Article at UConn Today: https://today.uconn.edu/2026/05/uconn-alum-directs-public-service-announcement-on-racial-profiling/ 

UConn Today: https://today.uconn.edu/2026/05/eighth-annual-senior-exhibition-highlights-dmd-capstone-projects/

Article at: https://today.uconn.edu/2025/11/uconn-student-chasing-dreams-in-tornado-alley/

July 6, 2023 | Kimberly Phillips

Josh Hirshfield was that kid in middle school who’d spend all weekend playing video games.

“I was playing on my parents’ 1997 Dell computer with 128MB of RAM, because that’s what we had at the time. Playing old titles like SimCity 4 or Roller Coaster Tycoon exposed me to the idea of creating digital virtual worlds,” he says. “The one that really blew my mind was Spore by EA. It introduced me to this world of 3D design where you can make buildings and creatures, animals and spaceships all from your computer.”

When Hirshfield ’21 (SFA) went back as an adult to visit his seventh and eighth grade teachers and told them he now makes video games, no one was surprised.

“My whole life I secretly wanted to make video games but was scared. I didn’t think it was something that I was allowed to do because it seemed too fun,” he says.

Now, almost every day is fun for the Stamford native who just earned his MFA in game design from NYU, has his own independent studio, is working with the Neag School of Education to create educational software, and has interviewed for senior-level positions at some of the largest companies in the industry – at 24 years old.

“For a lot of my life, I thought I would do things around video games, like make the art or make the music for video games. It was only once I had a high school class in game development that I realized there was a path for building video games,” he says, explaining that class prompted him to consider colleges with game design programs, which led him to UConn’s Digital Media & Design.

“The idea that I could get a degree where one of the words in the degree is ‘games’ is really amazing and those programs are hard to find,” Hirshfield says. “UConn has one, it was accessible, and my parents loved it when I told them I wanted to make video games. Finding and pursuing a passion really matters to me and my family.”

As an undergrad, Hirshfield loaded his schedule – almost overloading it – with independent studies, one year even acing all his classes and adding 48 credits to his transcript. He says he would pair a class like Interactive Storytelling with an independent study to produce projects that paralleled the lessons learned in class.

Another independent study coupled him with the School of Business to create an interactive training program for the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. That program, The Recovery Files, aims to train recovery coaches in what to say – or not say – by presenting them with interactive sample text messages for a variety of scenarios.

“Most video games are fun. Most are about bringing enrichment to your life. But some tell sad stories just like film or TV,” he says. “And serious games are this idea that by sharing an experience you can perform social action. The idea of The Recovery Files was that you would play it and the serious function of the game was to train and enrich the minds of those who are going to help others.”

Hirshfield says he cares deeply about this genre of gaming and wants the opportunity to make a difference, like with Courtroom 600 – a production from Greenhouse Studios and other UConn departments to document the Nuremberg Trials – which Hirshfield worked on one semester while an undergrad.

Then there are other times when gaming just needs to be about gaming – an escape from reality.

“I get made fun of a lot because I care about social action games and then I go and make the most stereotypical video game ever,” he says of the first-person shooter game Godwalker, in which the idea is to shoot the bad guys as quickly as possible to gain strength.

“It’s not very long, it’s not very big, but I did make it on my own,” he explains. “I didn’t buy any assets. I didn’t have anyone make anything else. It all came from my computer and my brain, and to me that’s an invaluable piece of work to have. You can present it to someone and say, ‘This is something that I made, and I think it’s really cool.’”

He told people a variation of that in April when he trekked to Troy, New York, to demo Godwalker at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s annual GameFest, an event that draws game designers from throughout the Northeast to compete for a series of awards – real-life awards, not ones handed out in a game world after virtual play.

“The first game I ever made, Aether, went to RPI GameFest because I just wanted to show it to people and see how they liked it. The judges ended up giving it the award for Best in Game Feel, which is really cool,” he says of the game that was developed mostly during high school and finished at UConn.

Aether received acclaim in 2018. This year, Godwalker earned the award for Excellence in Design, while Lexy Vecchio ’23 MFA received the Impact Award for Here There Be Bears.

“The judges are from throughout the industry, and you get some awesome validation from external sources that aren’t just your friends,” Hirshfield says. “I hate having an ego, but it’s cool that I can say I’m pretty good at the thing I do.”

While he now mulls the question of what comes next, Hirshfield notes that a friend is the person at the New York Times who makes sure games like Wordle and Spelling Bee come out on time every day.

“What does a game designer actually do,” he asks. “Do you think that the New York Times crossword puzzle just pops into existence? We work in the background. A good design is not something you notice.”

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2023/07/childhood-dream-becomes-reality-for-video-gamer-turned-designer/ 

May 18, 2023 | Combined Reports

Northeast Human Rights Film Festival organizers hope the impact of this week’s three-day festival at UConn extends beyond the theater experience and calls audiences to take action.

