Screen Cultures Graduate Student Association (SCGSA)

The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Association (SCGSA) is a group of graduate students who are committed to creating and sustaining a productive, supportive, and rewarding graduate student experience in our program. We provide a discussion forum amongst PhD students and faculty in RTVF. We have established professional development opportunities, including organizing graduate student conferences and self-led pedagogical workshops. Our mission is to create and foster a community for academic and professional growth. We are dedicated to providing opportunities for organizing, leadership, and service—not only to Screen Cultures graduate students, but also to graduate students across the university, with events that appeal to the interdisciplinary nature of our field and department.

Graduate Students

Maddie Alan-Lee is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University and the 2022-2023 Graduate Assistant for the Office of Fellowships. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary genres of networked video and imagery, including Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), slime videos, and #oddlysatisfying, placing them in conversation with digital media artworks that engage and critique these popular aesthetic forms. She holds an MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and a BA in Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Tatiana Anoushian is interested in the relationship between media production within the global Armenian diaspora and the politics of the everyday, particularly the ways in which this relationship might challenge more dominant ultranationalist discourses, both historically and in the present. She is also part of the editorial collective for Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal. Her broader interests include Marxist theory, experimental/avant-garde media, and all things Cher. She received her MA in Cinema Studies from San Francisco State University. anoushian@u.northwestern.edu

Livia Maia Arantes is a PhD student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, having previously earned a PhD from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Her research delves deep into the transformation of the Brazilian media landscape, investigating how digital distribution and streaming services are shaping storytelling and production in Latin America. Arantes is especially interested in how these platforms address glocalization in their stories, focusing on the dimensionality of female characters that challenge traditional gender and sexuality norms. Arantes’ background bridges academic inquiry with hands-on experience in media production―having worked extensively in television production and direction, including documentaries and newscasts, for a public TV station in Brazil. larantes@u.northwestern.edu

Crystal Camargo (she/ella) is a PhD candidate at Northwestern’s Screen Cultures program in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Her research explores Latinx representation at the intersections of television theory, language ideologies, and critical race and ethnic studies in U.S. English- and Spanish-language television. Her dissertation – Televising Latinidad, Hearing Racial Difference, Translating Whiteness – examines how television forms and aesthetics represent and translate Spanish over time. She has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), Flow, SCMC +, and the University of Georgia Press through an open-access textbook on Latinx Media Studies. Crystal has presented her work at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Latina/o Studies Association, Flow, Literature/Film Association, and Queertopia and Backward Glances Student Conferences. She served as a graduate student representative for the SCMS Latinx Caucus and has participated in the JCMS historical inequities publishing initiative. She received her BA in International Studies, Spanish Language and Literature, and Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Denver and her MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern. She has completed a teaching certificate from Searle Center and held a year-long competitively awarded teaching appointment with the Latina/o/x program at Northwestern from 2020-2021. She is currently a Comparative Race and Diaspora as a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies, an affiliate with the NU Latinx Digital Media Center, and a 2023-2024 Kaplan Scholar Graduate Assistant for the Kaplan Alice Institute for the Humanities.

Arundhati Chauhan works on documentary as an aesthetic mode, experimental non-theatrical film and the cultural politics of decolonization and the Cold War. They are interested in collective documentary practices from the late 1970s till the early 2000s. As a culture worker, Arundhati previously held roles across research, editorial and programming. They hold a BA in English Literature from Miranda House, University of Delhi, and an MA and MPhil from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Nicole Dixon’s research focuses on the intersection of African American literature, stage and screen adaptations, and casting within Black diaspora. Her interests extend to television screenwriting, Black women writers, podcasting, and storyboarding. She received a BA in Mass Communications with a minor in Creative Writing and an MA in English with a focus in African American Literature from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Esra Cimencioglu’s research interests include transnational media, cinema of displacement, architectural theory, urban and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between space, gender and everyday life in post-revolutionary Iranian women cinema. She received her BA in Urban and Regional Planning from Istanbul Technical University with honors, and MA in Film and Television from Istanbul Bilgi University. She worked in production and media companies in Istanbul as a production assistant and produced several short films and documentaries. She has presented her work at the conferences including Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and Middle East History and Theory. She has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for her doctoral study in the United States. esracimencioglu2015@u.northwestern.edu

Alicia Echavarria is a first year doctoral student from Harlem, New York. As a filmmaker and theorist, she seeks to explore notions of race, gender and proprietorship through possession tropes in U.S. and Dominican cinema. Her intersectional approach to the possession genre highlights how such tropes can be utilized to reclaim ownership of identity and subvert stereotypes that have been instilled by mainstream white-centered narratives. She earned her BA in English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in Cinema Studies from Bowdoin College. Before coming to Northwestern, Alicia was a College Success Advisor for charter school alumni attending universities in NYC. As a first-generation college student and Afrolatina, she aims to serve and uplift her community through film and scholarship.

