Families

Overview "ALVY2 is an online multimedia experience that explores a collection of creations that preserve a past generation. The various pieces dive into the relationship he had with his grandmother, who was a painter, photographer, chef, E.R. nurse, author, and dreamer. The installation reimagines the original artwork she had created in her lifetime and molds them into a new collaboration. Various materials are called upon, blending traditional art with new media to create an immersive experience....

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An installation triptych that explores concepts of family, memory, and cultural traditions.--Abstract.

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"'Cuts' is a documentary about a 47-year-old man's career path and his relationship between his two fathers." -- Abstract

Overview "FingerPrint is a collection of poems that weaves arcs of family and spirituality with bodily autonomy and acceptance. Expanding on the concrete and contrapuntal poetic forms, the poems physically create a set of hands by assuming the translated shape of the hands' cross sectional slices. The collection starts at the tips of the middle fingers, then moves down the fingers, knuckles, palms, and finally the wrists. These hands frame core questions: What do they reach towards? What do they hold...

Overview "Fugue States, a collection of five short stories, comprises a range of literary fiction written during the author's time in Emerson College's Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program. This collection, through a combination of first and third-person perspectives, experiments with both narrative retrospection and immediacy, exploring the desires and fears of myriad women. From kudzu-choked Tallahassee to a surreally post-apocalyptic Boston, these stories–humorous, vivid, and...

Overview "Along with a deep investigation of the human condition, this is a story that dissects, tests, and questions the foundations, fundamentals, and the fruition of a few lived-in experiences, and of the various full-circle warm-belly miraculous feeling of life happening. Ultimately, it all gets compared to one object—a Golden Delicious apple, whose symbolism, history, and lore (Biblical or otherwise) makes for a metaphor that both incites and soothes humanity's inclines and descents. The action...

Overview "Gone Fishing is a novel in progress that covers the formation and dissolution of a family, framed through a renegade fishing trip taken by father and son. The novel primarily covers two major periods in the characters' lives in parallel: the beginnings of parents Denise and Jared's romance in college and young adulthood, and Jared and Billy's fishing trip following the couple's years-long separation. The novel tackles themes of what makes adulthood, young love, and the stresses and...

Overview "Letters for Julian is a coming-of-age dramedy about a Boston teenager who, after a sudden death of his mother, learns that he has an older brother who was given up for an adoption at an early age. Exploring themes of family ties, the importance of friendships and human connection, the script follows one main character through his journey on discovering what true family stands for, which leads to a final realization that sometimes blood ties are not the strongest, and our home is truly where...

Overview "Maybe the Kids Aren't Alright is a story about three foster siblings: Millie, Louie, and Theo. Each one of them must learn to confront how the difficult and painful realities of their pasts continue to harm them in their present, if they ever hope to move forward to something better in their futures. For Millie, it's a toxic relationship with her mother looming over her every decision. For Louie, it's the pressure to always be perfect to keep everyone he cares for safe and happy. And for...

Overview "Pearls Lost is a short fictional narrative film set in the Appalachian mountains of southeastern Kentucky in the early 1990s. The film illuminates a distinct perspective on being gay at that time and place and the repercussions of disclosing and not disclosing sexual identity in challenging the typical American family structure. Pearls Lost approaches this topic from the lens of a woman, Renee, trying to hold her family together in the face of these decisions outside of her control when her...

Overview "'Ten Essays' is a collection of narrative and memoir essays that explores what happens after a family fractures. Beginning with her mother's obsession with restoring old houses and the aftermath of her father's abrupt departure, the narrator examines both herself and her family through the lens of repeating patterns, unexpected symbols, and inherited dysfunction. In an honest portrait of her family, the narrator traces pivotal moments in her rural childhood, discovering truths hidden in the...

Overview "What is home after immigration and displacement? Family after loss? Memory after dementia? Using interviews with members of my family, this thesis is an attempt to answer those questions for my benefit as well as to prompt viewers to consider such questions for themselves. It is a personal documentary that centers immigrant experiences because it is a narrative that comes from my Jamaican family and uses their words in their voices. The experience exists entirely in virtual reality and so...

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"'The Backside of God' is an experimental documentary utilizing archival footage, digital glitch, chemical abstraction, and direct animation to explore the intricacies of the artist's relationship with their late uncle, Doug Seidel." -- Abstratct

Overview "The Great Saving is a heart-wrenching true story from the perspective of a young girl who realizes her parents are addicted to drugs. Madilyn and her siblings endure abuse, neglect, and trauma beyond measure. They're forced to grow up and raise each other, keep their parents' addiction a secret, and suffer silently and alone in rural North Carolina. Madilyn and her siblings can't help but anticipate the deaths of their parents or their own. But when her baby brother is born addicted to...

Overview "The essays that make up the body of this memoir have been written over the past several years. They are an attempt to make sense of a time when women and children were not protected and were subjected to the supremacy of a patriarchal society that centered and privileged white males. This was not a long-ago time. In my small hometown of Winthrop, Massachusetts in the 1970s, secrets and shame experienced by a family were a family's business. The institutions that were meant to protect and...

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"Using the Addams Family musical to develop and implement a performance assembly that explores the question, What is a family? In this social-emotional learning program students should recognize that all families are made from love and respect, no matter what they look like. This assembly was presented to the five elementary schools in Westwood, Massachusetts on March 3 and 5 of 2020." -- Abstract