An expansion of the Human Rights Film & Digital Media Initiative established in 2020 by the leaders of the Human Rights Institute, Digital Media & Design department, and Dodd Human Rights Impact, the inaugural film festival aims to connect filmmakers, human rights advocates, and community groups with the common goal of sustained, transformational impact.

Festival Co-Director and Donna M. Krenicki Professor for Design and Digital Media Heather Elliott-Famularo, department head for Digital Media & Design, says the ideal outcome of the festival is that people will walk away afterward and feel impassioned to do more, perhaps volunteer for a community effort, lobby politicians, donate to a related organization, or participate in campaigns. The ultimate hope is to inspire and motivate people to translate their passion into action.

Among the festival’s full schedule of free events are screenings of: “The Territory” on Friday night, an authentic portrait of an Indigenous community’s fight to protect their ecosystem from illegal deforestation in Brazil; two films on Saturday, “Clarissa’s Battle,” the story of the fight for universal child care and early childhood education for low-income families, and “A Reckoning in Boston,” which highlights the systemic racism and economic inequities in Boston; and “Midnight Traveler” on Sunday, which shares the dangerous trek of an Afghan family as they seek refuge in Europe.

“While the films’ themes may be very different, the issues addressed are things we can all relate to. The films address a wide spectrum of human rights concerns,” says Kathryn Libal, festival co-director and Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute director/Dodd Human Rights Impact interim director. “It’s critical for us to think about what fundamental rights we have as human beings within an increasingly interconnected world.”

Elliott-Famularo explains that the films use a participatory approach to filmmaking, in which the filmmaker engages directly with the subject and reveals their role in the film, instead of using a third-person narration or standing on the sidelines.

“Participatory documentary filmmaking requires a level of vulnerability by both the filmmaker and the participants in the film, who are often collaborative partners in the filmmaking process rather than passive ‘subjects.’ It also inherently reveals the power of media to invoke real change, because the audience can essentially see the film being made on screen. This happens, for example, when James Rutenbeck, director of ‘A Reckoning in Boston,’ shares that he would make an entirely different film due to the relationships he built with Carl Chandler and Kafi Dixon and when Hassan Fazali directly speaks about both his role as a filmmaker – and an asylum seeker – in ‘Midnight Traveler,’” Elliott-Famularo says.

“For filmmakers committed to impact work, building trust within communities is essential. Each of the films we selected shows how collaboration and a commitment to social change elevates a film from a documentation of events to an opportunity for continued advocacy work,” says Erica Laplante ’22 Ph.D., festival co-organizer and postdoctoral research associate at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. “By pairing these films with impact events at the festival, we can further inspire action beyond the screen, through community partnerships and relationships.”

Each of the four award-winning films will be accompanied by a unique impact event, featuring the filmmaker and others connected to the project or the topic. For example, following the screening of “A Reckoning in Boston,” there will be a dinner and Encounters Dialogue, during which the community will engage in small group discussions around the issues of housing and racial justice raised in the film.

In addition to the four invited films, the festival concludes with a Sunday evening performance of the multimedia puppetry project, “Azad,” recipient of the inaugural UConn Global Affairs Digital Media Residency awarded by Global Affairs, Dodd Human Rights Impact, and the Levant Foundation.

For the residency, “Azad” writer/performer Sona Tatoyan and her crew has spent two weeks at UConn workshopping the show that uses her great-great-grandfather’s handmade Karagöz puppets to tell the story of her family, the Armenian genocide, and contemporary Aleppo. “Azad” will be performed at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, followed by a closing reception for the festival.

“Building on UConn’s 25-year history of human rights work and our new DMD major in film production, we have the possibility to make UConn a national leader in this kind of impact work for film and digital media,” Elliott-Famularo says. “The Northeast Human Rights Film Festival is the next step to realizing that goal.”

Find a full list of events at the Northeast Human Rights Film Festival website. Tickets are free and open to the public but must be reserved via TicketLeap. The festival is presented by the School of Fine Arts and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, with generous philanthropic support from NICABM, the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.

 

 

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2023/05/northeast-human-rights-film-festival-to-showcase-documentaries-rally-audiences-to-action/

April 27, 2023 | Kimberly Phillips

Years beyond their middle and high school careers – in one case by nearly two decades – and they’re still listening to their teachers.

Kelsey Tynik ’12 (SFA), ’23 MFA says she often draws on skills gained from her middle school home economics teacher, and Giana Adragna ’23 (SFA) points to high school graphic and web design classes as strong influences in her work today.

In the backstory to her latest project, Lexy Vecchio ’23 MFA mentions the teacher, not even from her own school, who came to her aid when she was at her most vulnerable, and Zaire Diaz ’23 (SFA) smiles broadly when she recalls that a high school teacher bestowed on her the nickname DRC, a happy moment in otherwise challenging teenage years.

