Current Fellows

Antigoni (b.1993) is an artist, filmmaker, and performer from Greece, constructing speculative worlds that pulse between reality and fiction, centering a chorus of queer, femme, and non-human voices existing in the margins of techno-capitalist regimes. They often conduct archival research into sidelined histories or draw inspiration from the potent stories of those living intimately around them—stories they translate into poetic, hybrid films that rupture normative perceptions of time, space, and being. Through a deliberate fusion of live-action performance and immersive CGI environments, Antigoni destabilizes boundaries between fantasy and materiality, creating spaces of sensory disruption and transformative potential. Other times, they create the radical spaces for these kinds of stories to be told and flourish, utilizing speculative storytelling, and participatory sculptural installations designed to foster emergent forms of collective imagination. Collaboration—with artists, friends, lovers, and machines—is fundamental to their practice, grounding their work in relational and intimate methodologies that propose visionary reconfigurations of social, political, ecological, and economic systems. During the CEMA fellowship they will work on an interdisciplinary project about reimagining human/robot/planetary interaction through soft intelligences, affective vulnerabilities, and eco-queer relationalities.

Antigoni is currently a Ph.D candidate in Media Arts and Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts. They hold an MFA in Media Arts from UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture under a Fulbright Scholarship and a BFA in Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece. Their work has been exhibited at prestigious venues such as the Arnolfini Center for Contemporary Arts in Bristol, Honor Fraser Gallery, REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, UCR Arts x LACMA as part of PST Art, among others.

During the CEMA fellowship Antigoni will work on an interdisciplinary project about reimagining human/robot/planetary interaction through soft intelligences, affective vulnerabilities, and eco-queer relationalities. It is a film installation featuring performances with a robot dog and experimental interviews with roboticists who are using these technologies in subversive ways. The film will be shot in 16mm as an attempt to soften the rigidity, cleanness, and accelerationist language often associated with these technologies.

Avila do Espirito Santo (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a multi-disciplinary artist specializing in music and sound. He graduated with honors from Berklee College of Music in 2014 with a B.A in Professional Music and Latin Percussion and is currently an MFA candidate at the USC Roski School of Art & Design. He is a drummer and professor of Capoeira through Capoeira Batuque in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil and in Los Angeles. Avila is also an Awo of Isese Ifa, initiated into the Adesanya lineage of Ode Remo in Nigeria.

He uses rhythm as the foundation and guiding philosophy for his music compositions, writing, image making and performance work. He is interested in the ways that drumming deepens our relationship to the natural world, diasporic movement and to non-linear time.

Avila has had his music commissioned for projects with A24, LACMA, HBO, Sony Music, Ghetto Film School and Creative Capital amongst others. He has collaborated with other artists such as Khalil Joseph, Terence Nance and Allison Saar. He has also been a recipient of multiple grants, fellowships and awards including the Pioneer Works Artist Residency, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Artist Residency, Sony Music Emerging Composers Fellowship and was a semifinalist for the Sundance Composer’s Lab. Avila was recently awarded a USC Dornsife Center for Ethnographic Media Arts (CEMA) Fellowship for 2026-2027.

Chantal Eyong is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and creative producer based in Los Angeles, CA. As a child of immigrants, she is drawn to third culture stories, memory work, and how diasporic methods of care translate into emerging technologies. Chantal has worked with National Book Award winning poet Robin Coste Lewis and the studio MakeMake, and has received support from the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, Amazon, the PlayStation Paths scholarship. She has facilitated community film projects with students at Long Beach and participated in creative research groups with LACE and the Mozilla Foundation. Her work has been featured on PBS, screened at international festivals, and recognized by ScreenCraft, the Atlanta Film Festival, and the Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards, where she was nominated for co-producing the documentary “Thailand Untapped.” Chantal holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of California, Riverside, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California.

David de Rozas is a filmmaker, media artist, and educator based in Los Angeles. His practice investigates the politics of memory, focusing on places, bodies, and materialities as sites shaped by historical authority, regimes of truth, and institutions of power. His award-winning films have screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, Kassel DocFest, and the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. Recent projects have been exhibited at MoMA (New York), Getty PST, the Visual Arts Center in Austin, and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. De Rozas has been a Flaherty Seminar Fellow (2019), VIA Art Fund Production Grantee (2020), artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), and USC Annenberg Fellow since 2023. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Media Arts and Practice program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

David Kelley’s work traces the hidden ecologies of global infrastructure—from deep-sea mining and the Silk Road to Alberta’s oil sands and the extraction of rare earth elements in China. Working across film, photography, installation, and sculpture, he explores how technology, modernity, ecology, and memory operate as interwoven systems of mediation. His practice draws on essay film, experimental ethnography, and experimental theater, using form as a site for affective experience, ambiguity, and transgression.

