Stories

PhD student Michelle Salinas Wamungu will be exhibiting as part of the exhibition Concrete Hope at The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College.

Curated by Erika Hirugami (CuratorLove) as part of the Foto Socal project, Concrete Hope "speak[s] to the intricacies and complexities of belonging to a community of individuals united aesthetically by culture, transcending national boundaries. Concrete Hope features equal parts piñatas, abuelitas, cholos, tatuajes, virgencitas, mercados,rosarios, metates, petates, buganvilias, escapularios, veladoras, primas, primos, letreros, gente de nuestra comunidad, gallos, emblemas nacionales, ventanales, ladrillos, sobadores, pirámides, manteles, familia y fotografías."

"Concrete Hope’s aesthetic axis is the celebration of all things Brown, Mexican-American, Nepantlera, Mestiza, Indigenous, Chicanx, Mexican-Irish, Afro-Mexicana, Chicano, Latine, Undocumented, Oaxaqueñe, Yaqui, Migrant, Guatemalan-Mexican, Salvadoran, Mexipino (Mexican-Filipino), Chapin, Immigrant, Undoc+, and Jaxican (Japanese-Mexican), et. al., which stands as a reflection of self-affirmation of the lived experiences of the complex brown community in Southern California. Concrete Hope brings together thirty-eight emergent photographers and lens-based artists from Southern California who explore an assortment of installation media as materiality for the photographic depictions."

Read more about the exhibit here.

Katrina Meng (MA+P BA '24) is currently an M.S. Speech-Language Pathology student at @keckschoolusc, where she is applying her storytelling and media design skills to the medical field. With colleague Marilyn Sun, she designed and produced Cranial Connect! a competitive card-matching game for future healthcare workers and educators studying the brain.

The game will help prospective speech-language pathologists understand how the cranial nerves connect to different activities of daily living, and most importantly, speech and swallow functions essential for patients’ quality of life.

Recent Media Arts + Practice PhD program graduate Sarah Ciston was recently awarded the prestigious S+T+ARTS Grand Prize in Artistic Exploration presented by the Linz-based media arts organization Ars Electronica for her project titled AI War Cloud Database. The project is in keeping with the creative/critical hybridity that characterizes the iMAP PhD program as it shows how commonly used AI systems are being deployed in war­fare – automatically and with serious consequences for civilians. To celebrate the award, the project is being showcased at the 2025 Ars Electronica show, the preeminent showcase of media art in the world

*Photo of Sarah by Paige Zangoglia

Read prize announcement here.

This summer, MA+P PhD students Zeynep Abes and Andrea Kim traveled to Seoul as presenters for ISEA2025, the 30th International Symposium on Electronic/Emerging Art.

Andrea gave an artist talk titled "Multi-Agent Fabulation in the House of MU," about world building for narrative media, drawing from Korean mythologies and folk culture.

Zeynep presented a paper for ISEA's Summit on New Media Art Archiving. "Futures Forgotten: Rhizomatic Archiving of Immersive Memories" examines rhizomatic archival structures, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of decentralized, interconnected knowledge as a solution for preserving XR and its complex histories.

Over the recent fall break, undergraduate students in the IMAX: The Art and Practice of Giant Screen Cinema course traveled to the Alabama Hills National Scenic Area outside Lone Pine for a 4-day workshop where they learned how to compose images for the giant screen, operate the IMAX MSM film camera, and film with the ARRI Alexa LF digital cinema camera. Students were guided by legendary director of photography Sean Phillips, IMAX camera technician Scott (Smitty) Smith, and MA+P professor Matt Scott. The work captured over the weekend will be screened at IMAX Headquarters in Playa Vista on November 4, where students will meet members of the IMAX team and tour the extraordinary IMAX facility.

Photo: A student operates the IMAX film camera to capture the USC student group sitting under Mobius Arch.

MA+P PhD alum Triton Mobley ('23) talks to SCA about his 2024 exhibition Coloured.Aesthetica.

Watch video here.

Co-created and produced by SCA professor Michael Bodie and Dramatic Arts professor Paula Cizmar, Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles is an immersive and interactive environmental justice experience merging exhibition, performance, and activism.

Through multimedia-enriched documentary theatre and film storytelling, SZLA sheds light on the damaging effects of decades of industrial pollution on South Los Angeles communities by transforming the Otis Booth Pavilion at the Natural History Museum into a home along the I-710 Corridor. Attendees will have the freedom to meet the family and explore the household in the order of their choosing, going at their own pace while learning about the challenges of living in “sacrifice zones” — the places in our city devastated by ongoing environmental pollution.