As graduating students from Digital Media & Design and the Art and Art History department, each with work on display in three on-campus exhibitions this month, these four might have produced vastly different final projects, but they’re connected – like so many who’ve drawn on previous experiences for inspiration – to their formative pasts.

Playtime as work time

With an undergraduate degree in illustration and art history from UConn, Tynik for many years worked in New York City as a window decorator for a contemporary fashion brand. Seeking a break, she left that job to nanny young children, putting her in the position of watching kids at play and considering how that might look for her.

“I noticed with the kids that their version of play is fun, light, and fearless. They’ll try anything,” she says. “But there’s a system to their play that’s structured yet freeing at the same time.”

As she reconnected to her painting roots, Tynik says she longed to “pluck my work off the wall and break the frame.” That’s when she started to play, taking painted canvas off the stretcher and sewing it into shapes large and small to create 3D wall paintings, like “And cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches,” which is on display at the William Benton Museum of Art.

She says she uses Stephen King novels – she’s a fan of horror novels and their own playful structure – as inspiration not just for her work, but also the titles for many of her pieces. In the case of “Capering Clown,” it looks like the remnants of a mischievous character that’s sucked itself into a rainbow of color.

“You know you want to get closer, but you don’t want to get too close in a way,” Tynik says, describing her work. “I like that boundary. It’s tricky when a lot of your work looks fun and friendly, because it is that, but it’s also important to have a boundary between the fun and the viewer. My goal is for people to say, ‘I want to touch it, but I don’t think I should.’”

Tynik also includes carved wood in her pieces, which means she built for herself not just a sewing area but also an enclosed grinding booth with a dust removal system in her work studio.

“It’s wild actually, and I feel like so much has come back to me that feels so familiar,” she says of the skills she gained early on in school. “Habits that I learned as a child, they’ve come back up in a professional sense.”

A little help to plan the big day

When everyone in Adragna’s extended family gets together, she says they total about 50 members, that’s including 17 first cousins, their spouses, and their children. Together, they comprise a large Italian family that likes to celebrate good times, oftentimes dancing the night away.

“We have a wedding almost every year,” Adragna says. “Even if we’re not in a wedding, we’re there for all the events. We love weddings in my family. We go all out.”

As Adragna set to designing an undergraduate DMD project that demonstrates her mastery of web and interactive media, she says she thought about her role as co-maid of honor in her sister’s upcoming nuptials – she’s sharing the job with her other sister – and her place in the wedding parties of seven previous ceremonies.

She also noted that her cousin is marrying this August and is in the throes of planning, so why not design an app that would be meaningful, helpful, relatable, and tied to the very thing in which her family has expertise.

“Jade Wedding Journal,” on display in the Jorgensen Gallery, allows wedding guests to participate in the planning process, differing it from the legions of other apps that help brides and grooms check off items on their to-do lists.

The app allows guests to RSVP, post pictures and updates on a feed, and even make vendor recommendations to the hosts – an idea that came from Adragna’s mom. But its biggest asset might just be guests’ ability to request a specific table and see the table seating arrangement.

“We had a second cousin who had a wedding last year and we didn’t know until we got there if we’d be sitting together as an immediate family. It would have been nice to have that verification beforehand,” she says.

The feature also would be helpful if a guest is a friend from high school, who might not know many family members and who would like to see whether other friends from high school are at their table, Adragna says, explaining that she’s always been a savvy planner and wanted her project to have the ability to relieve the stress of a host who might not be.

“Jade, the stone, means growth and prosperity and new beginnings,” she says of the app’s name. “Green is also a color of growth and the earthtones really spoke to me with the romance of it all. With the name and the color scheme, I really wanted them to be something that’s very meaningful.”

Experiencing PTSD through gaming

Vecchio used to get panic attacks in school and suffered from emetophobia, or the fear of vomiting, that was so severe, she says, if a fellow student threw up in a bathroom, she wouldn’t talk to the person for a week or ever again use those facilities.

Years of misdiagnoses plagued much of her later childhood, she says, and only in her older teenage years did doctors connect the behavioral issues to PTSD that resulted from a skiing accident she had when she was 11 and broke her hip after attempting a maneuver she’d seen some snowboarders do.

She landed the trick and had only 20 feet to stop before going over a cliff, she recalls, explaining that in the process of stopping she snapped her femur in half, missing her femoral artery by a centimeter, and blacked out off the trail in an isolated area.

“I don’t know exactly how long I was on the mountain. From what I understand, it was probably two hours since I’d only done one ski run. There’s a lot of time dilation I really don’t remember, but I was calling for help for so long,” she says, explaining she didn’t even know she was hurt until she tried to stand.

A child about her age eventually heard her calls, and they sought their teacher for help and later the ski patrol. Vecchio was in a wheelchair for three months and on crutches another three, yet everyone expected that given the presumed resiliency of an 11-year-old, she’d bounce back.

Then entered her behavioral issues.

