ENA HSIEH

Feature by Kayly Nguyen

Photos by Maggie Zhang

Ena Hsieh (CC ‘28)’s art showcases how humans interact with metropolitan environments and how spaces are able to influence human behavior. Through photography, charcoal paintings, and 3D modeling, Ena explores how intent in urban design is able to smooth the constant friction of daily life. She is currently studying Economics and Political Science at Columbia College.

Ena Hsieh grew up with the freedom to create. Her mother was an abstract painter who always kept their household full of materials and canvases for Ena to work with, and from a young age, Ena was encouraged to manifest all the ideas in her mind into reality. And with the astounding 1,671-ft skyscraper known as Taipei 101 right next to her, it’s no wonder that Ena grew curious about how urban design and policy shaped the dynamic metropolis she lived in.

As I sit down with Ena at Blue Bottle on Broadway, she tells me about her hometown of Taipei, which boasts an exceptionally high standard of living along with excellent comfort, safety, and healthcare ratings. Ena speaks about how moving through the city felt seamless, as if she was gliding through the spaces around her, and she wanted to explore how urban design made that feeling possible. 

She began interacting with older and newer buildings all over the city and observed how spaces could be tailor-made to suit a purpose, such as drawing people together, or to create a more harmonious standard of living through principles such as feng shui, a Chinese practice that optimizes space arrangement for balanced energy (chi) flow and a high quality of life. In fact, even the nearby skyscraper Taipei 101 was built with feng shui in mind: its shape resembles bamboo, which symbolizes longevity and resilience, and its eight-sectioned structure represents abundance and good fortune (Feng Shui & Housing Markets). 

A photo of the Taipei 101 skyscraper taken at sunset by Jimmy Liao.

Fascinated by those intentional choices, Ena began studying architecture in high school, where her teacher would tear down the pieces Ena had constructed and propel Ena to start all over again. As a result, Ena began viewing architecture as something iterative: a dynamic process that requires constant revision to suit the needs of a space. From her experiences with modifying architecture, Ena began to consider cities as alive in their own right, and she started to explore how the interaction between humans and the urban spaces around them could be visualized in her art.

In many of Ena’s charcoal drawings, there appears to be no clear foreground nor background. Instead, both the people in the center and their environments merge into one another, tangibly showcasing how humans and spaces can never be entirely separate from one another. What we would traditionally consider empty or negative space is instead highlighted with dark strokes that pull the background to the center, and that dynamic momentum is built up with variations in texture that mimic 3D movement.

And within the dynamic, shifting appearance of her art, Ena wishes to portray how humans and spaces are constantly influencing and being changed by one another in a perpetual cycle. With one click of the shutter from her camera, Ena captures a single moment of our ever-changing present, whether that looks like a blinding moment in the desert or the intimate view of a day’s end.

“Things don’t happen naturally. The fact that I get to be here at this exact time with these exact resources and these exact individuals–so many things led me to where I am in the present. What are the chances that this moment could be exactly the same in the future? It’s never going to happen again. So why are we not appreciating what we have right now?”

Pointing at me, Ena tells me that “One way I’m able to emphasize the importance of being fully present is looking at the air around a person. That way, I’m not just seeing clearly outlined shapes–like oh, here’s a circle and there’s a triangle. I see you as a human by observing how shapes interact with the air around you. Your shoulder–that’s more in the light, so the air should appear softer. But by your jacket, there’s a sharper contrast…”

She doesn’t think about photography by staging poses or color blocking. Instead, Ena wants to frame an image exactly as it appears in real life–capturing the ephemerality of a singular moment in time where an individual and an urban space have come together to create something beautiful.

Gesturing to a person sitting outside, Ena says, “Look at her drinking coffee. She seems happy. She looks comfortable. Why can’t things always be like that?”

In the bustling, cramped environment of a city that forces us to make ourselves smaller and follow overwhelming crowds, Ena wishes for a world with space for us to slow down. She dreams of cities where “living could feel as easy as breathing–not something you have to think about.” 

That kind of urban space may not exist in our present day, but it appears to be taking shape in Ena’s art. I stare at Ena’s charcoal drawing of a woman contorted backwards in pain and clenching her face in agony, and I watch how the woman’s desperation seeps into the air around her until the setting fluidly morphs into a manifestation of her hurt.

Unfortunately, this vision of seamless interaction between space and humans is not yet reality. The composition of urban environments chafes at our emotions and makes it harder to feel.

But for now, perhaps we may hide away in the world that Ena visualizes: both a representation of reality and what it could be. A place where living feels natural, where we can let down our burdens to immerse ourselves in the transient present.