Written, designed, and performed by current and former USC students and faculty, Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles will run from January 13 - 28, 2024.

Read USC News article here.

Learn more about the project here.

Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 2 p.m.
USC Brain and Creativity Institute's Cammilleri Hall (BCI)

As the culmination of three year doctoral research, Media Arts and Practice PhD candidate Juri Hwang presents a public event with USC’s Arts in Action and the Los Angeles Chapter of Hearing Loss Association of America: Here My Voice - Celebrating the Power of Voice with Hard-of-Hearing Community. Featuring vocal performances by hard-of-hearing participants, this event celebrates the intensive collaborative work of the participants of the Here, My Voice project, which responds to the challenges of hard-of-hearing people to make their voices heard and use them for creative expression. The performances will be followed by a conversation with performers and their voice teacher partners about their innovative, interdisciplinary, and transformative collaborations.

More information + RSVP

"Body of Mine," an immersive piece by Cameron Kostopoulos, premiered at SXSW 2023 and won the Special Jury Award in the XR Experience category. The festival jurors called the project "a beautifully crafted virtual reality experience that shows how VR can provide a safe space for understanding, reflection, and connection when a safe space in the real world is hard to find."

Cameron, a 2022 graduate of the Film and Television Production major and the Future Cinema Minor, worked on this project as part of his IML 481: Mixed Realities course, taught by Professor Scott Fisher. Fellow MA+P students Nali Mandi (MA+P '22) and Luke Greenwood (MA+P '23) are credited as 3D artists for the project.

Read the announcement here.

Kumi James writes about living out Black queer collective fantasies and inventing a collective path and space. (Photo by Sam Hood)

Read the article here.

In this artist talk, PhD student Andrea Kim will present "Origin of Somu," a chapter of an ongoing transmedia series. Kim will read "Origin of Somu" in webXR and discuss how digital tools interface with creativity, techno-culture, and the human-machine relationship.

Learn more about the event here.

Human Resources LA will host an exhibition of work from PhD student Fidelia Lam on July 23-31, 2022.

New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX. grapples with the affective and aesthetic legacies of empire and colonialism as they continue to shape the racial architectures of Asian diasporic femme subjectivities. The exhibition features new multimedia works that speak to, with, and nearby speculative ancestral figures, drawing on Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of ornamentalism to create sites for grieving, honoring, and queering modes of synthetic personhood. Playing with recursive processes and speculative rituals, the pieces arrive in formations of plastics, light, and digital technologies to meditate on the racializations of matter and inter-textual modes of being.

Opening: July 23, 2022, 7-10pm
On View: Wed-Sun 12-6pm, July 23-31
Exhibition walkthroughs available by appointment.

View gallery announcement here.

PhD alum Emilia Yang will be joining the faculty in Fall 2022 at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design. Yang will focus on Anti-Racism by Design as a central area for research/​creative work, and will join colleagues at the U‑M School of Information and the Ford School of Public Policy to form the Racial Justice & Technology cluster.

Read the story here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of May 6 for PUNCTORIUM, an exhibition of thesis projects created by senior undergraduate students in the BA in Media Arts + Practice and the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program. These projects integrate research across multiple fields and together represent a holistic view of the emerging media landscape.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Opening Event:
May 6, 2022
4​:00 pm: Screenings in SCI 106
5:00 pm: Exhibition in Stages 3 + 4

Gallery Hours:
May 9-10, 2022
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Stages 3 + 4

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
3470 McClintock Avenue (SCI 106)
900 West 34th Street (Stages 3 + 4)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Peabody Awards honors excellence in storytelling that reflects the social issues and the emerging voices of our day. The Board of Jurors recently announced PhD Alum Nonny de la Peña as one of four Special Awardees that have achieved outstanding feats in storytelling across interactive, immersive and new media categories. The distinguished “Legacy class” of winners whose mediums altogether span Virtual and Augmented Reality, Gaming, Interactive Journalism, Social Video, Interactive Documentary, Transmedia Storytelling, and more, demonstrate the depth of these digital formats and emphasize the foundational standards for future award recipients.

Read more here.

MA+P faculty member Alex McDowell and PhD alumnus Brian Cantrell have co-authored a paper on the new design language they are developing as part of their collaborative project "World in a Cell."