Kate Erskine’s research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of madness and trauma in contemporary television and digital culture. From 2021-2023, she was the graduate assistant for an interdisciplinary research group with the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and she co-organized the 2023 international conference, “Media and Mental Health: Exploring Contemporary Representations of Madness, Melancholy, and Trauma in Film and Television.” Kate is a guest lecturer with the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab, and she has presented her work at SCMS, Visible Evidence, and the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies, among other conferences. She holds a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and an MSc from The London School of Economics and Political Science. Kate is an alum of the Paris Program in Critical Theory, a cotutelle doctoral candidate at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a Chateaubriand Fellow for 2025.

Diana Funez focuses on questions of media obsolescence, embodied spectatorship, home video nostalgia, and material cultures. Through her work on analog video collections and representations of spectatorship in streaming TV, she aims to rethink the legacy of obsolete or “useless” formats in contemporary digital spectatorship. Diana holds a dual B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies and French from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.

Demetrius Green is a first year doctoral student from Cairo, Illinois. His research interests include the intersection of hip-hop, race, identity, audio and visual production and digital media. He earned his BA in Radio-Television & Digital Media with a specialization in audio production from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and his MA in Film and Media Studies from the University of Kansas. Alongside his academic career, Demetrius has extensive experience in audio production as a hip-hop DJ & producer having worked with notable brands and names such as Sirius XM Radio, SXSW and Adidas.

Julia Peres Guimarães holds an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, an M.A. in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio, Brazil, and a BSc in International Relations & History from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Julia’s research investigates how cinematic texts address the fictional reproduction of patterns of normalcy, standards of deviant behavior and the medicalization/institutionalization or punishment of individuals. Her objective is to unsettle understandings of mental illnesses and their conceptual implications to the legitimization of notions of “normality” associated with local/global citizenship, and to explore the philosophical boundaries pushed by extended levels of consciousness experienced within manic episodes. Her additional research interests include feminist media, critical theory, affect studies and photography. juliapguimaraes@u.northwestern.edu, www.juliaguimaraes.com

Imani Harris studies black cultural production, specifically the dissolution of respectability politics and the cultivation of anarchistic black consciousness expressed in twenty-first-century music, television, film, and comics. Her research primarily examines how black women and queer hip-hop artists curate aesthetics, sound, spatial practices, and other aspects of performance to challenge hegemonic cultural narratives and generate alternative visions of minoritarian collectivity. Her broader research interests include queer of color critique, black digital feminisms, 20th-21st century speculative fiction, fan studies, internet studies, hip-hop literacy, DIY culture, mad studies, and the digital politics of black placemaking in the US South and Midwest. Imani graduated from The Ohio State University with a BA in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. She held dual minors in Film Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In addition to her academic work, Imani is a poet and emcee with audio and visual production experience.

Kaiwen Huang is a PhD student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. His current project uses screen as a hermeneutics to articulate how media elements compose our symbolic and material surroundings. His research interests also include infrastructure studies, media space and media place, and popular culture in East Asia and beyond. He holds an MA in Film Studies with Distinction from University College London, UK, and a Bachelor of Law in Sociology from Nankai University, China. Before coming to Northwestern, he worked for an edtech company in China. kaiwen.huang@u.northwestern.edu

Rita Rongyi Lin is a doctoral candidate whose research explores the intersection of gender, spectatorship, and urban space in cinema through the figure of the flâneuse as both a subject of representation and a mode of female spectatorship. Working across divergent national, historical, and theoretical contexts as well as tropes of the flâneuse including the fallen woman, the sleepwalker, and the (im)migrant, her dissertation considers the structures of desire and identification for gendered and ethnicized subjects, and other ways of relating to an image than rapture, such as distraction, disorientation, and disavowal. She also writes about spatial production, “new” media, and transcultural exchanges more broadly, with an article forthcoming in the December 2021 issue of tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture. In her spare time, she likes to watch kpop and think about plastic orientalism and affective economies in the age of digital globalization. Rita received her BA in English from Bryn Mawr College and MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University. rongyi.lin@u.northwestern.edu

Nicola McCafferty is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University with an interest in race, gender, sexuality, and the intersections of these identity categories with the category of the human. Her research focuses on representations of nonhuman women in horror and science fiction film, tv, and music video, and aims to rethink the parameters of who (and what) comes to be included under the umbrella of humanity. At Northwestern, Nicola serves as a Writing Fellow in the Graduate Writing Place and is currently the Graduate Assistant for Northwestern University Press. Nicola holds a BA in Psychology from Boston College and an MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.

