Student Artists in Residence
The Student Artist in Residence program is intended to support Barnard/Columbia students as they research new movement technologies, by providing space, mentorship, equipment resources, and publicity/performance opportunities.
Fall 2022-Spring 2023
Minne Atairu
Minne is an interdisciplinary Artist, and doctoral student in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College Columbia University. Minne's research emerges at the intersection of Machine Learning, Art Education and Hip-Hop Pedagogy. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence (StyleGAN, GPT-3), Minne recombines historical fragments, sculptures, texts, images and sounds to generate synthetic Benin Bronzes which often hinge on questions of repatriation, and post-repatriation. For Minne's residency at the movement lab, she will focus on developing a CGI film using motion and facial capture technologies.
Christina Duan
Christina Duan (also known as just Duan) is a senior at Barnard College studying computer science on the urban planning track. They are a designer – focusing on UI/UX, graphic, and typographic design – visual artist, dancer, and friend :) They’re learning about creative technology and hope to reframe their relationship with technology in the movement lab space and community. Recently, they’ve been immersed in traditional lion dance (even though it is very hard!), archives & zines, photography, the written word, and helping out where they can.
Duan believes that creating is an act of resilience in and of itself – I was here, I am here, and I will be here – and they are hoping to carry that sentiment into this project on the movement and purpose of lion dance. They’ve been wondering if it is possible to translate the experience of a lion dance celebration through the mediums of film, projection, sound, and code. They want to recognize that – as people of the diaspora – not everyone is born into a tradition or has a chance to engage in an artistic practice. Duan wishes to explore how to pass down traditional forms of knowledge, along with concepts of healing, love, and ritual. Let’s live and create pathways of joy!
Rosie Elliott
Rosie Elliott (they/she) is a junior at Barnard College majoring in Dance and Gender Studies. They work within the realms of dance and film, taking particular interest in how the two mediums enhance each other.
She is thrilled to be joining the Movement Lab Student Artist in Residence cohort this year. Through physical and intellectual experiments, Rosie will investigate what it would mean to remain in a constant state of non-productive play. In this interactive piece, Rosie asks audience members to embrace mess and play as they watch creative destruction and utopian world-building collide.
Yilin Li
Yilin Li is a senior at Barnard College and a storyteller using movement as the medium. She is interested in investigating the unique language of movement and the diverse expressiveness of the body. Her previous research and practice focused on creative dance for children to enhance problem-solving skills. At the movement lab, she explores how VR environments can provide prompts for dancers to design partial (e.g., body articulation) and full range of movement (e.g., level changes, space awareness, weight shifts). She is eager to probe into the interplay between human and technology through the perspective of a dancer.
Grace Li
Grace Li (BC'24, Computer Science and English) is interested in world building and the formation of shared language. With a background in ceramics and photography, Grace is interested in form and creating languages through sequence and symbols. During their residency with the Movement Lab, Grace is exploring their experience growing up and generational storytelling and mythology through photographs, archival research, and movement sequences. Guided by the themes of memory, nostalgia, and family, Grace is guided by the question: "what does it mean to forget?"
Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon
Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon is a 22-year-old American, Italian choreographer and a Senior at Barnard pursuing a self-designed major that combines Dance, Evolutionary Biology, and Literature. She was raised in Paris, France and trained in ballet. The study of animal behavior and her choreographic goal is to understand what makes us inherently human. Art and science are both ways of holding a mirror up to ourselves. She wrote her thesis on the evolution of art and storytelling in humans by looking at mating behaviors in birds. Her work in the lab will be a continuation of this exploration into how and why we, as a species, tell stories and explore how our relatives in the animal kingdom can tell us about ourselves.
Liz Radway
Liz Radway (she/her, Columbia College ‘24) is a computer scientist, creative technologist, and dancer with a specific interest in intelligent systems. Working at the intersection of art and engineering, she is interested in the ways our human biases can shape algorithms to imitate the same behavior; particularly, from the heuristics we chose and data we possess.
Nami Weatherby
Nami is a senior at Barnard studying Sociology and Ethnomusicology. Her work considers relationships between the fluid circulation of musics, social imagination, and survival in contexts of asymmetrical power. She is interested in exploring the potential of aurality to displace the distortive visual frame and articulate alternative, multiplicitous narratives about self and place. Nami is currently working on an installation illuminating the under-considered intimacies between peoples touched by a global network of nuclear violence. During her residency, Nami will explore means of bringing together aurality, visuality, and movement in ways that—like radiation itself—are boundless and diffuse, making audible relationalities that exist beyond the material.
