Student Fellows
ida fellows 2023
Santiago Alvillar (Co-Chair)
Santiago Alvillar (he/him) was born and raised on the outskirts of East Los Angeles, California, where he was cultivated by a strong sense of family pride, emerging from two resilient, undocumented parents, and a fundamental sense of ancestral identity. Through mixed media paintings, Santiago embodies delicate themes of generational trauma and the desperate need for coping mechanisms amidst harsh realities. Simultaneously, he finds remedy within his own community and understands the need to inspire healing by recognizing the interdependence between individuals, generations, and shared histories. Ultimately, Santiago seeks to explore the innate irony of becoming victims of colonial-rooted, systemic-funded cycles of oppression, whilst holding the most impact on the cycles themselves.
Ijeoma Alozie (Co-Chair)
Ijeoma Alozie is a filmmaker and poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Alozie has been writing and drawing since they could pick up a pencil, and found that filmmaking is a happy medium between their love for the visual and written arts. They are committed to prioritizing fat Black queer gender marginalized people in their work and have a particular fascination with coming-of-age films. Ijeoma is a junior majoring in Communication and minoring in Film and Media Studies.
Chloe Chow
Chloe Chow (she/they) is a senior double-majoring in Theater and Communication with a minor in Asian American Studies. As a multidisciplinary artist, they are interested in site-specificity and surrealism to reflect their own wandering with plural identity. Chloe’s journey this year with IDA is leading her to experiment with filmmaking as a medium to capture the authenticity of her family history and stray from linear artistic processes. Her project centers on her family’s old hot sauce business as a vessel for their Asian-Central American identity.
Norris Johnson
Norris Johnson is an artist, podcaster and content creator pursuing a degree in English (screenwriting) and African and African-American Studies (@stanfordaaas). For the past three years, Norris has built an internet presence as Norris Jay launching a podcast “Come Get A Sip”, in 2019 and a TikTok in 2020 where he has amassed over 25,000 followers. Norris leverages his presence online to launch new music, and in 2021 he released his first two singles, “Come Get A Sip” and “Stock Go Up”, as well as premiered his first music video. Norris' new work through IDA, considers the tensions and possibilities that exist between race and sexuality and hopes to make ties between Black Gay communities across time.
Sky Walker
Sky Walker (she/her) is a Black American artist from Atlanta, Georgia who primarily focuses on paper collage. Her artistic journey began with critiquing interlocking systems of oppression and has since broadened to center the visual and conceptual memories and narratives of Black people, including her family's history in the south. Her work explores storytelling through the manipulation of magazines, newspapers, maps, archival images and any other paper products she can get her hands on. Sky's work with IDA this year centers her grandfather's Black Panther Party newspapers from the 70s and her family’s history with the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL.
Bhu Kongtaveelert
Bhumikorn “Bhu” Kongtaveelert is a sophomore in Art Practice and Computer Science and a passionate energy and environmental journalist for the Stanford Daily. Growing up in the “Cities of Angels” -- Nakhonsawan and Bangkok, Thailand -- Bhu observed the effects of climate change and experienced the constant battles between flooding and droughts across his sinking country. Through painting, projections, family archives, and creative research, he hopes to navigate his complicated relationship with eco-anxiety, global climate policy, inequity, and collective memory.
Ximena Sanchez Martinez
Ximena Sanchez Martinez (she/her) is a senior studying Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a concentration in Health and Wellness, and a minor in Biology. She is a multidisciplinary artist and works mostly with collage, painting, and photography. Ximena’s work explores her identity and journey as a first-generation student in higher education. Her passions for immigrants' rights, access to higher education, medicine, and storytelling influence her projects. Her current work focuses on spotlighting the stories of immigrants and depicting the obstacles DREAMers face when pursuing higher education.
Halima Ibrahim
Halima Ibrahim is a 20-year-old Egyptian American artist and poet based in Rhode Island and Cairo. She transferred to Stanford in 2021 from the Community College of Rhode Island after completing an Associates of Fine Arts. Halima is a double major in Art History and Art Practice, with a minor In archeology. Her interests focus on Modern Egyptian Art following the 2011 Arab Spring. Her art practice is based in photography, textile, and printmaking. Halima Ibrahim served as the Rhode Island Youth Poet Laureate for 2020 and 2021, and former Artist in Residence for the Markaz resource center for the 2021-2022 academic year.