Read the paper here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumnus, David Viramontes.

Read the full interview here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumna, Carolyn Diloreto.

Read the full interview here.

Virginia Kuhn talked with the LA Times about the Lil Nax X’s new video “That’s What I Want” and radical queerness.

Read the story here.

PhD student Benjamin Nicholson's performance, "Deathless and Taxless: A Corporate Exorcism," was featured in the 2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Learn more here.

MA+P adjunct faculty member Ashley York is one of nine filmmakers selected by the Smithsonian for the "Futures We Dream" film showcase. This showcase, part of the upcoming "FUTURES" exhibition, will present uplifting visions of communities across the U.S. from award-winning independent filmmakers.

Read the full announcement here.

Laila Shareen Sakr (PhD '15) and Susana Ruiz (PhD '15) received an extension grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for their project "Arab Data Bodies: Social Media in Mixed Reality." The ACLS Digital Extension Grant program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences.

Read the grant announcement here.

USC students create the digital future in a new interactive building.

Read the full story here.

While its physical location was closed by the combined impact of government reprisals and the global pandemic, museum director Emilia Yang Rappaccioli (PhD '21) discusses how the museum lives on as a digital space.

Read the full story here.

In the summer of 2016, three USC scholars gathered at an 18th-century castle in Austria to teach 70 college students from around the globe how to dream about the future. The Salzburg Global Seminar likely qualifies as the most glamorous venue to host workshop leaders Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, but it's only one of many places where the trio has championed the practice of "civic imagination" through world-building exercises. Additional to the workshops they've run over the past eight years, Jenkins, Shresthova and Peter-Lazaro have produced two recent books filled with fresh thinking about media activism.

Read the full story here.

MA+P PhD candidate Curtis Tamm recently developed sound work for artists Maki Ohkojima and Yosuke Tsuji, Tokyo-based artists who work together as Maki Ohkojima.

Thanks to Curtis, their project,Where Lies Your Afterbirth, features a 21-channel sound composition inspired by Maki’s sculptural and large-scale 2d works. The composition includes archival recordings, original music and field recordings captured throughout Mexico and Japan.

The installation will be on view through October 19 at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre Theater in Japan.

PhD student David Kelley will present a new installation in collaboration with Patty Chang at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, with an opening on Thursday, September 18, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Titled “Our Abyssal Kin,” the installation uses video, sound, and sculpture to challenge the rigid distinction between humans and nature established by Western science. Instead, the exhibition insists on the inseparability of human and ecological systems. In a time in which environmental justice and climate issues have become increasingly urgent, this exhibition situates deep-sea ecology within historical struggles for agency and liberation.

The exhibition will be open September 18, 2025 - January 24, 2026.

Exhibition website here.

PhD student Halo Starling's exhibition at USC's ONE Archives will close, Friday, September 12, 2025, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. with an artist's talk in which Starling will discuss his year-long archival research process, collage methodologies, and trans aesthetic tactics. Guest poetry readings will feature Heather Gray, Isabel Beavers, and Huntrezz Janos, who will amplify the themes of the exhibition. The evening will close with a reception allowing plenty of time to enter ‘faerie space’ for the final time.

Event link here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of May 6 for FROM THE OUTSIDE IN, an exhibition of thesis projects created by senior undergraduate students in the Media Arts + Practice BA program. These projects integrate research across multiple fields and together represent a holistic view of the emerging media landscape.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Exhibition Opening:
May 6, 2025
5pm: Screenings in SCI 106
6pm: Exhibition/Reception in Stages 3 + 4

Gallery Hours:
May 7-8, 10am - 4pm
May 9, 10am - 12pm
Stages 3 + 4

Luna Lens Film Festival
May 3-4, 1-6pm
SCA 112
*For festival schedule, visit @lunalensfilmfest on instagram

[en busca de la nada]
A live video+audio performance
May 7-8, 6-7pm
RZC 119

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
3470 McClintock Avenue (SCI 106),
900 West 34th Street (Stages 3+4 and SCA 112), and
3131 S Figueroa St (RZC 119)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

This program is open to all eligible individuals. The Division of Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. We request that individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids such as sign language interpreters and alternative format materials notify us at least 7 days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide reasonable accommodations in an effective and timely manner.

