GRANTS
at California Polytechnic State University
CLA Scholarship award, 2026
Grant Description: The CLA Scholarship Support (CLASS) Program is a highly competitive, multi-phased solicitation designed to fuel faculty research and creative endeavors. the program provides vital funding to approximately twenty tenured and tenure-track faculty across the college’s seventeen diverse departments, specifically supporting faculty-led scholarship.Project awarded for The Dowry: An Artifact-driven Interactive Experience AboutThe Negotiation Of Space, Displacement, And MarginalizedNarratives
CLA Summer Undergraduate Research/Creative Activity Program, 2026
Duration: 8 weeks of summer 2026Donors: 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.
This project explores the intersection of Generative AI and Interactive Literature through the creation of a web-based narrative game. Set within a digital museum managed by a dying AI, the work tasks players, operating as autonomous drone, with navigating a procedurally generated and corrupted library of humanity’s social media posts. The project specifically focuses on the digital footprints of immigration and assimilation, transforming fragmented online records into a sacred archive of human movement. With no win/loss state, the focus remains entirely on the act of categorization and the human interpretation of a digitized past. By categorizing these artifacts, players assist the AI in interpreting the complex emotional landscapes of displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation, ultimately questioning what makes a community worth saving. To populate this archive, the project invites two student researchers who will generate original digital artwork representing these social media "artifacts." Utilizing generative AI tools, students will produce visuals that reflect the fractured nature of memory while maintaining a rigorous ethical framework. This process includes documenting tool usage and authoring critical reflections on the potential for AI to either amplify or erase cultural nuances within immigrant narratives. By blending a "Handmade Web" aesthetic with advanced generative technology, the project moves beyond corporate digital norms to create a culturally responsive, human-authored artifact. It serves as both a ludic experience and a research platform for investigating how emerging technologies can be used to honor lived experiences in an increasingly digitized world.
CLA Summer Undergraduate Research/Creative Activity Program, 2024
Duration: 8 weeks of summer 2024Donors: 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.
An educational myriorama board game to teach immigration and generational immigration. This project consists of twelve game cards with both front and back design, and twelve corresponding Augmented Reality experiences. Each of these printed, physical cards represents a slice of a typographic landscape that references a marginalized immigrant community signage writings and contains incidents and characters that may be familiar to the natural and man-made physical landscape of California. The game speaks to the complex experience of generational immigration and assimilation, in which small businesses are at the center, providing both economic opportunities as well as equity and diversity. Regardless of their order, the cards create a cohesive scene, with near-endless narrative prompt possibilities. They can be used as part of a community building warm up activity, or as an interactive art installation for a gallery or museum.
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CLA Summer Undergraduate Research/Creative Activity Program, 2023
Duration: 8 weeks of summer 2023Donors: 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.