Works Cited

“Feng Shui & Architecture.” Feng Shui & Housing Markets, 14 Apr. 2009, fengshuih.wordpress.com/feng-shui-architecture/.

View of the Taipei 101 Observatory and the City at Sunset, Taipei, Taiwan · Free Stock Photo, www.pexels.com/photo/view-of-the-taipei-101-observatory-and-the-city-at-sunset-taipei-taiwan-17576844/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2026.

GABRIELLE HRUNG

Feature by Angel Wu

Photos by Colson Struss

Gabrielle Hrung (BC’ 26) studies Comparative Literature and Music at Barnard College. She is a classical musician and a literary translator. Her work focuses on capturing the linguistic and the literary in poetry, as well as balancing the granular and the general in the process of translation.

Gabrielle and I meet on a Friday afternoon, on the 5th floor of Diana. When I push in the large fire-escape door, she enthusiastically waves me over. I immediately take notice of the three colorfully patterned notebooks lying by her hand, and a prominent sticker displaying, “Berlin.” As we begin the interview, it suddenly occurs to me that the afternoon light has cast lined shadows on the floor—like musical staffs, or the undeciphered lines of a poem.

*

Initially, Gabrielle admits, she hadn’t expected for German to become such a large part of her life. But when she moved to Switzerland with her family at the age of 10, it slowly began to weave itself into her life’s path.  “When I was younger, I was actually very resistant to the idea of learning German,” she says, laughing. Yet upon returning to the US after two years in Switzerland, she came to realize that she had gained a valuable skill.  Now, at Barnard, she continues to study German as part of her comparative literature major. Having also participated in a study abroad program in Berlin, Gabrielle tells me that she feels much “closer” to German now.

I prompt her to explain that developing "sense of closeness.”  “I felt it,” she says. “I felt like I was becoming closer to it. And then that translated into ease with language, ease with reading it, writing it, and then also translating it.” But since childhood, Gabrielle has also been connecting with languages that communicate beyond words. Another thing that she “can’t imagine her life without, is something widely considered as an universal language: music.

Since the respective ages of 5 and 9, Gabrielle has been playing piano and viola. Mostly viola these days, she tells me. Jokingly, she describes the viola as a “happy medium” between cello and violin; held like a violin, but the same strings (though an octave higher) as a cello. She has played both instruments for more than ten years now.

She describes music as directly “influencing how she thinks.”  I think I can hear that influence in her translations; there seems to often be an almost musical rhythm in the words she chooses. In her work, there are staccato sibilants, punctuated by plosives, and lengthened vowels that evoke notes. Yet Gabrielle’s interest in music extends far beyond “learning how to play it,” but also into how music itself works. “That involves understanding how each note functions within the larger component, like a phrase or measure,” she elaborates, “but then also understanding how that phrase plays into larger structural aspects—if it’s part of a sonata or like which sections.”

It’s a thinking process that once more closely mirrors her work in translation; she tells me that translation is very much about learning to see things on different spatial levels, about balancing “the granular and the general.”

She opens one of her small notebooks to demonstrate. There, I see neatly written lines of German and English. Sometimes individual words are thoroughly annotated with one language or the other. She tells me that despite having a pdf copy of the works, she needs to feel the embodied process of writing the words down on a first translation. “I’m thinking about what each word means and the resonance it could have,” she explains. “But I also have to think about the writer’s voice more generally and how I’m going to communicate that in another language.”

I ask her about the particular nuances of that process specifically in relation to English and German. She points to her translation of “Die Heimkehr,” by Yujing Kang; in Gabrielle’s translation, the title is “The Homecoming.” 

Left: “Der Heimkehr” by Yujing Kang, Right: “The Homecoming” translated by Gabrielle Hrung 

“A well-known quirk of German is that you can string nouns together,” she says. In the poem, “Die Heimkehr,” there’s a line that she has chosen to translate as “the path of return”—but even behind this seemingly short line, lies thorough consideration. I admire how each word, though seemingly simple, seems to illuminate a very specific connotation that illustrates the image —— perhaps most vividly experienced when one reads the line out loud. The word “return,” for instance, needs one to roll one’s tongue back, like a “return,” while the exhaled fricatives in “of” and “path” illustrate a long, continuing process, as if just like a path.  

