Grants

at California Polytechnic State University

CLA Summer Undergraduate Research/Creative Activity Program, 2023

Duration: 8 weeks of summer 2023
Donors: Circle of Giving, Dean’s Excellence Fund - College of Liberal Arts
Grant Description: A multi-phased solicitation to support faculty research and creative activities while engaging undergraduate students in faculty-led scholarship.

Project proposal: A queer augmented reality learning system to enrich visitor experiences in galleries and art museums. The experience consists of an identity and wayfinding system which consists of physical signage and a digital archive in the form of a mobile application or website. The experience blends seamlessly into the physical museum settings as part of the traditional project descriptions prints next to artworks on the gallery wall, suggesting related or similar works created by a queer artist and/or about the queer experience. A range of queer artist identities and queer artworks are available in the archive for wayfinding onsite and offsite exploration, reimagining the gallery and museum space which have remained relatively static and lacking especially for queer audiences or those interested in queer artwork.

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CLA Summer Scholarship Award, 2021

Grant Description: Research and creative activities that enhance faculty professional development through scholarly engagements, advance achievement in retention, promotion, and tenure, and make it possible for faculty to remain active in their scholarly pursuits.

Project proposal: An Extended Reality (XR) immersive experience into a digital typography experimentation of the geometry of the lights and shadows. It depicts the journey of undocumented immigrants in a poetic spatiotemporal typographic landscape built on the words of the poem The New Colossus by American Poet Emma Lazarus. The experience is built using the Unity Engine.

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Adobe & CSU Digital Literacy Grant, 2020

Project proposal: This project is part of a longer-term initiative to facilitate the permeation of empathy in the classroom as a tool for discourse around many of today's pressing issues regarding identity and inclusion. In this series of two workshops, we will work on an interactive digital collage *using Adobe XD. These two part workshop is open to the larger campus audience and more.

*A digital collage is not just an illustration but rather a compilation of ideas, like a moodboard, in which one embraces visuals in their walking lives that they identify with. In the first part of the workshop, participants will work on a collage that seeks to understand their identity. The second part of the workshop would pair and match participants to coedit a live file together, exploring a common theme. This project tackles the challenge of digital literacy as being more than familiarity and mastery of digital tools. It is also about employing empathy to create meaningful digital content.

Effective Online Teaching Practices Grant, 2020

A abbreviated proposal for this grant is available upon request.

at Monmouth University

Urban Coastal Institute, Summer Faculty Research Grant, 2019

An abbreviated proposal for this grant is available upon request.

Faculty Research and Creativity Grant, 2018

An abbreviated proposal for this grant is available upon request.

at University of Texas at Arlington

C2C Art Therapy Workshops for Veterans, 2016

Five workshops and an art exhibition were developed in 2016 and 2017 as part of a multidisciplinary project guided by Professor Alexander from the Art + Art History Department and faculty from the Department of Psychology in collaboration with the Veterans Assistance Center at UTA using my hand-free drawing application. Licensed art therapists from The Art Station, a Fort Worth nonprofit art therapy organization, provided the professional art therapy support. We found that 98 percent of veterans participating in the University’s Artopia program consider that art therapy helped them cope with service-related trauma or disability. An equal percentage reported that art therapy helped them cope with everyday life.

An abbreviated proposal and completed film for this grant is available upon request.

Women & Gender Study-DAHI, 2016

An interactive solution to gamify the database of the Women in Texas History website, a project of the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women’s History which provides information on significant women in Texas including the City of Dallas and Dallas County. A number of individual Dallas women contributed to women’s rights and enfranchisement on a community, state, and national level.

Remember Wilberg, 2015, 1.3M

Remember Wilberg"tells the story of the December 1984 Wilberg Mine fire in Emery County, Utah, that killed 27 coal miners. Our team spent more than two years working on the film to ensure it honored the victims while also teaching critical safety lessons to present-day miners. The documentary, which will be a safety training tool for coal minors, was completed in association with Safety Solutions International, Inc. A $1.3 million federal grant written by film director Elaine Cullen was awarded to UTA's Division of Enterprise Development to fund the project.

Apatosaurus, 2015