Visual & Critical Studies 2023 Thesis Faculty Advisors

Nilgün Bayraktar is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Film Program at California College of the Arts. Her work, focusing on migrant and diasporic cinema, contemporary art, and critical border studies, has been published in journals including the Journal of European Studies, Screen City Biennial Journal, and New Cinemas. She is coeditor with Alberto Godioli of Stranger Things: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2023) and author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge, 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities: Countermemory and Speculative Imagination in the Cinema of Displacement, expands the chronological, geographic, and theoretical scope of her earlier research, looking beyond Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and the US–Latin American context to investigate the multiplication and diffusion of militarized borderlands. She received a BA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. Ephemeral and celestial are forms constructed with everyday gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding. Hennessy’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Wovenutopia, and the New Yorker, and in exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Pt. 2 Gallery. She has received awards from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Artadia, the Svane Family Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. Bogotá, Colombia) (they/them) is a trans visual artist, educator, and curator who explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their work is rooted in close dialogue and collaboration with trans, nonbinary, and queer friends and peers, most of whom are performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection while building sustainable trans futures and archiving trans history. Their work has been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Palo Alto Art Center, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.