Beyond this, Gabrielle tells me that the words were also chosen for their symbolic meaning. In the original German, the line is: ” den Weg der Heimkehr.” She tells me that while “den Weg” means “the path,”or “the way,” “Heimkehr” is a particularly rich word. The word is composed of two parts: “Heim” meaning home, and “kehr” meaning “to turn.” Combined, literally, that word would mean “hometurning.” Yet there is no word in English that corresponds precisely to that idea. Hence, Gabrielle had to meticulously compare many different verbal candidates.

“Homecoming was a possibility,” she begins. Just like in the German word, the word “home” is also embedded in the word “homecoming.” However, in her final translation, the word she chose to place there was “return.” Homecoming doesn’t have the same sense of turning towards somewhere, she elucidates. Language’s spatial connotations and properties is clearly something that matters extensively to Gabrielle. I notice that even language itself seems very spatial in all her descriptions; she consistently mentions languages and words in relative positions to herself and to each other. This peculiar sense of distance often inherently implied by language is something that many of Gabrielle’s literary inspirations have identified.

For Gabrielle, one such notable inspiration is Barnard professor Jhumpa Lahiri. Known for choosing intentionally to write in Italian—a language not native to her—and translating her writing back into English, Lahiri is a writer who is recognized for her experimentation and insights into languages non-native to oneself as well as the process of translation. As someone who also works in a language not native to herself, Gabrielle finds these particular experimentations fascinating and often ruminates on Lahiri’s insights into one’s relationship with foreign languages. 

 From another one of Gabrielle’s patterned notebooks, where she keeps her inspirations, Gabrielle reads me a few Lahiri quotes. One sticks with me in particular: “Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me” (Lahiri, In Other Words).

When Gabrielle describes “shopping,” “reaching” for different words to fit in the spaces in her  translated lines, it seems to match Lahiri’s process of “get[ing] closer to everything that is outside of me.” She also expresses that this process feels different when applied to different languages. 

“I realized the thing about English is that it’s always so close and immediate,” she says.  “It took me a while to understand that the space I felt between myself and a foreign language is not something to punish or condemn.”  

This spatial awareness is something that continues to guide Gabrielle as she continues to work on her many translations. It, too, guides her music when she takes her place in the Columbia University Orchestra. Her work ultimately reads like a melding of those two spaces; after all, poetry is a medium that inherently has musicality, too. 

*

Our interview draws to a close as time ticks towards evening. The shadows have lengthened. I watch as the lines shift and morph, and I imagine what it would be like to be able to read them. They remind me that there is something truly unique and miraculous about the artistry of translation.

You can see Gabrielle play with the Columbia University Orchestra.

JOEY O'NEILL

Feature by Mira Krish

Photos by Lucie Bhatoey-Bertrand

Joey O’Neill CC’26 is from Marin County, California. He is a composer of instrumental music that plays with restriction, experiments with musical variables and prioritizes emotional reaction.  

I met Joey on a Sunday afternoon in February. We are in the middle of his room on the first floor of Watt. One wall is scattered with a few framed photographs, we sit in two chairs facing one another. His room possesses a sense of stillness similar to what I found listening to his songs. Not too long ago, after some frantic text coordination, I was on the subway headed to his dorm, the long emotive string notes of his music ringing in my headphones. This is Joey’s intention in his composition, he wants for his music to evoke emotion, for the pieces he writes to be transcendent, for the listener to feel, for two or five or ten minutes, as though they have experienced something beyond themselves. 

This intent is the place from which Joey’s work is created. He tells me that at present the majority of his music is created for Columbia’s composing class (which he has taken for almost 4 years). The class rotationally focuses on a specific instrument each semester. Last semester, students composed for violin and electronic, and the one prior, it was two pianos and two percussionists.

Joey’s composition begins quite simply in his notes app. He has one large note where he records sparks of inspiration that pertain to the instrument(s) of the semester. “This semester I have this thing called flute and piano, I have a bunch of thoughts about those instruments, or what they can do, or prior repertoire that's been written for those instruments, or things that I want to explore in my next piece, or things that I did in prior pieces that I thought worked or didn't work so well, that I wanted to explore again”  he said. His ideas constantly ricochet off each other, and what he doesn’t write in one piece will go into the next. He tells me that he thinks of his songs as one continuous project–each piece relating to the next.

Joey likes for his music to live in the balance between complexity and simplicity. At the time of our interview, the inner workings of musical composition were both foreign and intriguing to me. I was interested in how one embarks on the process of writing a piece. In his composition, Joey is always thinking about manipulating one element of the song, “It's kind of like a balancing act because there are lots of different parameters of music. Obviously, there's harmony and rhythm and melody and timber, and you can go on and on.” In his process, Joey simply decides to focus on one of these elements, the rest is tangentially composed. 

