Ivy Sun ’24: Puppets in Prague
I took part in Puppet in Prague’s Marionette Carving + Performance workshop, an intense 22-day program that ran from August 8 to August 30 in the Czech Republic.
More InfoI took part in Puppet in Prague’s Marionette Carving + Performance workshop, an intense 22-day program that ran from August 8 to August 30 in the Czech Republic.
More InfoI received funding towards my honors thesis project, titled Maunakea and TMT: The Meeting Point of Scientific Exploration, Tourism, & U.S. Imperialism, that I am completing as part of my Program II (Environmental Humanities & Multimedia).
More InfoI received the Benenson Award to support Survivors Anchoring Art Narrative Garden (SAANG春风吹), a healing justice project for survivors of gender based violence and cyberbullying.
More InfoUtilizing the funding I received from my Benenson Award in the Arts, I enrolled in a jewelry design and gemstone analysis class, Jewelry Essentials, at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to complete my Applied Jewelry Professional degree.
More InfoWe, Angelica Moreno and Andrew Cao, created “Stars, Stripes, & Dinero Dreams,” a documentary focusing on the personal stories of a few Latine business owners in Minnesota.
More InfoUrban Interfaces and Urban Experiences is an interactive website that uses digital interfaces as an analog for urban landscapes.
More InfoI received Benenson Award funding to live in Los Angeles and complete a Film Production Internship at Skye Film Studios, a woman of color-owned and operated independent film and television studio.
More InfoThis past summer, I used this funding to pay the tuition of Northern Light Music Festival (NLMF) and Vivace Music Festival.
More InfoI had the privilege to learn from nightly conversations with photography students, graphic designers, ceramicists, silversmiths and more at the Haystack School of Craft in the mountains of Maine.
More InfoOur goal is to create a film that both reopens discussion about this family history once thought lost to time and to also bring the footage into conversation with the present identity of Eubigheim and the global context.
More InfoI received funding to extend my visual arts spring capstone project from a reinterpretation of Asian American Theater into a more comprehensive art book project about Chinatown and motifs of “China” in America.
More InfoI spent this summer exploring the soundscape of North Carolina. While I was living in Durham and recording music with my friends, I became interested in how noise, low-fidelity recordings, and “imperfections” can be used to create interesting music rather than hindering its quality.
More InfoThis summer, I was fortunate to participate in two programs that expanded both my musical and language skills: the American European Federation (AEF) and the Vienna International Music Academy (VIMA).
More InfoI received $2500 to compose a chapbook of flash fiction pieces exploring and critiquing the psychological archetypes of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
More InfoThis dystopian dark comedy, “Pin Drop Silence,” follows the story of a school teacher who quits his job to start a private academy.
More InfoExploring motifs in Saba Taj's "There are Gardens at the Margins" as part of an honors thesis with the Duke International Comparative Studies Department on queer Muslim environmentalisms in the United States.
More InfoPursue an acting curriculum full-time for the first time at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City.
More InfoTraining at the Ndere Cultural Centre to learn Ugandan dances and instruments as part of the Development of Music, Dance, and Drama (MDD) Program in Kalangala, Uganda.
More InfoAcquiring training and practice of the “invisible art.” A 6-week online Manhattan Editing Workshop provides a walkthrough of post-production techniques with courses and resources.
More InfoOrsolina 28, a dance program that brings together artists to not only provide opportunities of practice, but also of mindfulness of movement to the surrounding world.
More InfoA program designated for designers, engineers and sustainability advocates searching for ways to expand model-making techniques and carpentry skills with bamboo.
More InfoNavigating maintenance and engagement art museum operations at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy.
More InfoBranching into theater with introductory workshops taught by professional acting coaches in Los Angeles.
More InfoA Summer Dance Intensive with American Dance Festival (ADF) blossomed into self-discovery through modern dance and community.
More Info"The Sharpest Corners,” a story of a daughter who is estranged from her family who returns home after the passing of her father, was further developed with a trip dedicated to visiting the small town the novel takes place in.
