Closer to Earth explores a Black midwestern family's generational spiritual connection to nature through the power of spiritual archiving, ancestral veneration, and oral storytelling.

Doble Identidad conveys my experience as someone who struggles with their cultural identity. Through the expository modes of self-reflexivity, participatory, experimental, and poetics, the film displays the factors that molded my cultural identity. My childhood memories and interactions with my loved ones help me tell the story of how my cultural identity has and continues to leave me with feelings of inadequacy of not being Mexican or American enough.

This MFA graduate thesis explores the intersection of therapeutic photography, generational trauma, and Christian spirituality in promoting spiritual healing in disabled veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drawing from personal experience, rigorous biblical training, and extensive research, I argue that incorporating faith-based practices and beliefs can complement existing PTSD support and enhance spiritual and mental well-being. Through the lens of generational trauma, the thesis analyzes the complex interplay between individual and collective trauma. It posits that the healing process is intrinsically linked to the restoration of the individual and community. I present a framework for therapeutic photography that incorporates Christian spiritual principles and offers practical guidelines for implementation in conjunction with therapeutic photography. The thesis concludes with a call to action for faith-based communities, mental health practitioners, and policymakers to recognize and address the spiritual and artistic therapeutic needs of disabled veterans with PTSD.

Three individuals prepare themselves to perform unique talents on a live stage, proving to themselves and others that they are far more capable than they imagined.

"The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity" is an autobiographical documentary reflecting on society's expectations of the female body image and how it affects Latinx women. Through personal recollections, media content, and archival material, the film explores beauty expectations, body discrimination, and body positivity. The document analyzes the documentary styles such as autoethnography and narration incorporated into the film and provides historical and theoretical context to body image in the Latinx culture and how the media has affected body image, beauty ideals, and eating disorders. In addition, the pre-production, production, and post-production process is detailed.

"Thank You" Parts I and II is an experiment that attempts to break new ground in the field of anthropological cinema through the reflexive methodology and experience of myself. My establishment of a new theoretical film approach called meta-anthrochaomediacy and its evolution into radical autoethnographic mediation is explored throughout this thesis. I exercised my theory by producing and documenting a reflexive experience built on fostering emotional bonds and social relationships that provided interactivity and choice within an environment as a process of mediation for anthropological study. Part I features a physical installation I designed that exercised the transmission of memories shared with my familial table. Twelve individuals voluntarily experienced this process across 4 sessions in a single day where they interacted with the table, each other, and the memories of places that the table has lived in. The installation was primarily recorded with a 360 camera and subsequently established as qualitative data, as per my theoretical process, to be edited into a film object. Part II is a 58-minute multi-split-screen film that features my theoretical process in action as it expresses the crafting of emerging-in-real-time short term cultures through layers of reflexivity. I edited this film to test my theory …