Composition starts from the physical reality of the instrument. Joey gives me an instructive runthrough of what this means, “You just study the music that's been written for those instruments [that you are composing for], and then you read books about the instruments. Or you look for fingerprint charts, for strings, to know, like what stretches are possible right now. So it's a lot of not necessarily creative work that goes into it before you can write for the instrument.” Many of his pieces are for instruments Joey does not personally play. He tells me about the not necessarily creative work that goes into composition before one can write for an instrument. Joey spends time reading books about the instruments he writes for. Looking at fingerprint charts, for strings, to know what stretches are physically possible.

Joey started playing the flute at 10, he has since dabbled in a few instruments and has been continuously reading books about music. The only other instrument which seems to have really stuck is piano, which he occasionally aids him in the beginning stages of  composition. Sometimes he will improvise for an hour or two and record it. Later, he listens back, choosing one specific part he likes, and spends time expanding and editing it. He describes the piano iteration as an almost greyscale version of the final piece. At present, however, he has moved away from this approach. He has been preferring to create a scaffolding for pieces ahead of time, finding constraints helpful in his writing.

As described by Joey, a big part of composing looks like, “staring at a wall for four hours, basically.” I asked him for further explanation. The phases to him are as follows: "there is a sort of mystical, vague, very beginning. The piece could be absolutely anything, and you have made no decisions of any kind. Like fantasy land detached from material reality,” then he makes more practical tactical decisions, “about the length of the piece, or structural conceits or scaffolding.” Then he streamlines his vision for the piece, “ [when] you're creating you're being as ruthless as possible with editing and deleting and revising. You are making decisions and figuring out a vision for what the piece is going to be.” What is left is iterating the execution of the piece, writing it out. Joey likes to compare his full draft to the idea he had at the beginning. From here it is rather quick onwards into the rehearsal stage. Columbia’s composition class only permits 1-2 rehearsals before the piece is performed. If he is unsatisfied with the sound of the end result, it only makes for more for him to change for next time.

Joey writes from anywhere, in his room, in the library, JJ’s. When it comes to where within a piece he starts writing, he likes to start specifically at the mid-point. “Structurally, I like to do the kind of thing where you're leading towards a moment of like compartments or transformation or transcendence.” However this mid-point does not always have to come in the middle. “You can play with where it is gonna be, a lot towards the beginning, or towards somewhere else, because that has an interesting psychological effect on the listener.” A recent favorite piece of his is called Arc. He said “that piece was for six minutes, and then it slows down to half tempo. I thought that turned out very well in terms of restricting the musical material, and then freezing  certain frameworks and pushing other parameters to their extreme. That's the kind of thing I've been interested in lately.”

Joey began composing at the start of high school, during the pandemic. The first piece he composed for was for an assignment, a piece called a Passacaglia, which is when there is a repeating bass line. He plays in an orchestra, and it was in his orchestra where he was given this first composition project. He has now been composing for six years. Joey says he likes to focus on a lot of music where the process is the piece. “For me one thing is enough, exploring all the facets of that, trying to make it feel like a big kaleidoscope, where you're turning the same thing and seeing different aspects of it, but fundamentally it's the same thing.” he said.

I asked him how his composition has changed since he began, which is something he tells me he’s been thinking about recently. In his work, Joey likes to create a musical world. “I want them [the musical worlds] to feel very focused and very evocative. A way I’ve found to do that is to just be really hyper specific and very kind of ruthless in the editing process with the musical material you're choosing. So I feel that creates a very specific kind of emotion, emotional register and frame of mind for the audience when they're just thinking about one musical idea for 10 minutes.” You can feel it when you listen to his songs. Joey also likes the idea of a musical through line “my ideal piece of music is something where you're taking a breath, then you hold it for the duration of the piece, and then you let it out. I like things that are very focused in that way.”

Over time Joey has become more interested in electronic music, he really likes the way it sounds. I asked him about his influences. He said he is inspired by electronic music made by minimalists and the way they structure their music. Most of Joey’s headspace is occupied by music, when he is not composing he is attending various concerts, or listening to one the hundred of albums he has kept on a list which he keeps for albums he hopes to listen to. While he is interested in other time-based mediums, movies, sound design, Joey hopes in the future to keep playing music. At present Joey is in the process of applying to grad school for music composition.

DELIA MCGOWAN

Feature by Alexa Zacharias

Photos by Harper Rosenberg

Delia McGowan BC’26 is an undergraduate research assistant at Dr. William Fifer’s Lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Delia is currently pursuing a degree in Neuroscience and Behavior on the pre-med track as an aspiring obstetrician. Apart from this, she works as a poet during the early twilight hours, jotting down what moves her stream of consciousness before the mind fully awakens. 

