Tiffany Mi MFA'25 (she/her) is a poet, hybrid writer, and educator interested in collective memory and the archive. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest and Nimrod International Journal; and she is the recipient of the Mark Baumer Prize for Language Art, John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing. A Kundiman South Regional Co-Chair, she hails from Texas and currently lives in Providence on Narragansett land, where she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Mi’s project, Collage, is a site of collaboration and community, that grounds Mi's two-pronged project: 1) a book-length assemblage of writings engaging with her family archives, and; 2) a community arts+writing workshop series in collaboration with D.C.-based artist shurjo mukhi, culminating in a Personal/Oral Histories Card Deck—an interactive keepsake made with, by, and for participants. With its fragmented, hybrid, layered, and intertextual nature, the collage form resists hegemonic historical narratives; creates space for multiple voices to exist and interact; and produces dynamic understandings of the legacies from which we emerge and toward which we are constantly arriving.

Maiya Jannah Ramsaroop '25 (she/her) is a writer, director, actor, and producer, whose work endeavors to shed light on the intersection between identity and the intimate experiences of being alive. At Brown, she is pursuing honors degrees in both Modern Culture & Media and Literary Arts, and for the third year in a row, Maiya is serving as the Festival Director of the Ivy Film Festival—the largest student-run film festival in the world—where she works to nurture the next generation of film professionals and build inclusive pathways into the industry. She is a recent alum of the Television Academy Internship Program, where she received the opportunity to work with ABC Signature Studios as a Production Admin/Post-Production Intern, and later went on to represent the Bob Bennett Future Leadership Program as a trophy presenter at the 76th Primetime Emmys. She is passionate about opening up the entertainment industry to new perspectives, and is very excited to share Elegy, and the women it honors, with the world.

Ramsaroop’s project, Elegy is a feature-length narrative drama film that details the interior lives of intergenerational Caribbean women. Traversing across time in Queens, New York, from the 80s to modern day, the film pays homage to the vibrant, gritty Guyanese community that lives right off the A train stop at Lefferts Boulevard and Liberty Avenue. The film explores the necessity of female relationships within historically marginalized communities, and celebrates the spaces women carve for one another. It grapples with themes of maturation, sacrifice, agency, and grief - uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, and friends that feel like sisters, discover and rediscover one another, as time fluctuates between them.

Davis Jackson '24 (he/him) is a multimedia artist, animator, and short film director whose work aims to illuminate deeply personal stories of change, young adulthood, and trauma. He strives to push the limits of various media to find illuminating intersections between art, storytelling, technology, and science. While pursuing a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Modern Culture and Media at Brown, he has directed three live-action short films and co-created two 3D-animated shorts. His first project as writer/director is set to premiere at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth in April 2024, and his most recent project, Commencement, is currently wrapping up production in Providence, RI. In 2023, he was a Technical Director Intern in the Pixar Undergraduate Program, and he credits Pixar films with shaping much of his early view of the world. He loves cats, the beach, and good friends. 

Jackson’s project, Lost in the Forest, is a short documentary about seasonal patterns in Maine as experienced by his grandmother, Joan, who grew up in rural Maine and now lives there with vascular dementia. Part live-action and part stop-motion-style 3D animation, this project explores how the patterns of his grandmother's life persist beyond her explicit memories in extrapersonal archives, discovered through Joan's daughters' stories of her life in the forests and beaches of Maine. This documentary project illustrates the virtue of turning to nature and storytelling when faced with a diagnosis that threatens the patterns and memories that affirm one's identity.

Kathy Wu '24 (she/they) is a cross-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Providence RI (Narragansett land). She works across textiles, code, book arts, and language. Her work is interested in scientific epistemology, nomenclatures, land markers, and histories of copper. Her art, design, and writing have been published by The New School, New River. She has forthcoming work anthologized in Nightboat and Fonograf. She has taught computational poetics and community art at RISD, CUNY, Brown, as well as given workshops at Rutgers, UNC, Northeastern.