More InfoAn upcycled fashion collection that speaks to a multi-cultural identity by using traditional Korean and American garments.
More InfoA 7-week Orchestra program at Brevard Music Center Summer Institute & Festival provides an opportunity to elevate skills as a classical cellist by participating in lessons with BMCO professors, practicing in orchestras, and string quartets.
More Info“Three Stories of Gentrification” is a book that compiles photography and stories to explore the issue of gentrification within local communities, businesses, and urban spaces.
More InfoA bilingual screenplay that tackles the issue of immigration—featuring narratives of refugees from Ukraine and Russia—was composed within a four-week summer intensive workshop at the Pargue Film School.
More InfoProgression through the first level of a self-guided mastery hand knitting program supplemented with short-term correspondence courses.
More InfoSights and sounds of the Southwest is documentary project that explores landscape of Albuquerque, NM. The project seeks to point out the acute observations that make this land and culture so unique.
More InfoIn a world where comic book characters live side by side with real people, Malachi Washington works to free comics cast in prejudice bodies while Bob McCay seeks to revive his father's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. What follows is a compelling story of reckoning, healing, and examining the racist legacy of comics and animation, told through various forms of puppetry.
More InfoThe Transfer Station is a documentary photography project that examines what our waste says about who we are as people today. As our society’s waste gets continuously transferred, The Transfer Station addresses the question: where will it all eventually go? What will become of our discarded, once-valuable possessions—and of us?
More Info“Revelations” is an audio memoir/personal narrative about leaving a cult, losing family and living with their memory. It chronicles Arlene’s effort to learn about her estranged parents outside the Jehovah’s Witness framework, without actually talking to them.
More InfoA documentary that uncovers a prevailing nostalgia for the countryside, specifically in the American West, as the rural landscape undergoes rapid transformation by urbanization, climate change, and development.
More InfoI spent the summer training in jazz and Carnatic voice traditions. As an opera singer, this allowed me to explore the pedagogical practices comparatively while studying completely new music genres.
More InfoThis summer, I wrote, analyzed, and taught Asian/American women's poetry.
More InfoThis project is a photographic documentation of the unique practice and life of physicians who treat underserved/under-resourced communities with shortages of health care in North Carolina.
More Info“Usya” is a short film project centering on my great-grandmother’s reflections on home and motherhood as she remembers fleeing her native city in the south of Russia and having children in the wake of the Second World War.
More InfoI enrolled in Upright Citizens Brigade's Improv 101 and Lesly Kahn & Co.'s monthly courses to receive professional training in improvisation and screen acting across a variety of genres.
More InfoI took a six-week film intensive at NYU Tisch this summer called Sight and Sound Filmmaking with Professor Vondie Curtis Hall. During the course, I made seven short films.
More InfoMy pre-pandemic plans involved performing orchestral and wind music in the United States and Austria at several summer festivals. Instead, I spent the summer studying orchestral scores and preparing for my first semester as a graduate student in Conducting.
More InfoWith the support of the Benenson, I took levels one and two of The Second City's Stand-Up Comedy training series.
More Info"false chronology" is an extension of my film by the same name. It is an exploration of the lingering French colonial consciousness in Algeria and the fading traditions of the Algerian Amazigh people, specifically the custom of facial tattoos.
More InfoA visual arts series based on my experience during the difference stages of 2020 through different media.
More InfoI spent the summer producing art alongside fifteen other artists at HART Haus, a Hong Kong-based shared studio space.
More InfoI wrote a full-length play titled God's Last Name, a piece written for one actor and a series of recorded voices. The play tells the story of Huck and Amy, two sisters who find themselves driving a mysterious (and possibly dangerous?) hitchhiker to St. Louis.
More InfoOriginally, I was hoping to attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College for a fiction writing workshop. Due to COVID-19, I ended up attending Strikethrough Workshop, a virtual creative writing workshop at the University of Houston, and learned from Gulf Coast Journal fiction editor Obi Umeozor.