In between sips of jasmine green tea imported from China and the chill of a soon-to-be Spring breeze sifting through the open window of the four-walled space, Delia sat on her bed. We each had our own porcelain cups and spent a second in silence, taking in the sounds of the city— ambulances, soft-spoken conversations, and cars speeding through the streets. Her walls were encrusted in posters of Guinness—she used to be a bartender—Marlboro Reds, Anthony Bourdain, Charles Bukowski, and a funny, crude quote saying, “Never Fake An Orgasm… Let Them Know They Failed.”

However, around her workspace, the scene was quite different. Instead of beer brands or misogynistic writers, the space was filled with motivational study sayings, pictures of friends, and a large advertisement on the “Biological Markers for Neurodevelopment.” I understood then that Delia was a two-sided coin, a future obstetrician with the introspective mind of a poet.

She spent her morning sectioning mouse brains, the scent of formaldehyde still clinging to her clothes. “Oh my god, can you smell it on me?” she asked. I reassured her that the only thing I was breathing in was the scent of the warm water vapor emanating from our teacups. From her neuroscience thesis seminar, she headed into her writing seminar, where she revised a couple of the poems she presented for this article. Poetry allows her to take her mind off the heavier subjects she studies, setting aside the technicality of neurobiochemistry and enveloping herself in commemorating people, the observable, and the intricacies of intimacy through writing. She doesn’t separate her two interests, but rather, she puts neuroscience into poetry. When asked to further expand on this statement, she said, “I feel like practicing poetry and reading poetry makes you a better person. It makes you care more, makes you notice more. I feel like those are important qualities in medicine. Especially in caring about little peculiarities about people that you will see in the medical field. I feel like they work really well together. I also try to incorporate writing wherever I can.” 

As the scientific review editor of both “Grey Matters,” the Neuroscience Journal at Columbia, and “GYNECA,” the gynecological journal, Delia has oscillated between empirical writing and jotting down the first thing in her head in the space between waking and sleeping. 

“Why do you write?”

“I have a terrible memory.” 

This seemed to contrast the grounded reality of her poetry. As a reader, I felt like a phantom rummaging through the crevices of Delia’s most intimate thoughts. Sitting in the back of the car as she sped through the Oklahoma interstate, a tornado was right behind. Or watching as two lovers took in the sun at a rooftop bar, being swept away by the overwhelming feeling of falling in love.  “Writing is something for me where I can—almost in a memoir style—write something down and then read it and feel like I'm in the moment again. And that's really important to me for a lot of reasons. Revisiting relationships with friends, with people, or just like, even nostalgia.” 

In “Lawton, OK,” Delia depicts an instance in which she and her partner drove through a tornado, immortalizing the few moments they get to spend together due to their long-distance love. Delia loves driving and being on the roads. I caught sight of her Anthony Bourdain poster then—the infamous food critic and traveler, and their faces merged at my sight. 

“Caught Throat” is another perfect example of this. Interstates, exits, and erotic melancholia permeate the stanzas Delia has so carefully crafted. The scientific part of Delia’s brain, together with her creative flux allow her to really delve into the imagery and tactile performance of bodies and people being intimate. “I love writing about sex,”  she said and in “Caught Throat” she writes: 

“By the time we hit Tennessee, I reasoned that I am pulled everywhere by either my heart / or my hair (and that I have come to like it) / It mattered how I looked, being pulled in more than it mattered if I liked where this was going.” 

One of Delia’s literary role models, contemporary poet Charles Bukowski, writes about sex in this same way. Raw, unfiltered, and… kind of ugly. Although she puts intimacy at the forefront of her work, Delia weaves it subtly into lines so as to create a sort of universality. According to Delia, someone in her class “said that she felt she knew the people that I write about based on how I write them,” and that’s how she likes to write about intimacy. With a cheeky smile, she explains that she wants the reader “to feel like you could know that person or be in that moment or also map onto what I'm writing, what your experiences are.” 

