This dystopian dark comedy, “Pin Drop Silence,” follows the story of a school teacher who quits his job to start a private academy.

Exploring 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.

Pursue an acting curriculum full-time for the first time at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City.

Training 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.

Acquiring 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.

Orsolina 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.

A program designated for designers, engineers and sustainability advocates searching for ways to expand model-making techniques and carpentry skills with bamboo.

Navigating maintenance and engagement art museum operations at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy.

Branching into theater with introductory workshops taught by professional acting coaches in Los Angeles.

A Summer Dance Intensive with American Dance Festival (ADF) blossomed into self-discovery through modern dance and community.

"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.

An upcycled fashion collection that speaks to a multi-cultural identity by using traditional Korean and American garments.

A 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.

“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.

A 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.

Progression through the first level of a self-guided mastery hand knitting program supplemented with short-term correspondence courses.

Sights 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.

In 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.

The 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?

“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.

A 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.

I 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.

This summer, I wrote, analyzed, and taught Asian/American women's poetry.

This 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.

“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.

I 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.

I 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.

My 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.

With the support of the Benenson, I took levels one and two of The Second City's Stand-Up Comedy training series.

"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.

A visual arts series based on my experience during the difference stages of 2020 through different media.

I spent the summer producing art alongside fifteen other artists at HART Haus, a Hong Kong-based shared studio space.

I 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.

Originally, 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.

High 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.

I am writing a novel about a female scientist's fight against sea level rise and climate change.

My 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.

My 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.

"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.

A portfolio of LGBT-themed short films and feature screenplays-in-development, with the broad goal of raising the LGBT awareness of mainstream audiences.

At 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.

I 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.

I 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.

As 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.

I 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.

The 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.

I 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.

Support 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.

My 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.

I 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.

My 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.

I 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.

My project highlights the nuances and ingenuity of southern cooking techniques from Italy and America and the role they play in wider conceptions of cuisine.

I 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.