Kelley approaches research as an aesthetic process, privileging sensorial and speculative modes over purely discursive ones. His projects often involve site-specific production, archival research, and the integration of everyday objects and theatrical constructions within immersive environments. Scientific specimens—borrowed from natural history collections or reimagined in glass, ceramic, and stone—anchor his installations in material history while opening space for surreal and speculative encounters.

His work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; and The Bank, Shanghai. Upcoming presentations include LACMA in Los Angeles and the Global Visions FotoFest Biennial 2026 in Houston. Kelley holds an MFA from UC Irvine and was a 2010–11 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow.

Eneos Çarka is a filmmaker, media artist, and researcher. His films have screened at numerous festivals, galleries, and cultural events such as IDFA, HotDocs, FIPADOC where he received Tënk Award, Los Angeles Filmforum, Venice Architecture Biennale and more. He received the FIPRESCI Award in 2023 for his MFA film “The Silence of The Banana Trees” and served as a Jury Member in the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary in 2022. His first feature documentary “Another Day” debuted at IDFA Luminous section in 2023 where it received a Best First Feature Nomination and won the main award at DokuFest. He is an alumnus of the DocNomads MFA program in Creative Documentary and is currently pursuing artistic research at the University of Southern California.

Beyond The Blue Mountains Is The Sea documents the Albanian Tosk people’s deep connection to the Vjosa River, threatened by corporate and state-driven exploitation. This meditative docufiction explores their traditions and rituals as acts of resilience, highlighting struggles that resonate with global Indigenous cultures against extractivist economies and preserving cultural memory amid ecological pressures.

Faye Yan Zhang ‘s multi-media, multi-disciplinary work uses animation and ethnographic filmmaking practices to examine memory and politics across China and the United States.

Currently, she is developing Memoirs of a Barefoot Doctor, an anthology of films and immersive experiences based on her grandmother’s handwritten memoir. The first chapter of the anthology translates personal archival materials into an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that traces the divergent trajectory of two sisters’ lives during China’s Communist reform era. It explores the decline of footbinding, the development of rural medicine, and the generational effects of political upheaval through the perspective of rural women.

In her ongoing exploration of emerging technologies and cinematic storytelling, she is also producing and directing The Eight Acre Crater, a hybrid short film set in post-Revolutionary China that merges live-action production, traditional animation, and intentional AI workflows to unearth the wartime conflicts that upended Chinese communities. Through these parallel projects, her work bridges traditional ethnographic craft with the frontiers of media-making.

Her work has been supported by film and academic grants and fellowships, including from the Fulbright Foundation, the Yenching Scholarship, the Society for Visual Anthropology, the Shoah Foundation, Ganek Immersive Studios, and the Amazon Future Cinema Creators Project. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California, her academic accreditations include an M.A. in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, an M.A. in Chinese Law and Society from Peking University, and a B.A. from Harvard University.

Grace Pimentel Simbulan is a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Manila, and a PhD candidate in anthropology. Her work explores memory, living archives, and the aftermath of state violence, blending ethnography with film to tell stories that are both intimate and political.

Her films have been recognized by the Berlinale, the Asian Film Academy, Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), and Tokyo Docs, among others. In 2020, she was awarded the Nō Studios Artist Grant for film in Wisconsin. Her debut feature, A is for Agustin (2019), earned a spot in CNN Philippines’ Top 10 Films of 2019 and received multiple nominations and awards from international film festivals. Grace was selected as a 2025 (Egg)celerator Lab grantee by Chicken & Egg Films.

Letters from the Revolution explores the personal and historically significant story of Al and Nymia, two individuals who dedicated their youth to the underground movement against dictatorship in the Philippines. Spanning from the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 to the post- dictatorship years of the 1990s, this documentary reconstructs their story through a secret archive of letters, personal memoirs, and historical documents that remained hidden for decades. The film is both a personal journey and a historical excavation, delving into the sacrifices made by those who fought in the longest-running communist insurgency in Asia and how these sacrifices reverberated across generations.

James DeLisio is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles and San Diego. His filmmaking practice uses experimental nonfiction to explore the histories and ecologies of Southern California. His work has been supported by the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the William Male Foundation, the Russell Foundation, and Labocine. Previous films have screened internationally at festivals including the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, the Slow Film Festival, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and have been exhibited at the La Jolla Athenaeum and Brooklyn Children’s Museum. He previously worked as a community media educator and a sports broadcast operator. He is currently pursuing his MA in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California, where he researches the mediation of nonhuman life and landscapes through experimental and documentary film forms.