Her therapist helped her discover the panic attacks were triggered by situations that threatened isolation, she explains, and the emetophobia likely resulted because over those two hours on the mountain certain bodily functions probably started to shut down along the vagus nerve, causing severe stomach pain that she never consciously felt thanks to the trauma.

Now as a DMD graduate student looking for a final project, she knew she wanted to produce an embodied experience geared toward those with a disability, Vecchio says. When an initial idea was thwarted during pandemic shutdowns, she turned to personal experience.

“Here There Be Bears” is an escape-room style, first-person video game on display at the Benton that’s shown mostly in flashback and traps the player in a cave with a bear.

“One of the reasons we chose a cave is because of its isolation factor,” she says. “You’re isolated, alone, mimicking when I was 11. Cellphones were not a thing then, so there was no way to call for help and in a cave cellphones don’t work.”

Vecchio says she wanted to use an accident-based trauma because it’s an isolated event, and most of the population won’t experience PTSD from an accident like the one portrayed – getting trapped in a cave with a bear.

“In the game, you are not a sexual assault victim or a combat veteran, both of which comprise the majority of those with PTSD,” she says, noting that despite PTSD being widely known about people don’t really understand it.

“It’s a misconception that people who haven’t seen combat can’t really get PTSD,” she says, “and PTSD is so often used as a joke, like when people say, ‘I was triggered by that.’ Those misconceptions persist so people don’t understand what PTSD means or how it manifests in people who aren’t your stereotypical post-traumatic stress survivor.”

Changing the past by drawing it

Diaz describes herself as always being artsy, but she didn’t get to study art until coming to UConn.

She attended a high school that centered on nursing, which imprinted the importance of giving blood and knowing CPR, she says, but didn’t give her much in the way of art lessons, save a health teacher who allowed Diaz to draw, label, and describe the function of the heart instead of taking a multiple-choice test.

Another teacher nicknamed her DRC, because the country Zaire is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Home is where she got to create characters – how they look, their backstories, their families – and put them in more positive situations than she was experiencing at school, where not only was she studying a field outside her interest, but she also was navigating her gender identity.

“When I came out as nonbinary and demisexual, I tried to tell a teacher or two who I trusted, but they kind of shut it down and weren’t really accepting of my coming out,” Diaz says. “Because of that I shut myself out and stayed in the closet. Growing up, kids talked about boys and girls and dating, and for me I didn’t feel any of this. People made it seem like I was the strange one because I wasn’t thinking about being intimate or dating.”

The characters she created, “I used them to cope and illustrate things that I wished people would do or how I hoped people would have reacted when I came out because it wasn’t really great, unfortunately,” she adds.

Diaz says the purpose of “A Confession In March,” her undergraduate graphic novel that’s on display in the Art Building, is to give those who are still figuring out their identity a way to feel safe.

“In the story, the main character, Wolfgang, is starting to develop feelings for his best friend. He’s never felt emotions toward other people before that were outside of being platonic and he’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, what is this?’ I used Wolfgang as a lens of what I went through,” Diaz says, reinforcing that the purpose of the story is for “people to realize they’re valid, whether they’re straight, gay, bi, demi, ace, like I am.”

In a way, she might very well be saving a life, in a same-but-different-way as a nurse.

“I always want my art to be a place where someone feels comfortable and valid, because I never felt that and I want people to feel that. When you don’t have support, you feel alone. I always, especially through my art, want someone to look at it and say, ‘Someone’s out there for me.’”

 

The 2023 Studio Art and Digital Media & Design MFA Thesis Exhibition – “Breadcrumb Journeys” for DMD and “Closed Switch” for studio art – is open at the William Benton Museum of Art through May 7. The 2023 UConn DMD BFA Senior Exhibition “Limitless” is open at the Jorgensen Gallery at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts through April 28. The 2023 Department of Art and Art History BFA Senior Exhibition is open in the Art Building in the Fine Arts Complex through April 28.

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2023/04/art-dmd-students-look-to-formative-years-for-inspiration-today/

January 23, 2023 | Kimberly Phillips

UConn’s first integrative studies student bridges passion for art, engineering in research and life

Arpita Kurdekar’s story doesn’t start at the point she came to the United States, or when she got her dream job as an engineer, or when she pivoted to graduate studies at UConn. It doesn’t even begin when, as a young woman just starting out, a tree limb fell on her, rendering Kurdekar paralyzed from the chest down.

Her story begins long before all of that, when she was a young girl in India, and first picked up a paintbrush. It was a childhood hobby stoked by two artist parents and encouraged by accolades and a few awards for her work.

Growing up, Kurdekar was caught between an affinity for art and a passion for math and science, the latter winning out educationally and professionally when she pushed painting aside and sought to design bridges as masterful as her favorite, the Brooklyn Bridge.

Never did she think the bridge that would become her greatest accomplishment to date would be the one that marries engineering and art, bringing travelers to a place that merges the two – if only virtually.