Chunming Zheng
Chunming Zheng is a current student of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia. With her deep love for oral history and genuine interest in art, she hopes to bridge the two things together in her future projects. She believes that the voices and images of the ones who lived it has the incomparable power of sincerity. And artistic approaches will welcome a broader audience and inspire lasting contemplation. She is currently working on an oral history project focusing on disability studies. Chunming is thrilled to join the Movement Lab and explore the possibilities to deliver it with VR technology.
Fall 2021-Spring 2022
Sophie Paquette
Sophie Paquette is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Bloomington, Indiana. She works primarily in text and moving image, and is excited to explore projection, motion capture, and 3D animation with the Movement Lab during her Student Artist Residency. She is interested in muscle memory and the movements we store in the body, specifically as this relates to her new favorite way to bang up her knees: roller skating at the skatepark! Sophie is currently a junior studying Visual Arts at Columbia College in New York City. Check out more of her work at https://www.whereissophiepaquette.com
Madi O'Halloran
Morningside Heights local, Madison O’Halloran, is a movement-based performer, creator and thinker, in her senior year at Columbia College studying Dance and Political Science. Through their work, they bring together disconnected political and performance theoretical frameworks, allowing tensions and alignments to fall where they may.
Madi is excited to be a Student-Artist in Residence this Spring where she plans on investigating ephemerality as a mode of connection. The movement lab has been a site of inspiration, creation, imagination and play for Madi, they cannot wait to expand this collaboration through an immersive, sensory exhibit.
Sophia Fung
Hailing from Hong Kong and Paris, France, Sophia is a senior at Barnard College studying Art History and Dance. On campus, she is the president of CoLab Performing Arts Collective and is an editor for the Columbia University Journal of Art History. During her residency at the Movement Lab, she is researching and developing her Dance creative thesis, exploring what it means to experience a work of art in a critical and active manner. She hopes to integrate her research as a dancer and choreographer with a theoretical framework from her Art History thesis on immersive and experiential art.
Campbell Ives
Campbell Ives is a senior at Barnard, majoring in Dance with a minor in psychology. Campbell is the VP of CoLab performing arts collective and is also an intern at Artichoke Dance Company. They are investigating the contemporary significance of emergent strategy and improvisation in the lineage of postmodern dance in her thesis research. A question she plans to explore during the residency is: How can the sensual input of our surroundings shape our corporeal experience of dread and grief and vice versa? Campbell plans to take an interdisciplinary approach to the creative process incorporating collage, screendance and poetry in addition to dance.
Gioia Von Staden
Hi! My name is Gioia. I’m a senior at Barnard and originally from Michigan. My background in movement and dance began in ballet and then moved into more contemporary training. Movement has been a constant challenge, love, healer and necessity throughout my life. I will be using projection to research how environment affects the perception of movement and vice versa in the Movement Lab.
Alessandra Ganz
Alessandra is a senior at Barnard College studying Dance and Studio Architecture. She is a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, and visual artist with a keen interest in combining her architectural design and physical practices.
As a student artist in residence, Al is excited to explore various methods of live feed and video projections to incorporate into her Senior Creative Thesis, a contemporary solo choreographed by Vim Vigor’s Jason Cianciulli and Shannon Gillen. She also looks forward to experimenting with architectural drawings and logic-driven choreography in the Movement Lab. As a student of architecture in a world facing climate crisis, Al is working toward unpacking our human relationship with the built environment as well as developing strategies to combat environmental destruction through art. Al has a passion for drawing, painting, choreographic diagrams and postmodern dance.
Eli Duncan
Eli Duncan is a senior studying visual arts and architecture at Barnard. His work is installation-based and combines traditional painting methods with sound, virtual reality, photogrammetry, and sculpture. Throughout his research in the movement lab, he will explore themes of queerness and nostalgia in relation to spaces of performance and domesticity.
Fall 2020-Spring 2021
Nkima Stephenson
Nkima, a rising senior in Columbia College, is thrilled to be joining the Movement Lab as a Student Artist-in-Residence! She is looking to explore empathy and human connection through the lens of dance and movement; with some of her principal questions being: how can we build trust and mutual understanding with storytelling? how does technology interact and relate to this inquiry?
She is also interested in bringing more non-dancers into the space and pushing the boundaries of what dance/movement "should" look like. As a neuroscience major and a dancer, she hopes to use what she has learned about psychology and movement to better tell stories and work on community building through workshops, interactive performances, and movement installations.