Wu’s project, Text, textile, technology, is about how much computation is like weaving, a memory of labor and raw materials. Her mother taught her about copper, and how it allows circuitry to “semi-conduct.” She has been holding semi-conduction as a metaphor for complex global connectivity. This project will be an Arizona-based community program on geopoetics, land, and memory for young artists and writers, which will culminate in a group publication. The project also includes solo travel to the American Southwest, where she will ground her site-specific research on circuitry’s labor history and expand existing poetry and copper weavings.

Laney Day (They/Them/Theirs) is a multidisciplinary indigenous (Cree/Turtle Mountain Chippewa) artist from Montana. They are a writer, animator, painter, beader, problem solver, and friend whose work focuses on generational relationships, ideas of home, and indigenous humor as a form of resiliency. They studied Ethnic Studies at Brown, and Painting at RISD and continue to work and live in Providence RI.

The Light that Makes Us is a project that references Indigenous histories of (mis)representations, beadwork, and generational teachings. Designed as a way to stretch the use of material, to build onto and carry tradition, and to consider what it means to only be seen in entirety from far away- The project is to create large scale beaded portraits of Native people made up of Red, Green, Blue, and opaque Black size 11 glass seed beads that when lit from behind mimics the technology of a digital display creating a full spectrum of color.

Alison C. Rollins (she/her) holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. In 2021, she was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Much of Rollins’ work celebrates the Black American experience and the ways in which cataloging, technology, information, and identities are inextricably entangled. Her work explores the fragile line between "human" and "nonhuman" beings, encouraging a social justice focused art practice that seeks to collaborate with plants, animals, and robots.

Quartet for the End of Time is a four-prong project that consists of a poetry collection, a visual art installation with the capacity to be activated, a series of performance art pieces, and a libretto titled Black Bell. This project incorporates and melds Rollins' work across disciplines, including but not limited to: literary arts, metalwork at the Providence Steel Yard, sculpture, letterpress printing, and sonics. Points of reference for the project include visual artist Nick Cave, the music of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Sun Ra & His Arkestra's Sleeping Beauty, and Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, as well as 19th century historical figures such as Henry "Box" Brown, Lear Green, and Harriet Jacobs. An innovative meditation on Black fugitivity as well as concepts of queer temporality, Quartet for the End of Time provides imaginative interventions surrounding how subject and object positions might be destabilized, and how, in turn, subjectivity and society might be reciprocally shaped with the potential for more liberatory possibilities. 

Nina Fletcher (she/her) is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Oregon. She has exhibited work in Providence, RI; Joshua Tree, CA; Los Angeles, CA; and Miami, FL. Her experimental public artwork, On Sand, was distributed across Providence in December 2021. Most recently, she was Director of Photography on the forthcoming short film Good Morning, I Love You (dir. Scott Magid) and is wrapping production on her documentary project Only Fiction, about the Mojave Desert in Southern California, which is expected to be released in May 2022. Fletcher believes in the interconnectedness of all things and watches Twilight (2008) when she’s homesick.

Our project is the story of human-nature entanglement in Siskiyou County, California, a crash site where humans are ever more bound up with an idol of regulated and criminalized nature: the marijuana plant. Increasingly, local tensions over marijuana farming, water usage, rural identity, and political power are reaching a fever pitch. Against the backdrop of the summer harvest, this documentary will critically observe the languishing and compromised county government and call into question the efficacy of criminalization as a political strategy. Theo Whitcomb will co-direct.

Kate Hao (she/her) is a poet and fiction writer, cultural worker, shy Leo, ex-pianist, soup enthusiast, aspiring morning person. Her writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and more. She is currently completing the master's degree in Public Humanities at Brown.

foundings+findings is an archival activation project for the pandemic era. Through a workshop series and a digital travelog that draws on found poetry as its guiding method, this project will embark on a shared search for meaning in Asian American movement archives across the country. In its travels, it attends to the particularities of local histories in order to question the meaning of present-day Asian American identity. Using clippings of the past as communal source material, foundings+findings centers collective learning and discovery in the process of negotiating history and envisioning liberatory futures.

Rai Mckinley Terry is an audiovisual archivist, artist and scholar. They are pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Humanities at Brown University where they are a fellow at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Black Arts and Social Theory from Brandeis University. They have worked in moving image archives for 4 years and with multimedia arts for over a decade. Recently they held a fellowship with the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Their work largely explores the nature of archives as it relates to Black Feminist Studies and Queer theory. They are committed to engaging the ephemeral natures of history to explore, rupture and expand Black queer realities. 