‘My life changed in just a moment’

Kurdekar earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University at Buffalo in 2015 after completing her undergraduate degree in India and working a few years at a structural engineering firm there. She came to the U.S. for the opportunity of advanced education and the hope for a professional license not long thereafter.

While at Buffalo, an internship at the New Hampshire Department of Transportation provided a conduit to a full-time position in the Granite State at GM2 Associates, where she focused on structural design calculations for projects in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

She says she enjoyed the work, suiting up in a safety vest and headlamp out in the field, ascending into the underbelly of structures for visual inspections, and sometimes walking through construction sites as workers laid the steel girders that help give a bridge its strength.

“One day, about seven months after I started at GM2, I went home after work and planned to go to the gym. As I walked down the driveway, a neighbor’s tree fell on me and immediately I was paralyzed with a spinal cord injury,” she says. “My life changed in just a moment.”

Kurdekar says she lay on the ground calling for help for an hour because she was in a location that neighbors couldn’t readily see. Eventually her roommate came home, and Kurdekar says she remembers being found. She then lost consciousness.

Girish and Vandana Kurdekar traveled from India as quickly as possible to sit by their daughter’s bedside, and today provide her around-the-clock care. Her first memory after the accident was waking to them in the hospital.

“It was a very difficult time,” Kurdekar says of those early days of recovery. “I was on a ventilator, so it has been a long recovery journey. I had to learn to breathe on my own again, how to talk, how to eat, and how to move what parts of my body I could. It has been a very, very long and difficult six years.”

Those early days of rehab at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Boston were centered on regaining the most basic of life skills. Once Kurdekar moved to Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, New Hampshire, a therapist suggested she tap not just into the muscle memory of the art from her youth but also the peace it gave her.

At first, Kurdekar says the only movement she had was shrugging her shoulders. Then, with the aid of a splint, she learned to hold a paintbrush. Eventually, she wrote her name, and later she painted flowers.

“I remember those sunflowers,” she says with a giggle. “They didn’t look like sunflowers – only my therapist and I knew they were sunflowers. Still, art has been an outlet of joy for me to fight depression and feel happy again. It gives me a lot of rest and peace.”

As she awakened to the value of art in her life, Kurdekar returned to work at GM2 for a few months before assessing her professional future and recognizing academia was the place she wanted to be.

GM2 President and CEO Manish K. Gupta ’98 MS, ’01 Ph.D. had become a mentor to Kurdekar and spoke fondly of his time at UConn. At his urging, she applied.

Teaching with VR Technology

Accepted into the School of Engineering Ph.D. program in 2018 and poised to study civil engineering, Kurdekar realized the passion she’d had for engineering had waned, though it wasn’t extinguished. She thought there might be a way to bring art and engineering together to complement each other.

Kurdekar says she shared with faculty in the schools of Education, Engineering, and Fine Arts her idea to create virtual reality technology to help students learn engineering principles that can be difficult to understand via a two-dimensional description in a textbook or on a screen – think thermodynamics, angular momentum, and gyroscopes.

It’s technology that visual artists, too, could use to practice their skills or plan for a piece that might be too large or cost prohibitive to build as a prototype.

“I’m aiming to teach concepts related to rigid body dynamics and specific art movements and art-making techniques through the overarching theme of kinetic sculptures,” she says. “I wish to present the learning experience in a more interesting and playful manner, in which the students can engage in creative thinking and problem solving by applying learning from both fields. That’s the kind of education we need to give students to prepare them to become innovative thinkers.”

She assembled a team of advisors from each of the three schools and became UConn’s first Integrative Studies Ph.D. candidate. It’s a program that allows students to combine several disciplines into one study track that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing department. Kurdekar hopes to finish her degree in 2024.

She has a fellowship from the Krenicki Arts and Engineering Institute, for which she’s been a teaching assistant in courses such as Entrepreneurship & Innovation in Industrial Design, Packaging Design, and Human Factors in Design. Kurdekar also has received support from the Dr. Radenka Maric Fellowship Fund for Engineering.

“There are a lot of parallels between my research and the art-making process,” she says. “In both, I focus my energy on solving creative challenges, whether on canvas or in a 3D virtual space. I want the viewer to be moved by the visuals and feel the same sense of engagement and enjoyment as I had during the making of it.”

In the beginning, though, Kurdekar was not a computer programmer. She says she’d picked up only bits of coding experience during school and needed to lay that foundation before building up.

Advisor Kenneth Thompson, an assistant professor in-residence in UConn’s Digital Media & Design department, taught Kurdekar’s first class, Introduction to Game Scripting.

“It takes grit to go from nothing to where Arpita is now,” Thompson says. “Since she came at it with a background in engineering, she already had the foundational logic and thought process that allowed her to excel in class. She knew where she wanted to go, and that made it easy to point her toward the material she needed to learn.”

