Fellows

Eva Aguila is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and organizer. Born in Los Angeles her work currently is centered around oral histories of the Mexican diaspora, specifically her ancestral familial rural Michoacán communities. Aguila works with installation, sound, video, and social practice to examine personal histories and the in-betweenness of the Latinx experience. Using research and personal archives her current work is informed by the materiality of memory. Inspired by ephemerality and Indigenous futurism, she works with time based media to depict stories and alternative histories to reinterpret cultural portrayals and internalized stereotypes. Aguila is also the co-founder and Board President of Coaxial Arts Foundation, an artist-run non-profit organization dedicated to experimental sound, video and performance art.

Chantal Eyong is a writer and media producer in Los Angeles, CA. Her work examines memory, erasure, biopolitics, and identity in relation to African diasporas. Her interests are in how community stories and culture are preserved through/with migration and how abstractions can inform a way of knowing. Her work has been featured on PBS and national/international film festivals. The short documentary she co-produced, “Thailand Untapped,” received a regional Emmy nomination in 2013. Her screenplays have received placements in screenwriting competitions, including ScreenCraft and the Atlanta Film Screenplay Competition. Chantal holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of California Riverside and is a Ph.D. student in the Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California.

Brodie Quinn is a researcher of religious nationalist movements. For his MA, he conducted long-term fieldwork with Pro-British Protestant Christian groups in Northern Ireland. This involved attending meetings and parades of the pro-Unionist anti-Catholic groups in the border areas of the country, as well as joining my interlocutors in charged environments as they protested and organized against social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. His larger PhD project at USC looks at similar ground, studying secularism and the separation of church and state here in the US.

Grace is a filmmaker and a 2nd year PhD student in the Anthropology department, where her research delves into the complexities surrounding the families affected by the war on drugs in the Philippines. Her work explores trauma, grief, conceptions of justice, and authority in this context.

Her works have been supported and recognized by the AIDC, Tokyo Docs, AFA, and DMZ Docs to name a few. In 2020, she received the Nō Studios Artist Grant in film to support her work in Wisconsin. Her first feature film A IS FOR AGUSTIN (2019), premiered in S. Korea and was shown in China, Italy, France, New Caledonia, Canada, the Philippines, and the US. This film was also featured in CNN Philippines’ Top 10 Filipino Films of 2019. 

Curtis James Tamm is an artist and researcher exploring the relationship between sound and emergency. In 2017 he was the recipient of LACMA’s Art and Technology Lab grant, and in 2019 he was commissioned by the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo) to create his debut solo-exhibition (MAMproject 26: Curtis Tamm; curated by Kenichi Kondo) inspired by his research into the precognitive ability of other animal species to detect catastrophes days before any sensory can. He is currently pursuing a PhD with the Interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practices department at the University of Southern California. 

Tamm has participated as an artist-in-residence with the University of South Carolina, School of Visual Arts and Design (Columbia, SC), Arcus Project (Ibaraki, Japan) Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Seydisfjordur, Iceland), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, (Omaha, Nebraska), Titanik Gallery (Turku, Finland), Santozeum (Santorini, Greece), and Soma, (Mexico City, MX). 

Faye is a visual artist and ethnographic filmmaker. Working in video, comics, and animation, her works often circumnavigate themes that arise from and intersect with China’s turbulent periods of social reform, from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the country’s present day COVID-19 policies.

Faye previously earned a degree in Chinese Law and Society at Peking University as a Yenching Scholar (2019-2021). She trained in filmmaking and anthropological research methods at the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology in Manchester, U.K (2018-2019) whilst funded by a Fulbright Student Scholarship. Before that, she worked in Washington, D.C. at two museums: Smithsonian Folkways Recording, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her undergraduate degree was completed at Harvard University.