When asked about her inspiration for “Caught Throat,” Delia opened up her laptop and swiveled the bright screen around, showing me an enormous file full of poetic jargon and unused sentences. Wide-eyed, she tells me, “I have a Google Doc of everything I have in mind, and it's like a bullet list of every line that I wanted to put in poetry or anything I wanted to write about. It's like 30 pages long.” I took a deep breath and quickly scanned through the amalgamation of words on these white pages. To write “Caught Throat,” she took one of the sentences from this giant Google Document and used it as the base to write about the feeling all of us know quite well– the sophomore hometown-sickness. At the time, Delia was grappling with the overbearing feeling of isolation in the cosmos of a city that is New York. However, because both of her parents used to live here, Delia thought about the places they went to, the dates they held all those years ago, remembrances of an aged love and now marriage that led to the creation of these lovely stanzas. In “Caught Throat,” Delia writes about her past. Who came before her, and who she is now, navigating the same spaces that once held the two warm bodies of her procreators. 

Although Delia loves the city, she often reminisces on the slow, day-by-day living of her birthplace—a small military base in upstate New York. In her poems, Delia embraces life's short moments, inviting us to savor an occurrence before it becomes a memory—with the possibility of fading from oblivion, slipping through the cracks of our brains. By the Hudson River, on a helipad, Delia would go down and settle in after a long shift at the bar she worked at, the dashboard displaying 2:00 AM. Looking out the window, she describes her spot: “There's one single parking spot right next to the helipad that faces out towards the river, and there are mountains and the rugby pitch. I would just go there and sit for hours, cry, or I would bring my friends there, or I'd bring people that I liked there. That was like my spot, and everyone knew that that was my spot. I can't really find a way to make it poetic. That’s my North Dock… all my good memories are from there.”

She has never written about this spot. Words couldn’t properly convey the magic and weight it holds for Delia. We shift onto the relationships she held with people back home that continue to permeate her writing. Besides writing about sex, she primarily enjoys focusing on the messy nature of young love. Their one-sidedness, the overthinking, the shame, but overall, the beauty of two people navigating the turmoil of attraction and budding feelings. “ I feel like relationships that are worth it come with a lot of turmoil, forgiving, learning, communicating, and having those ups and downs. Having those ups and downs within a relationship with someone is what makes it so much more valuable, to work for something so hard, and it certainly makes for good poetry.” I could notice this trajectory through her pieces, just like her descriptions of driving through the interstate, she navigates relationships with her past, parents, friends, and lovers in a similar way. There may be bumps or a tornado looming close behind you, but you keep your grip on the wheel and speed on, making sure to take in the views. 

Delia’s duality, the blend of scientific jargon with tender introspection, is what makes her work jarring, real, and compelling. As she navigates the demands of her chosen career and the emotional landscape of her poetic persona, she finds solace in keen observation– the ability to love and write about the deep peculiarities of the people she’s known and loved. Whether she’s picking her brain on remembrances of two lovers powering through Stormy Oklahoma roads or detailing the tiring performance of womanhood and sexuality, her writing works as a tool against forgetting. Delia’s journey is a testament to enjoying the little moments that ignite a smile or a deep-felt heartbreak, making sure to embrace life’s inevitable surges and bumps by keeping one’s eyes on the road. 

NICOLE HUR

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Yunah Kwon

Nicole Hur (GS ‘25) is an artist who seeks beauty and visual clarity. She is from Seoul, South Korea and is now based in New York City. As an English major doing the dual degree program with Trinity College and Columbia, she has continued to thoughtfully strengthen her poetic voice, photographic eye, and artistic work. 

It is early on Tuesday morning, but campus is quiet–still absent of students as Fall Break comes to a close. I spot Nicole through the large windows of Barnard Hall, sitting in the gentle silence and typing thoughtfully on her computer. When she sees me she smiles brightly and stands to give me a hug, as we relish the opportunity to finally hang out outside our shared club meetings. While waiting for me, she confessed, she was writing a poem. 

Together we walked to her dorm in the Union Theological Seminary. In the chill of the early fall day, shouldered by falling leaves and their signaling of a dwindling semester, we talked about grad school applications and MFAs, her love for her Senior Poetry seminar, and our shared time as Staff Editors on Quarto Literary Magazine. We get to her room, with novels and photography books overgrown on her desktop and shelves. I point out her huge pink Sofia Coppola Archive, and she shyly chimes in that she spontaneously got it at Coppola’s last-minute book signing–marveling at the suddenness and opportunity that we feel as students in New York City. As I sit at her desk overlooking the soft thrum of Broadway, she smiles, “Want to see the poem?” 

In a soft and deliberate voice, she takes me through a mediation on materiality, femininity, and the ache of a dark space. As the poem is part of a private collection she is still working on and thus cannot yet be shared, I realize that I get to be a lucky few to see her at this crux of her art, right before it soars far beyond the university. It has stayed in my head since. 