Kurdekar found supplemental instruction on YouTube, and, coupled with DMD classes, gained proficiency in the language C#, or C Sharp.

Making Her Mark in a Burgeoning Field

“Game development is a ubiquitous thing that we see everywhere,” Thompson says. “Your mailer that you get from the grocery store asks you to go on a quest for a 75-cent-per-pound ham to get experience points on your badge when you scan your card. Gaming is applied in different ways. Arpita really made the case that what she’s doing with VR is valuable from an educational research perspective and adds to the numerous projects being done across campus and disciplines.”

Thompson says that while people might associate VR mostly with gaming or entertainment, the technology merely helps users understand something at scale: “It’s like the first time you step out of a car or an airport in a big city and you have that feeling of looking up. It’s kind of overwhelming to feel that sense of height. VR provides that kind of experience and makes it possible to communicate or teach it.”

He says that a giant swinging pendulum, for instance, might be too dangerous, too difficult, or too expensive to create or too limited to have more than one per class. Kurdekar’s VR technology will allow students to learn concepts related to that pendulum because it will be right in front of each of them.

“People who are working on VR technology now, like Arpita, they’re the ones who are going to make marks and be the forebearers of how we have new experiences and interact with things,” he says.

School of Engineering Associate Dean Daniel Burkey, another of Kurdekar’s advisors, says some UConn faculty members already have begun to use VR technology for straightforward purposes, like looking at landscapes, viewing topographical maps, or manipulating objects.

Kurdekar’s work differs in that it’s more immersive.

Burkey says what’s being used now is in addition to classroom lessons, whereas Kurdekar’s technology will bring the educational space into the virtual world.

“That’s the defining feature and that’s something that will be really impactful moving forward,” he says. “The other interesting thing about Arpita’s work is that it is applicable to a lot of different engineering fields. Engineering has a strong psychometric component; it’s very hands on. Sometimes it’s difficult to give students an authentic hands-on experience. Virtual reality allows you to do that in a much more authentic way than simply interacting with something on a screen, or reading a case study, or doing it in pen and paper.”

Thompson adds that the pandemic accelerated the mainstream’s adoption of VR technology, especially since the cost of the requisite hardware is decreasing.

Burkey says, “Previous generations of the hardware have been large. They’ve been bulky. They’ve been attached to a computer with a lot of wires. There’s lag time that can be disorienting for people. The increases in computing power, the shrinking of technology, the reductions in cost are all making it a lot more accessible.”

Accessibility for those with limited mobility also has been central to Kurdekar’s research, especially since she’s just beginning to move her fingers at the first knuckle thanks to surgeries in 2021 and 2022.

“For five years I couldn’t move a finger, and now I can,” she says. “This is very new research, and Dr. Justin Brown, my doctor, at the Paralysis Center at Spaulding, is one of only a few doing it. Who knew this could happen for me, but it did. People are doing research and breakthroughs are happening every day. These unbelievable changes in my life have made me look at the future in a very positive way.”

Immersed in Art, Memorizing Nature

At home, Kurdekar paints as often as possible, trying to fill most of her free time with it and having done hundreds of pieces, many of which she has posted on Instagram and her website. Lately, she’s tried painting on wood and even using clay to create pottery.

“

I started off with representational style paintings, trying to make things look real, very life-like,” she explains. “But slowly, I realized my inner voice was missing in the art I was creating. So, I started laying fragments of my memories and experiences with people, places, and things on my canvases. My work started becoming more abstract and meaningful as I traced those memories with the use of expressive brushstrokes and vibrant colors.”

Using the beauty of New England as a muse, she adds, “It’s hard not to have imprints of the sunsets, the sky mixing with the water, or even the energetic shifting movements of the birds foraging the farms and the feeders in your mind and heart.”

In 2019, Kurdekar’s work went on display for the first time at the Mansfield Community Center. Since then, she’s exhibited there and at various galleries, including Arts Center East in Vernon, and has won a few awards in area juried art shows.

She continues to find inspiration in nature. Last summer, she and her parents visited Maine and ascended Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park via wheelchair ramps that stretched to the top. She saw views of the ocean and islands below, memorizing the shapes and colors of the scenery.

“I was a totally different person before the accident,” she says. “I was active. I would dance, I would hike, I would drive to different places. I lost a lot. But this journey has made me a different person. It’s opened my eyes to see what’s important in life. I realized who my true friends are and what really matters. I would never have gone on for my Ph.D. and do the research I’m doing if this hadn’t happened. It gave me a new direction and I totally enjoy what I do now.”

The biggest obstacle at this juncture is her and parents’ immigration status. None of them have U.S. citizenship, keeping Kurdekar from obtaining certain home-care services and her parents’ the ability to apply for driver’s licenses, work here, and get medical insurance.