Clare Ostroski is a doctoral candidate and a Writing Fellow at The Writing Place. From 2021-2023 she was the Graduate Coordinator of Kaplan’s Environmental Humanities Workshop, and in 2023-2024 the Office of Fellowships Graduate Assistant. Her dissertation explores how the ontologies of spectacles and screens materially, discursively, and historically intersect with nature and the environment. She has presented work at SCMS, IECA, ASTR, and other interdisciplinary conferences, and holds an MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern and a BA in Communication Arts, International Studies, and Digital Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rachel Pittman’s research interests include nontheatrical and amateur media, subculture studies, gender and sexuality studies, fashion studies, and material cultures. She holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from the University of South Carolina and an M.A. in Film Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas (he/him) is a doctoral student whose research delves into the impact of evolving imaging technologies and film conventions on portrayals of history on screen. His investigations focus specifically on 19th-century exploration narratives and 20th-century action-adventure films and travelogues, shedding light on how these visual mediums shape our understanding of the past. Beyond his specific research areas, his academic pursuits span a spectrum of themes including environmental media, critical theory, and visual culture studies. Moreover, his creative endeavors bridge the realms of academia, remix culture, and the digital humanities. As a research-based image maker, he navigates the intricate connections between cultural production and landscape representation, underlining the pivotal role of images in shaping collective perceptions of nature and history. Ramos-Barajas earned his BA in Film Production from The School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA and holds an MFA in Art from the University of Illinois Chicago. ramosbarajas@u.northwestern.edu

Ben Riggs writes about science on television. He has degrees from the University of New Mexico and Teachers College, Columbia University. benriggs@u.northwestern.edu

Rita Rongyi Lin researches transnational cinemas, new media aesthetics, spatial practices, affect, gender studies, and critical race theory. Her dissertation examines feminine spectatorship in/of cinema as dysfunctional elsewheres through tropes like the fallen woman and the sleepwalker with a focus on the Sinophone world. Since the start of the pandemic, she has also taken to watching and writing about K-pop. She is a teaching assistant in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Northwestern for academic year 2022-2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture and the Velvet Light Trap. Rita received her BA in English from Bryn Mawr College and MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.

Sarah Sachar is interested in filmic encounters with the obsolete and their potential to rattle and reconfigure contemporary forms of image consumption. Her undergraduate honors thesis considered how surreal traces in film disrupt the alienated experience of looking in late-stage capitalism. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature, Spanish, and the College Scholar Program from Cornell University. sachar@u.northwestern.edu

Tayler Scriber is interested in the exploration of critical race theory and the rhetoric of televised violence.  Her previous research projects have touched on the history of Blackness and film in the United States as well as the critical engagement of black film audiences and the effects that their minoritarian position can have on their viewing experiences. She wants to continue this critical exploration by looking more deeply at the function of depictions of black trauma in the context of American storytelling in film. In addition to that, she is also interested in the historical exploration of public policies that have created the conditions of the relationship between media and race in the United States. While having a vested interest in these topics she is also interested in exploring horror, science fiction, film theory and criticism, and sexuality and gender studies. She received her Bachelors in Sociological Perspectives on Film from Whittier College.

Jennifer Smart is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Screen Cultures program. She works at the intersection of media studies, experimental music, and visual art. Her dissertation project, “Sound in Art: Museum Audio in the Age of Ubiquitous Sound,” examines the variety of ways in which sound and music have been exhibited in the visual art museum.

Emilia Tamayo (ella/she) is a doctoral student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research considers the visual culture of place and displacement, particularly as it informs constructions of belonging, power, and social stratification in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her creative work seeks to amplify public access to these themes. Prior to Northwestern, she worked in museum communications, higher education, and nonprofits in Colombia and the United States. She earned her dual B.A. in Latin American Studies and Government from Smith College, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Latina Vidolova is a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures interested in industry-fan relationships, transcultural streaming, and digital cultures. Her dissertation work examines the implications of US SVODs producing and distributing Japanese anime. She holds a Masters degree from University of Texas at Austin.

Kylie Walters is a fourth year doctoral candidate writing a dissertation on Mobil, media, and design in the postwar era. She is a Franke Graduate Fellow for 2024-2025. Beyond environmental media studies, her interests include architecture, television history, experimental and avant-garde film, Marxisms, and psychoanalysis. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BA from Colby College.

Ana Yoo is interested in questions of gender subjectivity in contemporary South Korean media forms like film, television, and across digital media platforms like webtoons and Internet forums. She received her BA in Film Studies from Emory University and MA in Cinema and Media Studies from The University of Chicago. anayoo@u.northwestern.edu