When asked to describe herself, Nicole chooses the all-encompassing label of “a creative person.” In all of her art, Nicole is exploring, and she urges you to explore alongside her. Her interdisciplinary work spans mediums of photography, filmmaking, visual arts, and writing. She tells me, however, that poetry is the thing that holds each of her artistic pursuits together. “Poetry has been the only thing that I have consistently done for my whole life,” she admits, as if the poetry is her longtime friend, or perhaps an innate, long-lasting spark that she is always carrying with her. 

For Nicole, art is a visual practice. She hopes to create a lingering image or set a vivid scene—both in her poetry and her photography. It is evident how image-making is crucial to Nicole’s process and interpretation of her world. Nicole sees photography as “a place of on-site exploration.” She experiments with scene settings, the gaze of her subject, and how someone moves through a space. Juxtaposing her poetry process, in which she needs near-silence and a clear-head, photography is a medium in which she “just has fun.” She tells me about a recent collection she did in which she photographed her “very Korean grandparents” on a roadtrip to Arizona. One photo includes her grandparents sitting in a booth at an In-N-Out. She tells me the story of how her grandmother chastised her grandfather until he put on the In-N-Out hat, and how, as a result, their personalities brightly appear in the image—with her grandmother’s hat joyfully tilted and her grandfather’s perfectly posed above his quietly amused face. Here, she not only plays with the expectations of the audience but works towards capturing an incredibly special trip that brought her closer to her family.

Nicole confesses that “every piece of creative work I have thought about has haunted me a little bit.” In a long notes app on her phone that collects each of these haunts, she makes art out of the pieces, slowly growing connective tissue around it. She tells me about two images in a MoMA exhibit by photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, in which a black & white image of a hospital patient's back connected to a thick cord of wires splits a frame with an image of a demolished building, a mess of concrete, cables, and wires. In the shared space, ideas of vulnerability, desecration, and modernity are inextricably linked. For her, this is “what poetry feels like—two unrelated images, but something about them is speaking together.” Just like Frazier’s photographs, her poetry is an exploration that strikingly points out a hidden relationship between two opposing and seemingly separate sensations. 

“What I love about poetry is how open-ended it can be,” Nicole tells me. “You can play with the shape of an emotion.” When I ask her about what she is focusing on now in her poetry, she speaks definitively: “It's about desire.” 

In the open-ended space that a poem resides in, Nicole asks: what do we want? And why do we want it? Here, she contends with tenderness and grit, ephemerality and clarity, and always beauty. 

Nicole’s poetry is not only grounded in the visual, but in music as well. As a result of her upbringing with a violinist mother, musicality bleeds into Nicole’s art. In her poetry, she counts the beat of her words as if it's a sheet of music, seeing how it flows and is punctuated. Within this practice, the details are crucial, as Nicole explores how punctuation can invade the space of a poem or how leaving space can expand it. In the same way that a song can be quiet, loud, falling, or soaring, so is her poetry. Even though she jokes that she was always horrible at violin, Nicole’s deep sense of music and rhythm is potent in her approach to her work.

Nicole’s relationship to poetry has been strengthened through each of her artistic pursuits.

She is the editor-in-chief of The Hanok Review, a literary magazine that spotlights Korean poets and provides a space for their work to be translated to English-speaking audiences. In high school, Nicole discovered that her grandfather used to be the editor-in-chief of his university newspaper, and as a result, she realized her connection to Korean writers and her ability to make space for them. Freshly inspired, Nicole saw an opportunity to bridge her writing world in Korea with it in the U.S.—especially as she felt that there wasn’t a space for Korean translation outside of structured commissions. She thus worked to make translation more accessible.

Since beginning the magazine, Nicole has worked to break down barriers for Korean poets. She oversees translations, she reviews submissions, and she thoughtfully puts together an issue. “It can be really challenging,” she remembers, “I would be in my room with papers scattered all over, just looking at translations and organizing the issue.” Yet, she was never working alone. “I’m indebted to the team,” she expresses—which consisted of a mix of students, translators, and other published poets. “They were all really experienced,” she noted appreciatively, “and they had so much respect [for me] when I was young.”

In this work lies the unique difficulty of being a translator, especially from Korean to English. Nicole describes instances of not having direct translations or figuring out how to convey the same cultural nuances of a Korean poem in English. In some cases, she turns to poetic devices as a means to bring cultural definitions to a word. For example, if a Korean poem has a “feeling of being fluttery,” she looks to English punctuation to translate that sensation. She also plays with transliteration, using her position as a bilingual poet to bridge the different modes of thinking that each language provides her with. Through her translation work, her adoration for language and its exploratory power is evident. She expresses how a key element to translating is being a poet. It is not just her understanding of language that is necessary in translating, but also her understanding of form, shape, genre, and the emotion of a poem. The process is neither clean nor smooth, but Nicole embraces the difficulty. “If I'm going to do something,” she says, “I’m going to do it properly.”

