IMA MFA Fall 2024 Thesis Show

Saturday, December 14th 3:00pm-9:30pm
film, animation, audio, installation, augmented reality, interactive media
Intermission 5-6pm

Hunter College, North Building, 4th Floor Lang Auditorium + TV Studio
Entrance: 69th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues

RSVP here

Thesis Projects:

Equity’s Garden  
by Nicole Barreras
interactive game

Equity’s Garden is a narrative-driven video game that explores themes of fairness, inclusivity, and community dynamics through the framework of a community garden.  Through branching storylines, it illustrates how equality and equity can intersect or diverse, emphasizing the power of dialogue and equitable solutions in fostering community. 
advisors: Ricardo Miranda, Poyen Wang, Enmanuel De Oleo

Dear Cheri
by Chen-Hao Chang
film 

After discovering three valentines written by someone named Cheri in a thrift store, the director embarks on a personal journey to understand his fractured past, hoping that tracing these lost connections will help him reconcile with his own unresolved memories.
advisors: Reiko Tahara, Poyen Wang, Ivone Margulies

Serious Music with Bea Witkin 
by Megan Hattie Stahl
audio walk

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side. This immersive musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime West End Avenue residence. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 composition by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music comes from, begins and ends. 
advisors: Rachel Stevens, Michael Gitlin, Jess Shane

Burn  
by Debbie Rolf
film

A hybrid documentary examining burnout through interviews and lumen photography. Burn seeks to look beyond the clinical definition of burnout, and uses lumen prints of common workplace objects to illustrate the transformative experience of being burned out. 
advisors: Kelly Anderson, Christina Freeman, Michael Gitlin

Free Fall
by Mariam Bolkvadze
multimedia installation

Free Fall delves into the horrifying depths of infant abduction in Georgia, shedding light on this systemic issue that has plagued the nation. Through video projections, set design, interviews and sound, Free Fall is an immersive experience that honors the stories of those affected and the advocates for the families of missing children. 
advisors: Reiko Tahara, Andrew Demirjian, Andrew Lund

You Get That From Me
by Robyn Duncan
film 

You Get That From Me is a mixed-media animation film that integrates personal portraits, allegorical maps and digital collages to illustrate the personalities of each of the artist’s family members and crafts a memoir of a pivotal period in the artist’s life; the transition from childhood to motherhood. 
advisors: Andrew Lund, Rachel Stevens, Natalie Conn

Susceptible Specimens
by Audrey Hufsmith
augmented reality

An augmented reality museum vitrine containing artifacts that allude to the historical and anthropocentric origins of the U.S. conservation movement, natural history habitat dioramas, nature documentary film, and the possible evolution of ecocentric wildlife conservation. It focuses on extinct North American birds, Theodore Roosevelts’s hunting legacy, Carl Akeley’s contribution to nature documentary, and a diorama representing Project Puffin which is a scientific endeavor to reintroduce Atlantic puffins to the islands in the Gulf of Maine after being hunted to local extinction in the late 1800s.  
advisors: Ricardo Miranda, Poyen Wang, Andrew Demirjian