How did you pick IMA as your major?
I’ve always wanted to travel abroad. I originally wanted to major in Business, and was interested in NYU’s Business & Political Economy (BPE) program, which includes semesters abroad, but after choosing NYU Shanghai, I felt IMA was the only field that could align with my creative interests of photography and costume design.
How have you explored those creative interests since joining NYU Shanghai?
I’ve been making my own Halloween costumes since high school, and began making costumes for photo projects during Sophomore year. The first photo costume I made was a wedding dress for my photo series “Fusia," and the shot juxtaposed western and eastern funeral/wedding elements to play with cross-cultural signifiers. I really loved the production element of it, and subsequent photo projects I've done are similar in nature. For my summer DURF project, I created five research-based photoshoots, with one featuring a ‘high fashion’ costume I had made for my model out of a bunch of taped up Dior bags as commentary on consumerism.
Where did you study away and why?
I studied away in Florence for my first semester abroad during which I took part in a shoot for a photography exhibit in a private Florentine villa called La Pietra Dialogues, which analyzed the representation of food and the complex layers of meanings based on historical context.
In my second semester, I went to NYC, where I really challenged myself academically by taking a variety of courses in different NYU schools--some were grad level, and one was a collaboration between NYU and Pratt Institute.
It was also that semester in New York where I continued to push my photography forward and launched the female empowerment initiative CELEBRATE WOMEN.
Tell us more….
A month and a half before Women’s Day, I was thinking about how I could use my photography and portraiture skills and how for some people, having something fancy like senior portraits done can be somewhat of a rare event and I thought: how can I scale this up and supply this great feeling of posing of a portrait to a larger group of people? How can I empower others? And so I asked the women I photographed “What empowers you?” That was the root idea. I wanted them to have as much control over their visual narrative as possible. The results were beautiful and honest, and grew as a collaboration between myself and Shanghai campus photographers Brian Ho, Millie Wong, and David Santiano.
I reached out to several NGOs and ultimately presented CELEBRATE WOMEN at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. This experience indirectly led to my subsequent involvement with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and various UN events including UN Women task meetings and the Novus Summit.
After a year of studying away, how have you and your photography grown?
When I started in Shanghai, I was the quintessential photographer on campus. It gave me a lot of practice, but as exhausting and overwhelming as it was, looking back, that was a good thing. It helped shape me into the direction I wanted to go, which was fine arts portraiture. During my junior year, I became a lot more invested in social change, particularly gender equality--that’s a theme I’m trying to incorporate in my work and already has a great presence. I’m using all of my learned technical skills to advocate change.