Jasmin Zazaboi
Jasmin Zazaboi is a 2020 transfer student majoring in Science, Technology, and Society. She is a visual artist and poet who hopes to spend her time with IDA exploring the historical and present dynamics of scientific and medical racism. Through her work, she aims to prod assumptions about Black identity and humanity that have been shape-shifting and manifesting in multiple generations of scientific lore. She desires to construct visual and verbal subjects who, through conversation with and confrontation of scientific understandings, assert their own agency and humanity.
Claire Yu
Claire Yu (she/her) is a freestyle dancer. Her current project explores themes of escape, safety, and transnational empathy. Through improvisation, her project imagines an alternate universe through which we can safely confront, interrogate, and bid farewell to institutions that claim good intentions yet perpetuate harm.
Katie Han
Katie Han is a multidisciplinary artist majoring in Design and minoring in Psychology and Art. Combining these disciplines, she enjoys creating imagery, objects, and spaces that encourage contemplation, healing, and reflection. Her interests in psychology and art intersect; she finds that both domains drive interactions between our internal and external worlds. Although photography is her primary medium, Katie incorporates painting, installation art, jewelry design, and illustration in her work. Her IDA project explores themes of intergenerational ties, the complexity of memory, and the universal drive to create.
Malavika Kannan
Malavika Kannan is a junior double-majoring in Comparative Literature and CSRE with a minor in Creative Writing. She is a novelist, comic artist, and journalist who seeks inspiration and community in the art practices of other queer people of color. Her coming-of-age novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS, will release from Little & Brown in July 2023, and her writing appears in Teen Vogue, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Malavika is particularly interested in practices of healing, abolition, and transformation for South Asian women, and uses cartoon art / graphic storytelling to process the pain, complexity, and even (sometimes!) humor of that experience. Through IDA she is excited and grateful to begin her journey as a visual artist.
Roya Ahmadi
Roya Ahmadi is a Muslim, Iranian-American multimedia artist-scholar from the Bay Area. They work primarily in installation, collage, painting, and sculpture, drawing on ancient Muslim and Iranian art traditions to make work rooted in anti-imperial solidarity building, navigating diasporic identity formation, and understanding gender, sexuality, memory, and multigenerationality. Roya creates work that explores storytelling, futurism, and liberatory practice through collapsing history and visions for the future. Roya is a sophomore at Stanford studying Human Biology, Interdisciplinary Arts, and Urban Studies.
IDA 2022 Creative Thesis Cohort
Emily Geigh Nichols
Emily Geigh Nichols (she/they) is a senior pursuing African and African American Studies (with an IDA Concentration! @stanfordaaas) and Communications. Since she was a young child she has been inspired by her grandmother and mother’s practice of fashion design and sewing. Their work inspires Emily’s art practice, centered on fashion and sneaker design as a form of communal agency, representation, and liberation. In addition, Emily is also a content creator in the influential areas of fashion and styling for digital media platforms.
Tyah-Amoy Roberts
Tyah-Amoy Roberts is a senior studying African and African American Studies (@aaasstanford) with a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics (IDA), and a minor in Political Science. They are a multidisciplinary artist and work mostly with clothing design and music. Tyah-Amoy’s work focuses on the Black gendered experience, queerness, gender rejection, and self-fashioning.
Lee'Shae Lawson
Lee’Shae Lawson is a senior studying African and African American Studies (@stanfordaaas). Art has been fundamental in her life starting with singing in church choirs and musical theater. Her art practice has since expanded into photography, playwriting, and performance art. Lee'Shae's performance and writing emphasize how we are connected within the human experience and works toward combating the dehumanization of marginalized groups.
Isabella Tilley
Isabella Tilley is a senior majoring in CSRE with an IDA concentration. Their thesis looks at how model minority racialization & proximity to whiteness differently affect parents and children in Viet American families, and how those different perspectives manifest in conflict. Exploring intergenerational trauma and conflict, climate and social change-- the work including short stories and scholarship, pushes back against the complicity of systems of violence affecting Vietnam and movements for social change.