computer Science. He is a Senior Producer at Triton Television and current Media Director at Musicians' Club of UC San Diego, with experience working on a variety of film and music-related projects. As a passionate storyteller, musician, and filmmaker, his film intends to explore the rapidly changing emotional toll of feeling young, being lost, and dreaming big, from the perspective of a guitarist in a particular rock band.
The fellowship will assist the production of the short film by providing professional industry-standard equipment as well as funding for key actors, locations, and craft services.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Ashley Jones is a Communications major with minors in Political Science and Film Studies. She is an A.S. Senior Project Manager with Triton Television and is interested in digging into the concepts of feminism and genre studies in her work as a student filmmaker.
Support from the fellowship will finance the production of her Senior Communication Honors Thesis project “Here’s What You Missed,” a short film that seeks to bring the idea of the “feminist action genre” to life. This is a concept that she has been researching over the full course of her senior year, and she said she is so thankful to have the support of the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts to pursue it.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
STAFF
Keith Nixon Jr. is a filmmaker passionate about telling stories that explore the diverse spectrum of Black cultural identity. He is deeply inspired by his upbringing in a large, southern Black family. His childhood encounters with cinema unknowingly fueled a dedication to visual storytelling. His work revolves around the intersection of visual storytelling, design thinking, and cultural specificity. He is interested in crafting narratives that intentionally humanize marginalized groups by focusing on seemingly mundane, yet universal, moments and emotions. It is through these narratives that he aims to shed light on underrepresented voices.
Keith holds a degree from Old Dominion University where he developed a self-directed curriculum in Industrial Design. After working as a Technical Specialist in the energy industry, he shifted his focus to his creative inclinations. His affinity for the visual image led him to Howard University's Film MFA program where he fully committed to discovering his creative voice. Keith is a recent graduate of the American Film Institute where he completed his Master’s of Fine Arts in Cinematography. Keith currently works as an Operations Assistant at the Media Teaching Lab at UC San Diego. He also teaches Intro to Scriptwriting at San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts as a member of the faculty at San Diego City College.
The fellowship will help transition a feature film project from research to pre-production, with the realization of a short film. The short film will in turn serve as a proof of concept for a feature Nixon will be writing.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Noelle Sepina is an educator, curator, and filmmaker. She is completing her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on Black Cinema, Philippine Cinema, and making connections between Black and Filipino histories, cultures, and knowledges within the context of U.S. empire. Her filmmaking practice is inspired by Third Cinema and the LA Rebellion. Her first short documentary, “This is Historic Filipinotown,” tells the little-known history of migration and gentrification of Filipino American communities in Los Angeles. Noelle is also a programmer at the San Diego Asian Film Festival.
The fellowship will support production of a short experimental documentary that serves as a prologue for the dissertation.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Cuyler Ballenger is an artist and filmmaker currently pursuing an MFA in the Department of Visual Arts. His autofiction films take up the specifics of family in order to reveal collective truths.
The fellowship will provide travel support towards a feature length project, as well as essential camera and sound equipment for its execution.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
GRADUATE STUDENT
Fabiola Carranza is an artist, writer and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Visual Arts whose interdisciplinary practice examines visual, cultural, and personal phenomena. At UC San Diego Carranza is an affiliate of the Critical Gender Studies Project, a Katzin Fellow and a Black Studies Project Awardee. Her doctoral studies were generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Funds from this fellowship will assist the production of a film about stage and television actor and activist Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (1922-1978).
GRADUATE STUDENT
Antonio Catrileo (they/them) is a Mapuche writer, artist, and weaver from Pikunmapu/Qullasuyu. Currently is a student at the PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. They hold a B.A., M.A. in Chilean and Hispanic Literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Author of the book “Awkan epupillan mew: dos espíritus en divergencia” (2019) and “Diáspora”(2015). Member of the Catrileo+Carrión Community, where they have collectively published the books “Poyewün Nütramkan Pikunmapu/Qullasuyu” (2020), “Poyewün witral: bitácora de las tejedoras de Neltume” (2019), “Torcer la palabra: escrituras obrera-feministas” (2018) and “Yikalay pu zomo Lafkenmapu” (2018). Antonio currently is a collaborator of Global Center for Advanced Studies Latin America Collective. Their work is presented as a critical intervention in how colonial categories have been imposed on notions of sexuality and gender in the Mapuche context. Catrileo claims the word epupillan (two-spirited) as a generative practice that focuses on not reproducing the damage of the archive’s narratives in order to imagine a Mapuche futurity beyond the politics of recognition, nation, and identity. Epupillan is a situated knowledge shared by several elders who are HIV/AIDS activists and defenders of the land.
FACULTY
Alexander L. Fattal is an associate professor in the Department of Communication. His work has focused on the mediation of the Colombian armed conflict. He is the author of two award-winning books Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (2018, Chicago) and Shooting Cameras for Peace: Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict/Disparando Cámaras para la Paz: Juventud, Fotografía y el Conflicto Armado Colombiano (Peabody/Harvard 2020). He has directed two documentary shorts, Trees Tropiques (Berkeley Media, 2009) and Limbo (Cinema Guild, 2019).
For his Fellowship, Fattal will begin research on a documentary project to find Eliyahu, the birth name for an uncle of his who was among the Middle Eastern Jews taken from their birth mothers in Israel (who were told that their children had died after childbirth) and given to Jewish families arriving to Israel after the Holocaust for adoption in the late 1940s and early-mid1950s.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Jalal Al-Marashi Jaffer is a Visual Arts major with an emphasis in media. He is a Co-Station Manager of Triton Television and is interested in exploring the Muslim American experience through storytelling and film.