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University will welcome MA+P PhD graduate Catherine Griffiths to the Full-time Faculty of the Computational Design Practices Program for Fall 2024.

Read more here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us April 18-25, 2024 for iMAPPENING 2024.

iMappening is a yearly exhibition of experimental works-in-progress from the interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice PhD program, including film, video, installation, animation, performance, generative AI, sound, and other media.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Screening Program
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Broccoli Theatre (SCA 112)
6:00 pm Reception + 7:00 pm Screening

Exhibition Opening Reception
Friday, April 19, 2024
Soundstage 4 + SCI Lobby
5:00 pm

Exhibition Gallery Hours
April 22-25, 2024
Soundstage 4 + SCI Lobby
12:00 - 6:00 pm

Location
USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 West 34th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089

PhD student, sound artist and DJ Kumi James (aka BAE BAE), currently an artist in residence at the Hammer Museum, will stage a durational performance in proximity to Rita McBride’s installation Particulates. James’s work explores the immanence of what can be made of a moment, the vital nature of collectivity, and the integral connection between growth and decay. Performing with James will be Colloboh (a portmanteau of Collins Oboh)

Read announcement here.

PhD alum Emilia Yang was selected to be a 2023 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident in the Visual Arts, Literary Arts, Filmmaking Track.

Read the announcement here.

PhD student Sarah Ciston recently published A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets, a public resource that "offers questions, suggestions, strategies, and resources to help people work with existing machine learning datasets at every phase of their lifecycle."

Read the field guide here.

This November, students in the ZAP student organization hosted a 24-hour media making festival called Zapathon. Open to all Media Arts + Practice students, the festival was an opportunity for collective artmaking and community building amongst the undergraduate population. Students worked individually and in groups to create videos, sound pieces, graphics, and experimental media.

BONDS, a zine published by MA+P's undergraduate student organization (ZAP), collects wildly varied pieces of media including poems, photographs, fashion spreads, illustrations, links to short films and hard-to-classify fare.

Read more here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumna, Ryan Cenicola.

Read the full interview here.

The Music Center in Los Angeles recently announced the appointment of Kamal Sinclair as senior director of the performing arts center’s Digital Innovation Initiative (DII), a 10-year pilot program designed to explore and create digital and virtual reality experiences throughout Los Angeles.

Read the announcement here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of April 29th for the opening reception of iMAPPENING 2022.

iMAPPENING is the year-end showcase of media art projects created by students in the interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. Featuring more than a dozen pieces that exemplify a surprising spectrum of arts-based research, this year's show imagines the near future, remembers the ancestral past, critiques ongoing violence, considers care alongside crisis, and invites, as possible antidotes, non-lexical conversation, hand-weaving, and zine-making. The showcase includes performances, screenings, projection pieces, and interactive media, and in its cheerful eclecticism, invites visitors to reflect on the often profound ways in which concepts and ideas may take shape in and through media and performance.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Opening Event:
April 29, 2022
5:00 pm: Screenings in SCI 106
Exhibition in SCI 206 + SCA Stage 4 immediately following the screenings.

Gallery Hours:
April 30-May 3
12:00 pm - 6:00 pm
SCA Stage 4

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 West 34th Street (SCA Stage 4)
3470 McClintock Avenue (SCI 106+206)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Three students from the Fall 2021 IML 475 class (The Art and Practice of Giant Screen Cinema) were selected to present their work to the Giant Screen Cinema Association conference at Universal City Walk in March 2022.

Emilia Yang has published an article in the International Journal of Communication (iJoC) entitled "AMA y No Olvida Collectivizing Memory Against Impunity: Transmedia Memory Practices, Modular Visibility, and Activist Participatory Design in Nicaragua." This article presents the first chapter of Yang's upcoming dissertation.

Read more here.

Students enrolled in this semester's IML 475 class (IMAX: The Art and Practice of Giant Screen Cinema) traveled to Red Rock Canyon State Park on a practical field trip to capture landscape footage. The students completed photography workshops throughout the park, including the Old Dutch Cleanser Mines and Fossil Falls.

Congratulations to PhD alum micha cárdenas on the upcoming publication of her book "Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media." In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book will be released in January 2022.

Read more, from Duke University Press

Professor Alex McDowell's Planet Junk project, a student collaboration across 12 universities, was featured in Dezeen magazine. McDowell challenged students to use the worldbuilding methodology to imagine and evolve a 300-year future society that is built on the detritus of a ruined civilization. The USC contributors to the project were students enrolled in McDowell's course, IML 475: World Building, Narrative Design and Design Visualization.