U.S. Rep. Ann M. Kuster, D-N.H., introduced legislation in 2021 to relieve some of that strain and grant the family of three lawful permanent resident status. That bill, HR680, passed the House in June, the Senate on Dec. 21, and received President Joe Biden’s signature on Jan. 5.

“My parents had tourist visas and every six months they had to renew them in order to stay here legally to care for me. There was always uncertainty they wouldn’t get approved and that was a very big worry for me,” Kurdekar, who now will have a green card, says.

Going back to India isn’t an option. The infrastructure is not handicapped friendly, which means she wouldn’t have job opportunities let alone be able to obtain medical care that, she says, would be inferior to what she’s receiving here.

“I don’t know if I’d even be able to survive there,” Kurdekar says. “All the skills, all the hard-earned skills I have wouldn’t be utilized. In the U.S., every individual has equal opportunities in spite of their physical abilities. I can do a lot here. I can use my knowledge and skills to contribute to society.”

Despite all of this, she’s carried on.

An engineer friend designed and built an adaptable easel that, with the push of a joystick, can rotate a canvas, lift it, push it left or right, or tilt it to give Kurdekar easier reach. The palate of paint rests on the tray of her motorized wheelchair as she gets lost in the small brushstrokes that give her paintings their texture and movement.

“Life is much better than what it was five years back,” she says. “I want to tell people who are struggling not to be afraid. Take one day at a time. Have small goals and try to achieve them. If you really work hard, there’s always a way out. You can always find a way. If you keep looking, you’ll eventually find an answer.”

 

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2023/01/laying-a-new-foundation-before-building-up-uconns-first-integrative-studies-student-bridges-passion-for-art-engineering-in-research-and-life/

January 5, 2023 | Jaclyn Severance

‘Creating media that unites, that’s something that I really want to do with my films’

Guerra, with Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes, and the production team for Grit & Grace (Contributed Photo)

Today, you can order Alicia Villanueva’s handmade tamales from William Sonoma.

If you’re in the San Francisco area, you can get them delivered locally through her website, and you’ll find her at all the major food festivals and events in the area, with more than a dozen different varieties of her signature dish, all prepared in her 6,000-square-foot kitchen, where she employs 22 people through her family business, Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas.

Soon, you’ll even be able to enjoy her tamales on Alaska Airlines flights, and possibly even American Airlines flights as well – that deal is still in the works.

But while her business is booming now, that hasn’t always been the case for Villanueva, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and started making 100 tamales in her home kitchen every night – after cleaning houses during the day and taking care of her three children – and then selling her tamales on the street, sometimes making as little as $20 for an evening of culinary effort.

“As an immigrant myself, I felt very drawn into the story of Alicia – she’s a wonderful and charming person,” says Oscar Guerra, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and an Associate Professor of Film and Video in the Digital Media and Design (DMD) Department at UConn Stamford. “I think that was very remarkable, to be able to meet people who are really hopeful about what it means to become American.”

Guerra met Villanueva while producing and directing his latest documentary-style film, Grit & Grace, a unique project that premiered on December 13 at the National Archives in Washington D.C., with a mission almost as compelling as the three stories of the American dream – including Villanueva’s – that it shares.

Coffee with the Congressman

Grit & Grace tells the three very different stories of Villanueva; Joseph Graham, Jr. of North Carolina; and Jeremy and Wendy Cook of West Virginia. The film – narrated by the actress Sarah Jessica Parker – is a first-of-its-kind production on behalf of the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, chaired by Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes.

Guerra first met Himes at an event for Stamford Hospital in the late summer of 2021. They met again for coffee a month later.

“He started telling me about this idea,” Guerra recalls. “He wanted, for the first time, for a U.S. Congressional committee to produce a film, not just a report. Because that’s normally what all committees do at the end of their term, they produce a report. But he thought it would be more impactful if we were able to come up with something, that it could be more compelling than just writing a report. And I thought that was really interesting.”

The Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth was convened by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to develop solutions to what it calls “the key economic issue of our time: the yawning prosperity gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else.”

The committee was tasked with developing recommendations for addressing economic disparity in the country, but also intended to “Show America to Itself,” working in a nonpartisan manner to document the hopes, concerns, and aspirations of Americans regardless of differences or the issues that divide them.

“He told me that he wanted to tell stories about the American people, what it means to be American, what it means to achieve your American dream,” says Guerra, “and I said, ‘I think that’s wonderful.’”

After a lengthy process of interviewing people to potentially feature in the film, the committee staff settled on the three stories, and Guerra went to work bringing his signature style of personal connection with real stories to this new venture of docu-style filmmaking.

“Creating media that unites, that’s something that I really want to do with my films,” Guerra says. “I think that media can entertain. Media sometimes educates. Media informs. And lately we’ve seen a lot of media that divides. I think that we’re very polarized. So, I’m trying to get into this wagon of media that unites, and I’m trying to find stories where we can find commonalities among people and reclaim the humanity in each one of us, because that’s how we can actually connect at the end of the day.”