Maisa Imamović is a writer, web designer/developer, and experimental educator. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. She codes to challenge the ideology of user-friendliness, support cultural platforms, respond to political gems, and socialize. Text + Code are her main mediums. In 2022, her first book The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer was published by the Institute of Network Cultures. In the academic year of 2024-2025, she taught creative coding and the history of cyberfeminism as an adjunct professor at USC Media Arts Practice, UCLA Design Media Arts, ArtCenter Interaction Design, CalArts Critical Studies and Integrated Media. She holds an MA degree in Aesthetics & Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2025, her second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies was published by Set Margins. She is ⅓ of Rip Space — media arts project platform exploring emergent paradigms. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California.

Shaoyu Tang is a 3rd year PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Southern California. His research projects focus on how people live with cultural politics in their everyday lives. His dissertation project studies the emergent stand-up comedians from Northeast China, from whom he learns the art of being “happy citizens” in contemporary China. Based on his ethnographic work, Shaoyu has developed (in CEMA 2024-2025) an audio-video remix project on a group of fans of Ma Dashuai, a television drama produced in Northeast China twenty years ago. In this project, he uses “remix” as both visual practice and conceptual scaffold to explore how people from Northeast China (Dongbei) interact with various kinds of media to come to terms with their post industrial past, reckon with cultural authenticity, and imagine a prosperous future.

In the following year, Shaoyu will be working on a collaborative media art project that reflects on the feelings of shame and guilt of anthropologists in their fields. In this project, Shaoyu will collaborate with Xiaofan Sun, a PhD Candidate at the University of Hong Kong whose ethnographic study examines the hallucinatory experiences during psychedelic-assisted therapy, and explore how ethnographers’ ethical concerns and aesthetic experiences mutually influence each other and, in turn, question boundaries between ethnographers and research subjects, the medical and the spiritual, and reality and fantasy. Rethinking the problematic concept of “empathy,” the two anthropologists work together in this project to explore how sharing affect and vulnerability through artistic engagement can help imagine ways of co-living and care.

Sichong Xie is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her practice combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, Xie investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the body in ever-changing environments. Xie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and is the recipient of the 2022 MAP Fund Award and the 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award.

Parker Hatley (b.1990) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. He is currently working on two feature-length films: Two Plantations, an investigation of land, labor, and developmentalism in Guatemala’s western highlands, and Xunantunich: The Stone Woman, which explores how insurgency is memorialized, forgotten, or transmuted into myth. Hatley earned a B.A. in Anthropology with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies from Bard College in New York and completed a post-baccalaureate fellowship with the Al-Quds Bard Honors College in Abu Dis, Palestine. He has earned several grants and fellowships, including the Fulbright García-Robles Scholarship, Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Film Study Center-Harvard Fellowship. In 2024, he edited the book Peter Warshall: Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above (Edition Hors-Sujet; Zurich, Switzerland).  His academic writing and criticism have appeared in The American Anthropologist, The Anthropology of Work Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Fabrikzeitung.

Virginia Zangs is an architect, computational designer, and researcher investigating how socio-technical infrastructures of intelligence, from AI platforms to data networks, shape ecological, political, and cultural realities.

Virginia’s practice spans cultural institutions, research labs, and design studios, combining theoretical research with computational and spatial design through installations, spatial data visualizations, and digital platforms. She is founding partner of the design studios interMediations and ZangsMichalove. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 “ Intelligens” and “City in the Cloud – Data on the Ground” at the Architektur Museum Munich (2025-2026). She has presented at symposiums, conferences, and hackathons, including the BlockchainGov International Symposium at Université Paris Panthéon-Assas, the AI & Cities – Digital Double Symposium in Rome organized by ETH, UZH, Digital Visual Studies Max Planck Society, and FCL Future Cities Laboratory (2024), and the Open Source AI Hackathon at Brown Institute, Columbia University (2024).

Virginia graduated from the MS in Computational Design Practices (CDP) program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University. Since 2022, she has been a licensed architect (ByAK – Bayerische Architektenkammer) with a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Politecnico di Milano

Vlada Lodesk is a PhD student at USC School of Cinematic Arts and a  filmmaker with an interest in personal documentaries, essayistic, and  experimental film practices. Her current research investigates how creative  documentaries engage with absence and the ineffable through formal  techniques and how these practices reshape theories of (a)visuality. These  ideas are central to her latest short Memory is Me?, a letter-film to her  deceased father, whom she never met, in which she traces his presence  through her mother’s memories and the artifacts he left behind. 

Vlada holds a Master’s degree from Indiana University, where she was a  Fulbright Research Fellow. Her practice-based research there focused on  accented filmmakers and their use of cinematic techniques to evoke visceral  experiences of displacement. As a CEMA fellow, Vlada continues exploring  notions of home and dislocation. Her current project is a family road trip set in  contrasting geographies: her own move from Indiana to California and her  family’s relocation from Siberia to the Caucasus. The film focuses on the  tensions between the idyllic nature of a summer road trip often recorded  through the eyes of her preteen sisters and by a diffused sense of anxiety  and disaster shaped by contemporary world in crisis.