Student Fellows
ida fellows 2022
Kiara T. Dunbar (Co-Chair)
Kiara T. Dunbar (they/she) is a queer Black poet, filmmaker, and archivist hailing from South Los Angeles. Utilizing their training in Black studies, gender studies, and experimental media, as an artist-scholar they interrogate concepts of statelessness, fugitivity, codification, and belonging. Kiara is passionate about troubling narratives of visibility; in their work, they explore the utility and agency behind disappearing oneself. This year, Kiara is completing an original film titled “GIRLHOOD APOCALYPSE” — an experimental short that examines how the Black, ungendered body exists both as a carceral entity and a site of liberatory potential. Through artmaking, Kiara imagines the apocalypse not as devastating, but rather, as a landscape in which the socially dead can live on forever.
Email: ktdunbar@stanford.edu
Stara D'Haiti (Co-Chair)
Stara D'Haiti '24 is a makeup artist considering majors in Physics, Energy Resources Engineering and Earth Systems. She uses make-up as a storytelling device to think critically about standards of beauty, self-love, identity, vulnerability, acceptance and creativity. This year she will be building out her portfolio as a makeup artist, while exploring her practice as an act of social practice and self-transformation.
Email: stara@stanford.edu
Osadolor Osawemwenze
Osadolor Osawemweze (He/him) is an image-maker, artist, podcaster, and overall creative director. As a first-generation Nigerian American, he focuses on how Nigerian traditions can turn into chains of progress and how western “modernity” can lead to fading cultural values and livelihoods. He expands upon this focus with the complexity of desirability politics in black masculinity, gender expression (emphasis on clothing), and sexuality. Through mixed media presentations of digital manipulations, intricate yet fluid sketches, expressive photography, and extensive media research on pop culture, his work dissects the complexities and youthfulness of the African Diaspora.
Email: osadolor@stanford.edu
Ashley Toribio
Ashley Toribio (they/she) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is a senior majoring in African and African American Studies (AAAS) with a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics. Their Dominican-American identity has informed their research on gender performance in queer Afro-Dominican communities, specifically looking at the presence of queer black Dominican gender expression in different performance practices, and its effects on queer black insurgency in the Dominican Republic through different forms of visibility. The role of queer black gender expression in the D.R., what this looks like a context of queer black liberation, and how it has been, and continues to be, documented, and perceived through the visuality of the performing arts is especially of interest to them as they work on their creative honors thesis. For the creative aspect of their thesis, they hope to explore the liberatory tactics that are grounded in artistic practices among these communities through the mediums of collage and space curation.
Myasia Goode
Myasia Goode (They/ Them) I am a visual artist. My most common medium is oil paint, but for this fellowship I am looking to expand into textile and photography. My project with be focused on my personal experiences with body image; specifically the ways in which it intersects with race(anti-blackness), weight(fat phobia), and self-identity (the way we view ourselves).
Dija Manley
Dija Manley (she/they) is a junior at Stanford studying Product Design, and a multidisciplinary artist who primarily focuses on filmmaking and world creating. Hailing from Madison, WI, their art aims to center their experiences with African Diasporic Traditions, queerness, blackness, and gender identity. They are passionate about making art that fantastically captures the intangible, and strives to create art that touches the soul.
Diana Khong
Diana Khong (they/them) is a Viet theatermaker, filmmaker and cultural worker. They’re currently writing and directing their first full-length play Mary Magdalene, Daughter, Boatperson, a three-act ghost story following the death of a mother and three Vietnamese siblings who grieve her — a sister who finds refuge in take-out containers and neighborhood grandmothers; a brother who, freed from expectations of a nuclear family, falls in love with his best friend; and a daughter, the youngest, who learns her mom has gone to hell and loves her enough to follow her down. It will debut for the first time as the Asian American Theater Project’s Spring 2022 Mainstage. As an artist, Diana’s work is an act of renegotiation; and in their stories, they imagine endings where our families find home.
Tyra Blackwater
Ya’at’eeh, shí k’é dóó shí dine’é, my name is Tyra Blackwater (she / they) and I am from Tó’déé - Shiprock, New Mexico. I am Diné from the Red Bottom Cheeks and Between his Sleeves clans, born of German descent. I am a creative - my work includes photography, beading, acting, design and video art. I am empowered to reclaim spaces for queer, femme and Indigenous youth, using art as a tool to promote the visibility of suppressed identities. My work is at the intersection of traditional and contemporary art, inspired by my relations and the beauty of my homelands, I am taught by my relatives and matriarchs.
Alicia Evan
Alicia Evan (She/Her) is a senior majoring in Human Biology with a focus in public health and development. Her art practice weaves her indigenous identity into her love for digital art. Her art aims to re-create her Alaska-based tribal village as a way of protecting her ancestral lands. She archives her home today, attempting to immortalize it without the capitalistic grasp that is increasingly changing her community.