More InfoHigh school and college students took ten photographs that described their everyday experiences with asthma and/or allergies. Depicting foods, asthma inhalers, seasonal allergies, and lifestyle adjustments, their images illustrate the multifaceted and diverse impacts of these chronic conditions.
More InfoI am writing a novel about a female scientist's fight against sea level rise and climate change.
More InfoMy project is a screenplay that follows Philip Ahn, the first Korean-American movie star, as he rises to stardom while pandering to Hollywood discrimination. This year, I will continue to refine the project through the Studio Duke program in conjunction with UTA literary partner Julien Thuan.
More InfoMy original plan for the Benenson Award was to participate in the Clazz music festival in Arcidosso, Italy. Because of the pandemic, I shifted my plans to creating a portfolio of recordings across multiple styles.
More Info"Si Parla, Si Canta" is a young artist development program held in Arona, Italy which focuses on the Italian language and the Italian style of singing. I partook in this program in the summer of 2019 and was invited to return for the 2020 edition.
More InfoA portfolio of LGBT-themed short films and feature screenplays-in-development, with the broad goal of raising the LGBT awareness of mainstream audiences.
More InfoAt the Italian language and music summer program "Si parla, si canta" in Arona, Italy, I was surrounded by others who were not only extremely talented but also very passionate about opera.
More InfoI designed and executed a collaborative mural project at PediPlace, a nonprofit pediatric clinic in Lewisville, Texas. The 5’ x 10’ artwork encourages healthy lifestyles as patients add a leaf to the tree with their initials and pounds lost, marking their achievement and motivating others to stay fit.
More InfoI spent the summer studying with the New York Film Academy in Paris, France. There, I got the chance to spend five days a week learning on-camera acting technique. After class and on weekends I acted in students' films, all in the place where cinema was born.
More InfoAs a conducting scholar at the Eastern Music Festival, I was on the podium every day conducting readings, rehearsals, sectionals, and performances of repertoire covering three full orchestral programs per week.
More InfoI attended the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company Summer Intensive located in Ga'ton, Israel, a 4-week program that was led by professional dancers from the host company and other successful companies.
More InfoThe Theatermakers Summer Intensive in directing is a highly competitive training program at the National Theater Institute. It exposes four directors every year to innovative and challenging techniques in directing, script analysis, staging and composition as they work with professional directors, actors and playwrights.
More InfoI am exploring a changing human relationship to the ocean as resource in the midst of an anthropogenically altered coastal landscape and future. I focus on the oyster, an organism experiencing reconsideration in North Carolina's coastal communities for its potential ecological and economic significance.
More InfoSupport from the Benenson Award for the Arts enabled me to travel to Venice, Italy and learn about museum work from one of the most highly regarded collections of modern art in the world. I gained invaluable experience in museum education and programming as well as collections management and curation.
More InfoMy plan for a poetic apprenticeship in Charles Olson's Open Field Poetics changed after I was granted the opportunity to present at a conference, ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 11, in Asheville, NC.
More InfoI completed a 15-minute film that uses the relationships between my extended family and the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 to consider the ways ideology is passed down through the family.
More InfoMy internship involved both administration—managing class registrations, creating email content, and developing a system to analyze attendance data for grant reporting—and assisting in up to 8 dance classes per week.
More InfoI continued my study of Kuchipudi dance under the aegis of legendary dancers Raja, Radha and Kaushalya Reddy in New Delhi, India, expanding my knowledge of the traditional repertoire while also working on new, modern choreographic ventures.
More InfoMy project highlights the nuances and ingenuity of southern cooking techniques from Italy and America and the role they play in wider conceptions of cuisine.
More InfoI attended the New York Summer Writing Institute, a four-week series of workshops and readings at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, working with Cristina Garcia to revise and generate short stories to prepare for MFA applications.
More Info