Vibratory Tape: Black *Beyonding is a series of audiovisual vignettes that utilize Black queer theoretical frameworks and archival theory toward illumination of the importance of the ephemeral, vibratory moments of Black life which are rich with information.

MC Vigilante (they/he) is an antidisciplinary art-making organism based in Providence, Rhode Island. MC’s digital paintings and experimental animations use compression as abstraction, presenting immaterial space as a site of potentiality. MC has recently exhibited work at the List Art Center, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Brown Science Center in Providence, RI. Their debut solo exhibition, QUANTA: Reflections on [Im]material Selfhood, opened in March 2022 at the List Art Center. MC was born in upstate New York and was raised by the internet. MC is graduating with degrees in Visual Art and Biology from Brown University, where they are currently an animator at SciToons.

Seven Months or Two Wet Feet is a place-based exploration of power, abandonment, and refuge along the Erie Canal. Painterly digital images and experimental computer animations will present a contemporary, multihyphenate vision of the canal, informed by personal experiences and historical research. MC will travel the entirety of the Erie Canal, documenting thousands of sites and scenes using digital images, video, and sound. Through a transformative process of algorithmic image manipulation, these field recordings will become richly detailed compositions that blur the digital-tactile divide. In 2023, Seven Months or Two Wet Feet will be published as a gallery exhibition and an accompanying artist book.

Florence Wallis is a British-American writer, musician, researcher and performer. Her work focuses on fungi, ecology, memory and the nature and history of language, through experimental poetics, music composition, production and performance. She engages consistently in co-creation as a productive and resistant modality. 

An immersive, multi-media mycelial opera exploring the story of a Forager’s descent into our ecological crisis. Fungi have existed in our ecosystem for billions of years - they offer a complex and multi-directional understanding of our world that transcends linear progress. Inspired by this scale of time, I reach into my own translations of 5,000 year old Mesopotamian myths and their knowledge of environmental disaster. Fungi provide a means to create from within catastrophe so that we can re-imagine our future, our deep past and what we can do right now.

Jo Stewart (she/her) is a poet and theater maker. She uses a combination of gesture, voice, and text to make poetry and performance that investigates entrapment, borders, and freedom. Jo has previously been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Azule, the Old American Can Factory, the Anderson Center at Tower View, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and others. She was a recent member of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, rehearsing and touring “Cellular Songs” from 2017-2019. 

Un- is a book length serial poem that centers the life of a girl-child named un. This work investigates the prefix as an independent formulation—one with a destabilizing gift. Un- sows disorder in a language and social order for which “wholeness” relies on the exclusion of a non-being Other or  antithesis. Central to these poems is a preoccupation with self-recovery as it correlates with deliberate kinship and affinity for land. By joining this writing project with the hands-on teachings of land stewards and practitioners of plant medicine, I seek to find new grammars of selfhood and community formation that is rooted in becoming naturalized to place as medicine for an un- free world. 

Victoria Xu is an anti-disciplinary artist whose work explores the potential of storytelling to create room for counter-histories and counter-archives. The power in re-membered and uplifted history drives their work though filmmaking, installation, and performance. Currently, they are part of a documentary team working with PrYSM, a Providence-based grassroots organization addressing Southeast Asian community needs such as over policing and deportation. They are working from a community-based mode of documentary filmmaking to uplift the Pheap family’s desire to tell their story and fight for justice in the wake of state violence. They are expected to graduate from Brown University in 2021 and are excited to develop a practice of collaborative, critical, and empowering art-making.

Nearly two years ago, Channara Tom “Philly” Pheap was murdered by Officer Dylan Williams of the Knoxville Police, with no further recourse or disciplinary action. In the immediate aftermath local media outlets defamed him publicly, manipulating the memory of his life into a false image that justified this state violence. This documentary not only reclaims Philly’s memory but highlights the important collaboration between local BLM activists and the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) to find justice. Our documentary process will support Philly’s family and highlights a solidarity between the movements that continue their fight.