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
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 Communications. 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
STAFF
Luciana Marcos Laberge is a Canadian filmmaker and multi-media artist. She completed an MFA in Film Production from Concordia University in Montreal in 2018. She wrote and directed The Nature Of (2013) and PAS DE TROIS (2015) among others and collaborated with artists with performances and video installations. She works as a staff at the Latin American Studies program while training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitstu, a martial art linked to her next film to be shot in Beyrouth, Lebanon.
The fellowship will support the pre-production research stage of such project. lucianamarcos.com
*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.