Read the story here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice student, Luke Greenwood.

Read the full interview here.

An interview with MA+P graduate certificate alumnus, Vanessa Monterosa.

Read the full interview here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumnus, Eric Liu.

Read the full interview here.

As the CEO of Emblematic Group, Nonny de la Peña (PhD '19) uses cutting-edge technologies to tell stories — both fictional and news-based — that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. She has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget, while Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative” for her pioneering work in immersive journalism.

Watch her TED talk here.

An interview with a Media Arts and Practice undergraduate alumnus, Chandler Zausner.

Read the full interview here.

After seeing the distance between kids and their elders in his own Jewish community, Ethan Kurzrock (BA '21) developed the Haggadah Project for L.A. middle schoolers.

Read the full story here.

PhD alum Emilia Yang and PhD candidate Romi Morrison have been named as members of the Year Twelve cohort of NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology founded by the New Museum in 2014. Yang joins the Social Architecture Track, and Morrison joins the Art & Code track.

Incubator members, working at the intersection of art, design, technology, and entrepreneurship, will participate in NEW INC’s yearlong program, which includes a values-centered business education curriculum, mentorship, and opportunities to showcase their work to the public, including NEW INC’s annual DEMO festival at the close of the program year.

Yang, currently Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, utilizes expanded forms of digital media (XR, transmedia, web, interactive, films, archives, performance, games and public interventions) for the creation of community-based transformative justice memory projects and futures. Her practice-based research explores the role of memory, violence, emotions, performance, and participation in the political imagination.

Morrison is currently Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at University of California, Los Angeles and a 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellow. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Meet the rest of the NEW INC Year Twelve cohort here.

PhD alum Samantha Gorman of Tender Claws just presented the company’s newest project, Face Jumping, in competition in the Venice Immersive section at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.

Face Jumping is an interactive VR short that uses eye-tracking technologies as both muse and platform to explore the impossible desire of seeing through another’s eyes. Visitors navigate a journey of rebirth and evolution by meeting the gaze of other characters and swapping perspectives – including those of birds, rocks, delivery bots, ghosts, cowboys and clouds.

The creators explain, “This project originated from our explorations into how eye-tracking as input can uniquely resonate. We wanted to use sight as an active mechanic, rather than merely a cursor. The moment of making eye contact with another being can be profound – we latch onto that feeling as a starting point to examine other perspectives and modes of perception. We hope Face Jumping evokes curiosity and joy, as it immerses viewers in absurdist realities.”

Congratulations to Samantha and the Tender Claws team!

Learn more about the project here.

On September 19 MA+P will host renowned cinema artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, who will lead three hands-on workshops for USC students exploring projection, light, and camera-less image creation.

RSVP for the workshop here!

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us April 24 - May 1 for iMAPPENING 2025.

iMappening is a yearly exhibition of experimental works-in-progress from the interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice PhD program, including film, video, installation, animation, performance, generative AI, sound, and other media.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Exhibition Reception
April 24
Soundstage 4
5:00 pm

Screening Program
April 25
SCI 106
7:00 pm

Exhibition Gallery Hours
April 25 - May 1
(weekdays only)
Soundstage 4
10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Location
USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 W 34th St (Soundstage 4)
3470 McClintock Ave (SCI 106)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

This program is open to all eligible individuals. The Division of Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. We request that individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids such as sign language interpreters and alternative format materials notify us at least 7 days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide reasonable accommodations in an effective and timely manner.

MA+P PhD graduate Behnaz Farahi will join the MIT Media Lab's Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) as Assistant Professor, Transformative Design—Design + Technology for Societal Impact starting September 1, 2024.

Photo credit: Behnaz Farahi, Blindness Immersive Installation 2003

Read more here.

Between November 28 and December 1, 2023, PhD-level iMAP and CAMS students in IML 602: Practice of Media Arts curated a mid-year exhibition of works in progress in the SCA Gallery. Works-in-progress included a clay fountain of divers; a corridor haunted by an AI entity; various film essays; point cloud representations of an abandoned stadium; and etchings of tumultuous construction workers.

Descriptions and images of the works of all participants can be found here, and the websites for all participants can be found below.