Michelle Ibarra
Michelle Ibarra (She/her) and I am a mixed media visual artist and poet from San Francisco. Much of my artistry stems from a desire to explore the intersection of identities I hold as a low income, first-generation, queer, Latina artist. Through my IDA fellowship, I aspire to create an anthology of art and poetry chronicling my coming of age and my family’s history in San Francisco’s Mission District. I believe my artistic practice is rooted in wanting to preserve the San Francisco I know, amid the systemic violence inflicted on the communities I am a part of. In addition to my work acting as a living archive, I consider my art to be a medium for resurrection as I continue to mourn the places and people I have loved and lost.
Huong Nguyen
Huong Nguyen (she/they) is an experimental hacker of AI transformation in art, seeking to investigate how algorithms can be used to preserve cultural rituals. Much like ritual, coding engages repetition - by this nature Huong hopes to integrate their technological & spiritual practices in a reclamation of computational power and in opposition of assimilation. The artist notes: “My project will be an experimentation with style transfer, free of bounds and confinement, as I research the aesthetics of Vietnamese culture in its newfound iteration within the U.S. landscape.”
Harry Fowler
Harry Fowler (they/any) is a a non-binary film photographer, music producer, book maker, skater, chess player, and percussionist making a photography book centered around the intersections of ecowomanism/anarchism, freeform locs, racial violence, and family dysfunction.
Linda Denson
Linda Denson (they/she) is a dancer from New Orleans, LA interested in showcasing intersections of Blackness, queerness and femininity through movement. Their project is a set of heels pieces exploring Black women's relationship to sex, desirability, and performance. She hopes to enhance her project through the integration of many soundscapes, mediums (spoken word, video, etc), and dancers!
Miley Sinantha-Hu
Miley Sinantha-Hu (they/she) is a ceramic and mixed-media visual artist studying Biology and Education. Through the physicality of sculpture, pottery, collage, and photography, their work explores how collective memory and intergenerationality can be expressed as palpable narratives. Lately, their work is preoccupied with locating themself within their Laotian identity, among legacies of diaspora and inceptions of cultural reimagination. This year, they are working on a collection of porcelain pieces and terra cotta vessels that play with light, smoke, sound, and water to speak towards remembrance.
IDA 2022 Creative Thesis Cohort
Sequoiah Blaire
Sequoiah Hippolyte (she/they) is an actor and filmmaker majoring in Black Studies. While at Stanford, they have had the beautiful opportunities to grow as an artist and healer through projects such as their documentary Celena and Quincy, performing in Revival: A Site Specific, Multimedia Dance Theater Production, and founding Restorative Film Collective: a creative community for Black and brown filmmakers. Her senior thesis explores cinematography through a Black Womanist framework and continues the conversations of energy, internal exploration, and divine connection. Sequoiah is a proud granddaughter of Linda and big sister to Avielle.
Email: sequoiah@stanford.edu
Kevin Calderon
Kevin Calderon (they/them) is a senior majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Queens, New York. Kevin is interested in Queer Central American Diasporic identity formation, particularly in the realm of visual art and photography. Kevin has worked in various Latinx spaces on campus, including Casa Zapata as an Ethnic Theme Associate, as well as organizing spaces in the Bay Area, such as San Francisco Rising. Kevin's creative thesis focuses on curating an exhibition space that centers Queer US-Central American identity and art to give a platform to artists and photographers that subverts hegemonic narratives of the Diaspora.
Arielle Williams
Arielle Williams ‘22 is a DJ, spacemaker, and self-proclaimed sonic jigsaw puzzle master double majoring in International Relations and African / African-American Studies. Known for highlighting and uplifting the voices of Black gender-marginalized and queer artists in her mixes, Arielle’s Creative Honors Thesis will illuminate and pay homage to the various contributions of Black-Gender Marginalized music artists and DJs to Hip Hop Culture. Sitting at the nexus of Remix Theory, Performance Theory, and Hip Hop Feminism - Arielle’s project aims to curate an entirely Black Gender-Marginalized music festival experience accompanied by a sonic mix that puts Black Gender-Marginalized DJs’ stories, political values, and community impact in intimate conversation with the music. By combining the technical skill of remixing with one’s own positionality, Arielle hopes to reveal how Black Gender-Marginalized DJs use their skill set to create spaces of unbridled Black joy and belonging.
Sierra Edwards
Aaniin boozhoo, my name is Sierra Edwards (she/they), and my Anishinaabemowin name is Ikwe. I am an Anishinaabe (Mille Lacs Band & Red Lake Nation), Black, and white person, originally from Minnesota. I am also an older sister to three magnificent (and adorable) siblings.
I am a senior, majoring in African and African American Studies, and minoring in Native American Studies. My creative thesis considers Afro-Indigenous futures which center collective healing and resistance—futures informed by past and present iterations of Black and Native relationality in what is now the United States. The artwork of my thesis visualizes these Afro-Indigenous futurisms, and will combine digital collage and beadwork.
Tala Parker