Perry Parsons
Perry O. Parsons (they/them/theirs) is a senior at Barnard College studying theatre with a concentration in directing. They are a director, writer, and choreographer whose work is concerned with rejects, radicals, deviants, and queers, who love, rage, dance, sing, fail, and hope. They have called California, Washington, Louisiana, Wisconsin, and most recently, New York, home. They are currently directing What Every Girl Should Know by Monica Byrne for the Barnard Theatre department’s annual Senior Thesis Festival.
As part of their residency, they are interested in exploring fatigue and how it binds us to the limits of our body. A common side-effect of being alive and often categorized as a symptom of “laziness,” fatigue is a natural response to hatred and greed in our society and covid in our bodies. Perry is interested in exploring fatigue in their own life and body and the lives and bodies of their peers and neighbors.
You can learn more about Perry and their work at https://perryoparsons.com/.
Elise Logan
Elise Logan is a senior at Barnard College studying Dance and Interdisciplinary Race & Ethnicity Studies. She is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and activist from the Los Angeles area. She is looking to explore the concept of memoir and how documenting movement can be a method for storytelling in order to reveal truths about the personal knowledge of the mover, their reality, and the times they live in. In the spirit of alumna Ntozake Shange (‘70), the creator of choreopoem, Elise is excited to explore choreopoems and screendances as sites of movement memoir, narrative, resistance, and community-building, using a collaborative and feminist approach to research.
She has choreographed, filmed, directed, produced, and edited two pieces for Barnard Screendance titled, “In Your Curve I Found Mine” and “The Light Moved Us,” along with performing in other students’ films as well. Her choreographic debut was her piece titled “Forgive Me My Sins,” also co-choreographed by her colleague Carla Melaco. All 3 pieces were filmed and produced through the Movement Lab. Elise and Carla performed the piece for The Blackmotherhood Project, the “Bold Black @ Barnard” 2019 exhibit, and for the Barnard Dance Department’s Composition showing.
Fall 2019-Spring 2020
Mohar Kalra
Mohar Kalra (SEAS ’21, Electrical Engineering) is a cartoonist, filmmaker and creative technologist. As both an artist and an engineer, he is fascinated by how interactive technologies can interrogate audiences’ perception of the seemingly immutable world around them.
His research will focus on confronting audiences with the intangible connections between objects, people and their surroundings. His primary project is an interactive AR experience built with haptic feedback and motion tracking technologies to explore how, in environments increasingly mediated by purely visual stimuli, audiences can reconnect with physical sensation as a means of experiencing their world. His other project will consider how largely anonymous cityscapes can be personalized to better reflect the many lives and experiences that occur within. He plans to use wearables to allow users to frame their experiences of New York within those of their fellow anonymous passersby. Ultimately, he hopes to leverage technology to pull users back into the implicit sensation, movement and information that surrounds them every day.
Emma Lu
Emma Lu (CC ‘20) works primarily in printmaking, ceramics, lion dance, and computing, among other mediums. A student of embodied practices, they are interested in how we might move together with care and play. They are (slowly but surely) expanding their fields of study to include acoustics, Web 1.0, stretching, and karaoke.
Spring 2019
Kosta Karakashyan
Kosta Karakashyan (CC' 19, Dance) is a Bulgarian director, choreographer, and writer. Using performance, film, choreography, and text, he investigates how to nurture tenderness, empathy, and intimacy in an increasingly anxious, violent, and political world.
He is researching two upcoming spring projects in the Movement Lab: a series of audiovisual vignettes on desire and joy (in collaboration with composer Jude Icarus, projection artist Sophie Visscher, and dramaturg Hannah Story Brown) for CoLab's SplitBill Evening, shared with fellow Dance major Nadia Halim, and his Senior Creative Thesis, a flamenco/contemporary solo investigating anxiety and burnout using improvisation and biosensing responsive lighting, co-choreographed with Melinda Marquez and in technical and creative collaboration with the Movement Lab's Studio Manager and Technical Designer Guy de Lancey. Kosta's latest project was the documentary dance film Waiting for Color about the ongoing LGBTQ+ persecution in the Chechnya.
Allie Costa
Allison (Allie) Costa (BC’ 19, Dance and Computer Science) is a New York City based dancer, poet, burgeoning choreographer and computer scientist focusing on human-computer interaction.
Fascinated with finding ways to visualize the intangible, she is experimenting with using technology to expand our understanding of human movement potential, as well as using graphics and dance to physicalize data, the immaterial information “stored” in computers. This Spring, using the Movement Lab, she will be investigating inherent movement inclinations in dancers. Specifically, she will examine improvisation and how, if given feedback via technology, a dancer can adjust their movement to minimize redundancy and expand their range. She hopes to unite the two universal languages of dance and technology to engage a larger audience and breakdown the gap between these two symbiotic fields.