Eneos Çarka
David de Rozas
David Kelley and Patty Chang
Andrea S. Kim
Ellie Schmidt
Halo Starling
Sichong Xie

The USC art schools present a full day of panels, workshops, and activities exploring the potential for art to produce social and political change.

Image: Still from Hemorrhage, 2023, an animated film by Ruth Hayes

Read more here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of May 2 for REALITY CHECK: WHO ARE YOU? HOW DO YOU KNOW?, an exhibition of thesis projects created by senior undergraduate students in the Media Arts + Practice BA program. These projects integrate research across multiple fields and together represent a holistic view of the emerging media landscape.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Opening Event:
May 2, 2023
5​:00 pm: Screenings+Performance in SCI 106
6:15 pm: Exhibition in Stages 3 + 4

Gallery Hours:
May 3-5, 2023
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Stages 3 + 4

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
3470 McClintock Avenue (SCI 106)
900 West 34th Street (Stages 3 + 4)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

MA+P faculty member and co-chair, Holly Willis, will co-direct the new USC Center for Generative AI and Society. This center will explore the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on culture, education, media and society.

Learn more here.

MA+P PhD student Selwa Sweidan and her collaborator Nina Sarnelle will be facilitating a 4-part online workshop through the School of Making Thinking, hosted by Abrons Art Center. This workshop series is a part of larger ongoing collaborative research process called Touch Praxis exploring touch as a time-based medium and a form of co-creative knowledge.

Learn more here.

Ashley York has been selected as a 2022 awardee for the Propelle program, a female-focused accelerator initiative from partners Everywoman Studios, Endemol Shine North America and Realscreen. Ashley was selected in the Documentary category for her project (em)Dear Appalachia.

Read the announcement here.

The DECOLONIALATHON was a 2-day community design event held on May 14-15, 2022 in Los Angeles that co-creatively explored decolonization and augmented reality (AR) from an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and intersectional feminist lens.

Learn more here.

MA+P undergraduates Dani Takahashi ('23) and Summer Xiang ('23), along with teammate Bradley Manucha (BS Architecture, '22), have been named finalists for the Biodesign Challenge, a national competition that encourages students to explore biotech’s entanglements within society—in the way it empowers people, contributes to structural inequities, and creates opportunities for change.

Their project, “Prosthetic B-Habitat: growing food networks in communities," was chosen from several projects created as part of a graduate-level Biodesign course offered by the School of Architecture. Dani, Summer and Bradley will be presenting their project at the Biodesign Summit on June 20-24, where they will be competing against 54 other universities.

Learn more about the competition here.

PhD alum Triton Mobley's essay "Volumetric Black: Post-Cinematic Blackness" was published as a part of Materializing Digital Futures: Touch, Movement, Sound and Vision, a new volume edited by Toija Cinque and Jordan Beth Vincent.

View the book here.

PhD Alum Behnaz Farahi's new piece "Returning the Gaze" was recently featured in an article in Fast Company. Created for fashion brand ANNAKIKI's recent Milan runway show, the piece considers the male gaze and surveillance culture, themes that are present in much of Farahi's work.

Read the story here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice student, Kyle Ang.

Read the full interview here.

Filmmaker and media scholar Gabriel Peters-Lazaro (better known as Gabe) brought his love of creative media practice to the USC Media Arts and Practice community, where he served as a beloved professor and mentor until his passing in 2021. In his honor, his family and professional community have launched a memorial fund to provide much-needed scholarships and financial support to students whose work shares Gabe's commitment to mediamaking, critical scholarship, civic engagement and technological innovation.

Learn more about the fund and how to contribute.

Congratulations to alum Behnaz Farahi, who won the prestigious Cooper Hewitt 2021 National Design Award for Digital Design.

Read more here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumna, Georgina Chiou.

Read the full interview here.

MA+P PhD alumna Nonny de la Peña, dubbed the "Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Forbes and the Guardian, is joining Arizona State University to design and lead a new graduate program and center in emerging media and narrative based in Los Angeles.

Read the story here.

MA+P adjunct faculty member Qianqian Ye has just been appointed as the new co-lead of the p5.js project, with evelyn masso. Congratulations to Qianqian and evelyn!

Read the full announcement here.

On Our Radar 2021 features noteworthy projects in all disciplines that advanced to the final round in the competitive selection process for the Creative Capital Award. This year, micha cárdenas (PhD '15) and Susana Ruiz (PhD '15) and their project Oceanic is one of the many incredible projects highlighted.

