Global Arts and Cultures Students and Alumni

Sonya Bui is a writer and aspiring curator raised in Hanoi’s Russian-speaking diaspora. As a third culture kid, she uses arts and culture to examine her different ways of belonging in the world, with her practice centering multilingual storytelling and hybrid identities often marginalized by the mainstream.

Sonya graduated from Brown University with a degree in Modern Culture and Media. For her capstone project, she experimented with literary translation, interactive design, and archival research to create a choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel set in French Indochina. Following her studies, Sonya worked at the RISD Museum and Ugly Duckling Presse. At RISD and beyond, Sonya aspires to deepen her writing craft and further explore decolonial museum practices, hereby creating platforms for narratives of the Global South.

Originally from Montana, Toni France graduated with honors from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television with a focus on producing and dramaturgy. While at UCLA, Toni was a student educator at the Hammer Museum, creating and leading tours of exhibitions and assisting with museum programming. She has worked across literature, museums, and the performing arts with organizations including PEN America, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and National Dance Institute.

With research interests located at the convergence point of visual and performing arts, Toni investigates the intersection of artistic mediums, and the way that collaborations between performance, visual art, music, and literature can uplift each other and increase accessibility to the arts from different perspectives.

Olivier Mbabazi (he/his) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Kigali, Rwanda. His work explores art as a venue for cross-cultural understanding, resilience, and community healing. He is also interested in further understanding contributions of African art and African artists in decolonizing contemporary art and the marketplace.

In 2023, Olivier conducted his Thomas J. Watson Fellowship research project Art and Resilience in Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Jordan, Nepal, Senegal, and Seychelles. Through this project he examined how various artists, activists, educators, and other social actors use their work and platforms to process traumatic memories and initiate dialogue and other community initiatives aimed at fostering tolerance and reconciliation. In his current and future work, Olivier will continue to investigate links between socially engaged art, political propaganda, and preservation of lived and collective memories.

Tanishqa Sadhu graduated from Symbiosis International University, India, with a consolidated degree in liberal arts and law. She briefly worked as a lawyer before transitioning to the arts to pursue work that aligns more closely with her values, interests, and goals. Since then Tanishqa has worked as a social and emotional learning (SEL) facilitator with the nonprofit Slam Out Loud, to help bring art education to children from underprivileged communities.

Tanishqa’s intellectual pursuits lie in exploring visual arts and how they sit at the intersection of cultural, individual and social exchange, and impact personal identity. She is especially fascinated by Kashmiri arts and how they are molded by being at the resting stop of many dynamic cultures throughout history. In the future, she aims to explore the evolution of these artworks and gain insight into how they stitch into the contemporary cultural fabric of the Kashmir Valley.

Although Yiwei Zhou’s formal training is in economics, which she studied at Boston University, she has long been involved in art-related projects, including field research at the Mogao Caves (Dunhuang, China) and work with Harvard CAMLab. She is especially interested in questions of space and how cultural memory takes shape across media and environments.

Yiwei’s current focus resonates with themes in political philosophy and cultural geography—such as the production of space, sovereignty, and subjectivity, as well as the evolving role of digital cartography in art and public culture. Outside academics, she enjoys the outdoors, food, music, and theater :)

Areeha Ahmad graduated with distinction from the National College of Arts, Lahore, earning a BS (Hons) in cultural studies. She currently works on a project with the Lahore Biennale Foundation in collaboration with the National College of Arts focused on Mall Road’s ecosystem. Areeha has also served as a member of the South Asian Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), addressing issues of religious minority women in Pakistan.

Areeha’s research interests lie in cultural studies, particularly women and gender studies in South Asia. Her work critically examines secular-liberal frameworks of women’s agency, as exemplified by her thesis on the “Haya March”. She is passionate about social activism and the nuanced understanding of women’s roles within feminist politics.

Pinar Baser (she/her) is a designer from Ankara, Turkey. She holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from Middle East Technical University. Her intellectual pursuits are deeply rooted at the intersection of design and social sciences, with a particular focus on material culture.

Pinar is especially fascinated by the cultural landscapes of Anatolia and the Middle East, intrigued by the interactions between different cultures and ethnicities. She is passionate about how design and the material world both shape and reflect societal behaviors, cultural traditions, and political dynamics. She aspires to explore how design influences and is influenced by the fabric of societies and cultural narratives in her future work.

Sam Box is a writer that strives to unravel the mechanics of storytelling, creating work that plays with both its audience and the complexity of its own form. Sam received their BFA from the University of Maine at Farmington in creative writing and English, utilizing the space between generative and analytical writing practices to fuel an interdisciplinary perspective on composition—whether creative or critical.

Focused on the study of screenwriting, Sam explores the surreal and the empathetic in comedy, designing narrative spaces that can examine reality through the creation and deconstruction of incongruity. These interests have led to research in literary monstrosities, contemporary disseminations of local legends, and comedy as a double-edged sword that rejects and reaffirms social boundaries

April Lei Liu is an art researcher actively exploring the ever-changing landscape of art and its interaction with society. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in cultural management with minors in archaeology and business, and furthered her expertise by receiving professional training in economics and business at the University of Geneva via an exchange program.

Currently, April’s research mainly focuses on 20th/21st century Chinese art and the art market. Notably, she recently co-curated the exhibition Cast for Dignity: Early Chinese Belt Hooks from the De-Neng-Tang Collection at the CUHK Art Museum in Hong Kong. She also gained valuable experience through internships at Christie’s, Pace Gallery, Long March Space and TANK Shanghai.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Mary received her BA in Spanish from Stanford University with minors in art practice and modern languages. Her lifelong interests in art, languages, and museums guided her academic and professional experiences at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford’s Art and Art History department, and various organizations that support the Bay Area’s Spanish-speaking community.

After graduating, Mary moved to Elche, Spain, where she worked as a linguistic and cultural representative in a Spanish public school. Her time exploring museums, libraries, and bookstores across Europe further developed her interest in the relationship between language, art, and interpretation. In her free time, Mary loves going on walks, reading books and graphic novels, and trying new restaurants in Providence.

Daniela Ruiz Perez is an artist and geographer from the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area whose academic and personal interests have guided her towards cooperative curatorial work and aesthetic journalism. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, receiving a BA in studio art and BS in geographical sciences.

Daniela’s research interests lie in the dynamics of ethical transcultural exchange in the age of new media, using her interdisciplinary education and methodologies to sculpt an understanding of the interconnectedness in today’s globalized world, and is fascinated with how different environments form the interplay between time, space, and perspective. She aspires to create dialogues and narratives by actively engaging in cultural institutes and community-based collaborations.

Rachel Zheng is a Chinese graphic designer and curator with a bachelor’s degree in art and technology from the China Academy of Art. Past research interests are in content and genealogy design in the context of social and strategic practice. Her graphic genealogy series has been collected by the Zhejiang Art Museum and she has participated in many exhibitions.

Nowadays, Rachel tends to shift her identity from designer to curator and writer. Given that her expertise lies in the design of spaces and exhibits, she tries to combine more diverse forms of contemporary art and promote the exhibition space to realize the interactions between artworks and the audience. Rachel will focus on critical analysis of the prevalent use of the White Cube exhibition space model, focusing on the issue of inherent homogeneity, and explore more possibilities in innovative solutions for exhibition spaces and social narratives.