Stories of Resilience and Determination

Guerra and his team traveled the country, conducting three-to-five-day shoots with each of the participants at their homes, businesses, and neighborhoods.

In California, they toured Villanueva’s commercial kitchens, saw the nonprofit organizations that helped her turn her home-based tamale operation into a viable business plan, and saw the home that her family purchased as the business began to succeed.

In North Carolina, they learned from Graham about how the single father of four struggled with the impact of systemic racism in his early education, how family financial struggles initially derailed his dream of completing his college education, and how he eventually went back to school, ultimately earning his master’s degree and starting his own business focused on equity.

In West Virginia, they met the Cooks, who take care of two sons with special needs while running a home-based antique shop. When pandemic restrictions forced them to close their physical location, they were forced to pivot their business to an online model – made all the more challenging by an unreliable internet connection in rural West Virginia.

While it’s impossible, Guerra explains, to boil all Americans down into just three archetypes, the stories chosen for Grit & Grace embody the resilience and determination of the American people.

“When you see the stories of Alicia, Joseph, and Jeremy and Wendy, they come from very different walks of life,” Guerra says. “But the only thing that they all want from our government is for people work together and be there for us. So, at the end of the day, we’re actually not that different. We all go through the same struggles, and if we try to increase our compassion, if we try to raise our level of empathy, we can find that we all go through a lot and that there’s dignity in the struggle.”

Both Director and Professor – and on a Deadline

Guerra – who won an Emmy award in 2021 for a PBS Frontline documentary that followed an immigrant family from Guatemala living in Stamford, the mother’s life-and-death battle against COVID-19 while pregnant with her second child, and the teacher who agreed to care for the newborn infant while the local community rallied to support the family – often spends months or years documenting the stories he features in his films.

For Grit & Grace, he had only about six months.

“It was not until the summer of 2022 that we actually kickstarted this project, so it took a while to get going,” he says. “I wasn’t even sure if it was going to happen or not. It’s unusual to produce something valuable in this short amount of time, but we were working nonstop.”

He was also working on the film at the same time as his newest Frontline documentary, After Zero Tolerance, which also premiered in December.

“Having the right people on your team, it becomes crucial,” Guerra says. “It’s working with the right people at the right time and having the passion to make it happen.”

As with previous projects, Guerra worked as both a director and a professor, looking to UConn students and colleagues to help form that crucial team.

Samantha Olschan, an assistant professor in the DMD program at UConn Stamford, designed the logo for the film and worked with Michael Roca ’25 (SFA), a DMD sophomore studying Motion Design & Animation at UConn Stamford, who joined the project in the fall as a title designer in the post-production phase of the film.

It was Roca’s first time joining a project like this, and he says he learned a lot about working on a team through the process.

“In terms of the team itself, there was a lot of communication going on the whole time,” says Roca, “and that’s pretty major. Every second counts in a project, especially when the deadline is near. Oscar did let me know that the deadline was near, I was like, ok, I’m going to need to commit to this a lot, if I’m going to get this done.”

While DMD senior Christopher Orrico ’23 (SFA), who is studying Film and Video Production at UConn Stamford, had worked on film productions before, he’d never operated at the scale he says was required of him for Grit & Grace. But he didn’t hesitate when Guerra asked him to join the project.

“I jumped at it – I think I texted as soon as he asked me,” Orrico says. “I texted back not 30 seconds later, ‘Yes, I’m down, let’s go. Don’t even care what it takes. What do we gotta do? What am I doing?’”

Orrico worked as a camera operator for the project – invaluable experience, he says, that has jumpstarted his goals to eventually work as a director of photography and cinematographer on films, particularly documentary-style productions.

But it also pushed him outside his comfort zone – and literally out of the Connecticut – as he traveled with Guerra to California, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Washington D.C., accompanying Guerra on his shoots with the film’s participants.

And as he ate tamales with Villanueva – “She did nothing but feed us,” he shares with gratitude – spent time with Graham and his oldest son, and experienced the day-to-day joys and struggles of the Cook family, Orrico’s personal commitment to the project grew.

“At some point during this entire project, I wanted to be even more invested into it, not just from a career standpoint, but from an empathetic standpoint,” he says. “I wanted to do what I could, because this project is important, and I wanted to give everything that I had and more.

“I learned so much throughout this entire thing, and obviously still being a student, I still made mistakes, and with each mistake that I made, I made it a point to make sure I didn’t make it the next time. That is something that I’m forever grateful for, for both Oscar and his projects.”

Grit & Grace will be screened at UConn Stamford in an upcoming event this spring, sponsored by UConn DMD and Dodd Human Rights Impact. Additional screenings and events at Harvard University and New York University in Spring 2023 are currently in planning stages. To learn more about the project and the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, follow @GritandGrace on Twitter or visit fairgrowth.house.gov.

Original Article via UConn Today.