Read about the project here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumna, Jordan Fowler.

Read the full interview here.

Behnaz Farahi, a Media Arts and Practice PhD student, redraws the boundaries between humans and technology.

Read the full story here.

PhD student Ellie Schmidt and PhD Alum Aroussiak Gabrielian will be featured as part of First Hour: experiments on common ground, a Supercollider event at the David Horvitz Garden in Los Angeles.

Saturday, September 27, 2025 @ 5 - 9pm
David Horvitz’ 7th Ave Garden
1911 7th Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90018

Artists: Aroussiak Gabrielian, Devin Wilson, Ellie Schmidt, Ina Chen, Nat Decker, Patricía Lino, Sadia Quddus, Whisper
Curated By: Marcela Vieira

First Hour: experiments on common ground is an activation in David Horovitz’ 7th Ave Garden by members of Supercollider 2025 SciArt Ambassador Cohort and friends. The space is activated with sculptures, performances, and idiosyncratic interventions—both virtual and real—that simulate fictional scenes governed by unreal logics. It is a situation similar to what we experience when entering a new stage of a video game. As we step into the space we may find ourselves wondering: what is happening here? What is the code, the language, the way to interact with these works? Who are these figures? Since understanding takes time, perhaps we will be left only with impressions, rather than with clear answers to our questions.

MA+P undergraduate alum Bo Kim will open their first solo exhibition, BO KIM: BURN, at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach on September 11, 2025. The show is on view through Sept 18, with a celebration event 9/18 6-8pm.

iMAP student and ONE Archives artist-in-residence Halo Starling presents Fairy Prince, an exhibition of new work based on research at ONE on the Radical Faeries, particularly the New York Radical Faeries Collection and the Harry Hay Papers. The radical faeries are a loosely affiliated worldwide network and counter-cultural movement seeking to redefine queer consciousness through secular spirituality and ecology. Projects in the exhibition will include hand-crafted textile art, collage films, cyanotypes, an installation, and a zine. The show opens on Friday, June 13, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. and will be on view throughout the summer at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, 909 West Adams Boulevard.

Learn more here.

The Media Arts + Practice program, along with AIMS (AI for Media & Storytelling), Flux, and Logan, present Flux Festival, November 20-23, 2024. The event offers a showcase of emerging forms of storytelling, with an emphasis on AI and its impact on contemporary cinema. Through presentations, performances, conversations, and screenings, Flux Festival offers an opportunity to gather and share ideas about the shifting nature of storytelling in a computational culture. Events will take place in the School of Cinematic Arts, the Hammer Museum, the Audrey Irmas Pavilion, and online. The festival is free to the USC community by using the code AIMS2024 at checkout on Eventbrite.

Learn more here.

Three iMAP PhD candidates – David de Rozas, Halo Starling, and Michelle Salinas Wamungu – were among the five USC graduate students named Summer 2024 Sustainability Fellows earlier this year. Established in 2023, the Summer Primary Source Research Fellowships on Sustainability encourages student engagement with library collections by supporting public-facing research at the intersection of history, gender studies, and sustainability studies. Under the auspices of the fellowship, David conducted research on the history of urban transformation in downtown Los Angeles in support of a broader investigation into the social and environmental impacts of the Downtown Los Angeles 2040 redevelopment plan. Halo explored the ONE Archives’ Harry Hay papers to investigate how Hay’s communist principles informed his role in establishing the Radical Faeries movement. And Michelle conducted research on artistic responses to environmental racism and climate change. Watch for the results of this research in exhibitions and other forms in the coming year!

Read more here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of April 30 for ALGORHYTHMS: IDENTITIES IN MOTION, an exhibition of thesis projects created by senior undergraduate students in the Media Arts + Practice BA program. These projects integrate research across multiple fields and together represent a holistic view of the emerging media landscape.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Opening Event:
April 30, 2024
5:00 pm: Screenings in SCI 106
6:15 pm: Exhibition in Stages 3 + 4

Gallery Hours:
May 1-2, 10am - 5pm
May 3, 10am - 1pm
Stages 3 + 4

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
3470 McClintock Avenue (SCI 106) and
900 West 34th Street (Stages 3+4)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

PhD student David Kelley and his partner, Patty Chang, will screen their work "Overburden" this fall at e-flux in New York.

Read more here.

