Archiving the Archive is an exploration of the changing ways we hold our memories through media. As digital technology becomes ever more present in daily life, many old analog media are becoming obsolete. Throughout history, these media technologies have done significant cultural work through their ability to hold and share the content that formed collective memory and shared identity. But the way we view content is changing. This project aims to serve as remembrance to this symbolic work and the physical uniqueness of these media through illustrative prints imbued with a movement and life otherwise overlooked. These memories are then fractured and abstracted onto postcards that visitors are encouraged to take with them to create a new sort of collective memory of these media objects.

In our current internet-driven society, social media platforms act as the most central tool for communication and social activism. Through my observations of the #MeToo movement, I argue that despite success in visibility, external factors stemming from social media have prevented the movement’s development beyond online platforms. These factors include Slacktivism, the online presence and power of celebrities, and popular feminism and it’s commodification. Considering that the #MeToo movement is ongoing, my observations of the movement thus far aim to answer the question if social media based movements, such as #MeToo, will produce any structural change within and beyond the entertainment industry.

I feel like I can get home from here is an archive of the resilience, multiplicity, and survival of butch lesbians who continue to straddle the margins of a larger LGBTQ community and heterosexual world, and the lines of hypervisibility and erasure. As both a print book and digital archive, this project aims to compile meaningful textual and visual content about butch lesbians into one space and explore themes of identity, childhood, community, memory, history, and trajectories. Combining digital photography, questionnaire answers, interview transcripts, photo manipulation, and personal writings, the project aims to encapsulate a snapshot of contemporary understandings of butch embodiment in a manner that is documentary and figurative. 60 participants shared their stories and experiences in the form of in-person interviews and an online questionnaire. I feel like I can get home from here highlights the ideas that butch is a multiplicitous and nebulous identity that is vital to understandings of gender and sexuality and that a butch-designed archive can combat systematic erasure and stereotyping. Within its scope, the project serves as its own standalone emotive archive and gives greater depth and voice behind a butch image superficially propagated by media and commonplace stereotyping. The project derives influence from and negotiates theories that deal with symbolic annihilation and the conceptual archive, lesbian semiotics and identification, and (lesbian) photography. At its core, this project is a celebration, a living history, and a deep embodiment of community and love that speaks to a butch past, present, and future and the possibilities of masculinity.

This project explores the idea of dream sharing and how language is both a tool and a barrier for sharing dream experiences. I collected video and audio dream diaries from 15 different people and stitched together a "collective" dream that contains elements from each. From this new dream, I pulled words and displayed them as text on-screen. What is the relationship from the listener and the actual dream experience? Can we truly experience the dreams of others?

Unreliable Narrators is a record of the process to create a mixed media installation about how and why we tell stories, and how we as an audience discern the truth of those stories. The installation tells three different perspectives of the same story. Part documentary and part detective search, this project has viewers following the subject as she pieces together her story and ultimately has them deciding for themselves what to believe.

This media studies thesis is a series of digitally-made composites/collages visually inspired by popular text posts from Tumblr. The text posts -- and the images inspired by them -- reflect the ironic and sarcastic humor teens and 20-somethings use to cope with mental health issues.

This thesis explores the idea of the “monstrous-feminine,” or the idea that female monsters of television and film are linked to their femininity in a way that male monsters are not linked to their masculinity. Using the work of scholars such as Barbara Creed, Shelley Stamp Lindsey, and Jane M. Ussher, the thesis covers various facets of women’s lives as seen through the distorted lens of the monstrous. The character of Helena from the television show Orphan Black is used as a concrete example of the stages of the monstrous-feminine: the girl-child, menstruation and puberty, sexuality, and motherhood.

An exploration of introversion and creativity through collage, digital assemblage, and curation

Numerous U.S. studio executives claim that the lack of on-screen racial diversity is a result of producers responding to discriminatory racial preferences of international audiences. To test these claims, this paper augments prior film financial success models by introducing measures of cast diversity to quantify the impact that actor race has on film revenue in the domestic and international market. Using OLS regressions, I examine and compare this effect within the domestic and aggregate movie market to investigate the underlying motivations for producers to not cast nonwhite actors. The findings support the claims made by studio heads that, on the whole, films with greater levels of diversity significantly underperform in the international box office, yet are not a strong determinant for domestic consumption. Although producers may be making assumptions about foreign demand when investing in films, the revenue regressions seem to support their assumptions. However, the results are ultimately difficult to interpret. Holding budget and other key film characteristics constant, more diverse films perform poorly relative to less diverse films in foreign markets, so the demographic disparities in films could be mostly driven by rational, profit-maximizing behavior from studios and producers.

This thesis reexamines the purpose of fairy tales throughout history and explores the effectiveness of a modern alternative to classical methods of telling these stories. To increase interactivity as well as the agency of the female protagonist and players themselves, this thesis reimagines the popular classic, Cinderella, as a visual novel.