Support from the fellowship will finance the production of a feature-length film, Another College Musical, co-directed with UC San Diego alum, Ryan Ritterby.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
STAFF
Lev Kalman (b. 1982) has been making films together with his collaborator Whitney Horn since 2003. Their distinctive style blends lo-fi 16mm photography, dreamy electronic music, philosophical musings, and steady bursts of absurdist humor. Their feature films Blondes in the Jungle, L for Leisure and Two Plains & a Fancy have played at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, and BAMCinemaFest. L for Leisure was named among “The 100 Best Films of the Decade” in Little White Lies magazine. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called Two Plains & a Fancy, “The most imaginative and visionary recent addition to the [Western] genre.” Coming soon: Dream Team, which weaves together psychic coral and utopian basketball leagues in a 1997-set cyber thriller, and Twin Snakes, a comedy about the structure of the psyche. Since 2012, Kalman has been based in San Diego. He is on staff at the UC San Diego Media Teaching Lab, and a programmer at the San Diego Asian Film Festival.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
FACULTY
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Miyao is the author of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema (Duke University Press, 2020), Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2013), and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke University Press, 2007). He is also the editor of Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014) and the co-editor of Transnational Cinematography Studies (2017) with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Rida Qadeer is a student filmmaker double majoring in Media Studies and International Business with a minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As an avid screenwriter and director, her work aims to explore the paradoxical nature of the world we live in highlighting traditionally marginalized narratives- all with a bit of comedy.
The fellowship will support the procurement of camera gear and equipment in addition to securing key locations for her upcoming mystery rom-com She Could Be the One, coming soon...to a theater near you.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
GRADUATE STUDENT
Chanell Stone is an artist living and working in Southern California. Through self-portraiture, collage and poetry Stone investigates the Black body’s intersectional states of being and connection to the natural world. Her practice negotiates potentialities for reconciliation and reprieve by upending historical and ancestral memories within the American landscape.
FACULTY
Thomas Conner is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Communication, where he received his Ph.D. in 2021. His media-archaeological research surfaces cultural histories and analyzes media effects of digital hologram and augmented-reality technologies.
For the fellowship, Conner will travel to the Illinois Holocaust Museum to conduct a pilot study of spectator interaction with projected, life-size 3D holograms of Holocaust survivors, potentially laying the groundwork for a larger project.
FACULTY
Zeinabu Davis is an independent filmmaker and professor in the Department of Communication. Her work is passionately concerned with the depiction of women of African descent, and her most recent documentary, “Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from Los Angeles” (2016), won seven awards, including the African Movie Academy Award.
Support from the fellowship will allow Davis to complete research and plan the production for a feature-length film, providing professionalization to the UC San Diego film community in the process.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Raynard De Guzman is a current student majoring in media studies in the Department of Visual Arts. He has previously worked on films in various roles, and is underway directing a short film for a thesis project.
The fellowship will enable on-location filming that can accommodate heavily choreographed shots, as well as production design, location rental, and craft services costs.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Yingjie Fei is a Ph.D. student in Literatures in Spanish, in the Department of Literature. Her digital humanities project focuses on memories and narratives of conflict and violence in the mining industry in Colombia. She uses ethnographical media method as an intervention in Colombia’s cultural expressions to constitute a space where survivors tell their stories of the past and present.
The fellowship will support travel and research.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
GRADUATE STUDENT
Anvar Hassanpour is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and received an MFA in documentary media from Northwestern University. Anvar is a Kurdish filmmaker and has been working independently for the past 15 years: directing several documentaries, experimental, film essays and narratives.
The entirety of the fellowship will be used towards equipment rental to produce a first-of-its-kind feature film exploring social conditions of Kurdish life under Turkish nationalism.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Hazel Katz is currently pursuing an MFA in the Department of Visual Arts, and is a Los Angeles-based video artist and filmmaker focusing on the politics of visibility through reenactment and pop culture archives. Her 2017 short film “Bubby & Them” won top international film at WNDX festival, and her 2019 feature documentary “Florida Water” is now distributed by Collective Eye Films.
The fellowship will support production costs and complete the post-production process, including editing and sound design, in advance of the 2023 film festival submission market.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT
Macey Keung is a media major and studio art minor in the Department of Visual Arts, and serves as the vice president of the Psychedelics Club. Her work aims to disrupt the traditional narrative, shed light on the psychedelic renaissance, and embrace intersectionality, vulnerability and identity.
In addition to camera, gear and equipment use, the fellowship will support the production of a short film written and directed by Keung.
GRADUATE STUDENT
Amir Saadiq is an MFA candidate in the Department of Visual Arts. His interdisciplinary practice aims to generate a visual language examining the gratuitous violence that occurs without transgression. Through the summoning of observational invisibility that confronts the impossibility of Blackness, he is interested in pursuing illusions of timelessness regarding erasure by examining how opposites such as form and formlessness, and human and non-humanness speak to and silence one another.
The fellowship will be used for expenses incurred during the filming process this summer.
FACULTY
Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist and assistant professor in the Department of Visual Arts whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group identities. Often working in collectives, Segade makes spaces for critical play, using collaboration to complicate utopian impulses with radical ambivalence.
The fellowship will provide access to cameras and equipment, defraying rental costs and keeping a planned feature film with My Barbarian within its budget.
*Fellowship work featured in the inaugural Fellowship Forum on Oct. 12, 2024. View Project Details
STAFF
Paolo Zuñiga received an MFA from the Department of Visual Arts, where he currently works as a staff member. Zuñiga’s creative work vacillates between fiction and documentary form, concerning himself with the narrativizing of individual experience as a means of exploring the fluidity of identity, memory and landscape.
The fellowship sets the foundation for the development of a feature-length film script, including initial pre-production research.