USC Media Arts + Practice invites you to join us on the evening of April 24th for the opening reception of iMAPPENING 2023.

iMAPPENING is the year-end showcase of media art projects created by students in the interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. This year’s projects ask profound questions about the role of emerging media forms in contemporary culture with attention to harmful datasets and the encoding of antiblack and anti-queer, trans, and nonbinary life. The projects reflect on the evanescence of history and memory, offer new modes of witnessing and being, and consider our engagement with how we know and how we die. We meet the avatar of a shaman-bride, encounter a significant storefront in Boyle Heights, and learn about an historic vigil dedicated to peace.

Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Opening Event:
April 24, 2023
5:00 pm

Gallery Hours:
April 25-27, 2023
10:00 am - 5:00 pm

Location:
USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 West 34th Street (SCA Stage 4)
Los Angeles, CA 90089

PhD candidate Juri Hwang has received a third round of funding from Arts in Action for Here, My Voice, an arts-based intervention project that provides experimental voice lessons hard-of-hearing persons.

Read more about the project here.

PhD doctoral candidate Triton Mobley will present "Keloid Archives" at Soloway Gallery this fall. The work for this gallery show is a culmination of 18 months of studio research that engages with our relationship to the technologies we depend on to document and archive our digital selves. The collection of works distills lived experiences of Blackness—aiming to retrieve the digitized fragments that are inconvenient to the systems of capture—assembled and staged for reexamination.

See Triton's portfolio here.

MA+P undergraduate student Dani Takahashi was selected as the recipient of the 2022 Hedy Lamarr Achievement Award for Emerging Leaders in Entertainment Technology.

Read the story here.

What Am I Doing Here?, a collection of 17 short films from MA+P faculty member Jeanne Jo, is currently on view at the Southern Utah Museum of Art.

Read more here.

Score for Here, a new artist commission from Jimena Sarno which will be activated at Los Angeles State Historic Park from May 7 – August 31, 2022, is a site-specific sonic experience using modified field recordings and samples composed through geolocation. The piece invites Los Angeles State Historic Park visitors to compose sound in real time as they navigate the park, and will be available through a free downloadable phone app.

Learn more here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice student, Katie Luo.

Read the full interview here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice student, Mo Chuang.

Read the full interview here.

Curtis Tamm was recipient of the ACE-Nikaido fellowship in Summer 2021. He discussed his research and experience with the fellowship.

Congratulations to Jyn Arro (BA '20) on the publication of her first volume of poetry, "Book of Mirrors."

Arro writes, "Book of Mirrors is a collection of poetry and prose about pain and sorrow; change and healing; love and sensuality; pride and femininity; resilience and power. Through four parts it is my wish that you see yourself reflected in these words, and know that the person in the mirror is not so wrong or hideous as distortions would have us believe."

Arro's works often explore themes of spirituality, beauty, femininity, queerness, and the nuances and complexities of her mixed-indigenous, Xicana ancestry. When she is not exploring expression and entertaining her curiosity, she is recording the A Poetic Mess podcast, playing video games, or growing her divination deck collection.

Find more of Arro's work here.

An interview with Media Arts and Practice student, Ethan Kurzrock.

Read the full interview here.

PhD student Emilia Yang will showcase her project AMA Constructing Memory at the Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin as part of their curated exhibition "The Art of Change." The project is an Interactive Art Book about the memories of the victims of state violence in Nicaragua. Learn more here.

Yang's project Love and Remembrance, a VR experience about the affective landscapes of the protests and the right to memory, was also selected for the Vancouver International Film Festival's Immersed XR Market. Learn more here.

Projects by MA+P undergraduates Katie Chan and Katie Liu were selected by the Processing Foundation as part of the 2021 Google Summer of Code initiative.

Read the announcement here.

We are pleased to announce that MA+P faculty member Dr. Virginia Kuhn has just published a new book entitled "Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities." Dr. Kuhn serves as both a contributor to the volume, and co-editor with Dr. Anke Finger of the University of Connecticut.

Read more, from Open Book Publishers

An interview with Media Arts and Practice alumnus, Michael Kozlowski.

Read the full interview here.

Created by Behnaz Farahi (PhD '20), these masks are meant to empower women to communicate on their own terms by sidestepping the male gaze.

Read the full story here.

Media is just for consumption, right? But what if we told you that media can be used to envision a better future for humanity? This is what is on the agenda of Karl Baumann (PhD ’18).

Read the full interview here.