Students
Kristy H.A. Kang is an award winning media artist and a Creative Director with The Labyrinth Project—a research initiative on interactive narrative and database documentary at USC that collaborates internationally with experimental artists, scholars, scientists and cultural institutions to produce a range of digital media projects. These works have been exhibited at the Getty Center, Ars Electronica, ACM Siggraph, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and received numerous awards including the Jury Award for New Forms at the 2004 Sundance Online Film Festival. Kang has lectured at universities in Asia, Europe and the Middle East and is an Adjunct Faculty at USC’s Division of Animation and Digital Arts in the School of Cinematic Arts where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Inter-divisional Media Arts and Practice. She intends to synthesize her experience in animation and digital arts with scholarly practice to explore the intersections of animation and interactive media in East Asia.
[ See the USC Graduate School profile on Kristy here ]
Veronica Paredes received her M.A. degree from the Critical Studies division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. While a graduate student at USC, she has been a key organizer of several events that demonstrate a commitment to an expanded conception of academic practice as something that can and should reach beyond the boundaries of traditional education. These include the USC Provost funded TransFormations series, an ambitious four-part series of conferences, screenings, workshops and explorations that took place during the 2006-07 academic year. In 2007 she was also a co-organizer of the School of Cinematic Arts' first annual graduate student conference. In addition, she has worked as a teaching assistant for Multimedia in the USC Core and Open Play, programs invested in multimedia literacy and expression. Her current work explores challenges to commonly held assumptions surrounding the relationships between technology, race, gender, labor and history.
Jen Stein completed her masters degree in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College at the University of London in 2002. For the past three years, she has worked as the program coordinator of the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, while doing graduate coursework in Architecture, Geography and mobile media design, which resulted in the acclaimed mobile phone-based project, Tracking Agama, an alternate reality experience set in Downtown Los Angeles. Stein's MA dissertation, Popular Technoculture, presented her research on the popularization of information communication technology at the intersection of postmodern culture and the information age. Her background in media design and theory makes Stein uniquely positioned to think critically about the meaning of space and place in the urban landscape, while practically exploring how ubiquitous computing will affect our experience of everyday life in the physical world.
Lauren Fenton received her BA in philosophy with highest honors from Swarthmore College in 2006. Her fascination for media and film, as well as her interest in aesthetics and phenomenology informed her desire to explore the possibilities of the image as a medium for conveying information, advancing arguments and expressing truths in the context of the capacity of the image (and the moving image) to emulate sensorial or 'lived' experience. Through her subsequent work in visual ethnography she examined the process of constructing multicultural narratives and 'reproducing' collective cultural narrative agency in film, culminating in her being awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the year 2006-2007 to make a documentary about the impact of post-Soviet globalization on the spiritual values of the Altaians, an indigenous people in Siberia. As a first-year PhD student in the Media Arts and Practice program she is dedicated to breaking new ground in redefining the documentary film's relationship to filmic fiction and thinking about how visual argumentation or storytelling-based analysis can be enhanced by the interactive experience.
Susana Ruiz is a film and media artist whose research interests include the intersections between art, journalism, game design, ethics and cinema. Susana developed “Darfur Is Dying,” a game for social change, which received critical acclaim from experts, won numerous awards, and helped garner the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ prestigious Governors Award. The game was said to be one of the best presentations of life in Darfur by Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Her most recently completed project, “RePlay: Finding Zoe” is a game addressing gender stereotyping and has won the Ashoka Changemakers global competition Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care. Social issue-driven games, gameplay metaphors, activist digital art, user-centric design and future cinema are Susana’s principal interests. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division in the School of Cinematic Arts, where she is also conducting her dissertation studies. She recently co-founded a game design studio, Take Action Games, and you can learn more of her work, collaborations and awards at www.takeactiongames.com.
Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a professional background in screenwriting, filmmaking and experience design. His academic resume includes a BA in Cultural Studies from McGill University, an MFA in Film and Video from York University and a residency at the Canadian Film Centre. He is the co-founder of Dynasty Games, an independent game design studio, and is the originator of numerous transmedia projects, including The Black Sea Tapes, a long-term Alternate Reality Game funded in part by the Canada Council for the Arts, and The Trilogy Project, a layered-reality experience incorporating multiple films, websites, small-press publications and other media artifacts. In the first year of his Ph.D., Watson's expertise in transmedia storytelling and ubiquitous computing brought him into collaboration with researchers at USC and Keio University to develop a variety of web and mobile storytelling and filmmaking games. His doctoral research focuses on investigating how an increasingly mobile, ubiquitous and interoperable communications infrastructure can enable new forms of storytelling and social engagement.