Nicole half-jokingly describes herself as “Korean-American-Korean”—a description that both poignantly highlights the liminal space she occupies as she straddles both of her worlds and reflects a larger sensation of the difficulties of categorization felt by many diasporic groups in the U.S. Yet, these worlds mold together beautifully in her work. She is deeply inspired by Korean writers and Asian-American literature, expressing,“I find a lot of Korean poems to be powerful because they're very simple, but emotionally, very impactful.” This manifests in her own work when she offers moments of brevity—either through form, structure, or a vivid visual image. I see this in her older pieces “Shell” (2021) published in Rogue Agent Journal and “After the Funeral,” (2021) originally published in The Poetry Society. In the latter, she poignantly paints a small moment of grief that still fully expresses its resulting sensation of disorientation, coldness, and solitude.

“Shell” (2021) and “After the Funeral” (2021)

As she balances writing ephemerally and directly, she ensures that her poetry is still connected by a striking image. “If I’m going to [write] something cerebral or loose, I want people to see it,” she explains, “It has to be visually clear.” She does not want someone to have a hard time reading her work or be left confused or frustrated. Instead, she chooses to be deliberate in the image she wants you to curate, and push you to ask questions around it. The right reader, she expresses, “is curious as to why you made a certain decision.” It is not always about making someone ‘get it’ but allowing for careful questioning. Nicole is incredibly conscious of the “mind-space a poem can take up when it's being read,” and that to ask for someone’s attention is a difficult task. She reveals to me that her work feels most indulgent when it is embracing this request for deep contemplation. She is hoping that, as she pulls you into an evocative scene, you feel an impetus to think. 

As she reflects on her diverse mediums of work as an editor-in-chief, an arts and culture journalist, a photographer, and more, Nicole asserts that she is now purposeful in her focus on her writing. She warns against waiting for an opportunity for your work to shine, saying “That day never comes. You have to say, ‘I'm going to carve out time for my own work.’ If you want it, you have to do it.” Even in moments of halt, doubt, or confusion, “Nothing is wasted.” As Nicole works on exploring her voice and tailoring her work, she brightly expresses how she has only continued to see her writing improve. Every time she writes a poem that she believes is her best one, the next one is always better. 

MADISON LEE

Feature by Nika Raiffe
Photos by Lucie Bhatoey-Bertrand

Madison Lee (CC’29) is a Korean-American artist from rural Colorado. Her multimedia work blends animal symbolism, plant matter, and motifs from local hunting culture to explore predator–prey dynamics as metaphors for assimilation and identity formation, focusing on the interplay between permanence and decay, personal and collective identity. A freshman at Columbia College, Madison intends to major in Visual Art and History.

When I asked Madison where she’d most like to be right now, she answered without hesitation: on horseback. Her answer almost surprised me at first, given her delicate, almost fragile frame—but on second thought, it made perfect sense. She grew up in rural Colorado, surrounded by animals both living and dead. She spent her childhood riding horses and discovering deer skulls half-buried in her backyard. Life and death were no abstract ideas so much as daily presences: something you could stumble over, pick up, turn in your hands. It was a world marked by cycles of predation and renewal: life, death, decay, and rebirth unfolding daily within arm’s reach. That early proximity to nature’s rhythms became the foundation of her artistic language. 

Her practice spans acrylic paint, ballpoint pen, oven-bake clay, and wire mesh, though those are just some of the materials Madison uses in her work. Despite this range, her work feels strikingly cohesive. Skulls recur. So do animals mid-transformation, hybrid bodies, and symbols caught between reverence and erosion. What unites these elements is a consistent inquiry into how identities take shape, how they’re disguised or exposed, and what carries over in the process.

What initially struck me about Madison’s work is how precise it is, both in terms of theme and technique. For this, she credits the rigorous, art-focused high school she attended in Denver, where students presented 15-20 piece exhibitions on a regular basis. The demand to produce at volume and consistency sharpened her ability to translate abstract ideas into physical, multimedia form. She has been creating art every single day since sixth grade, and carried this legacy of artistic discipline with her out of Denver to New York. 

Animals appear in her work much as they did in her childhood landscape. Never merely decorative, they serve as metaphors for social behaviors and hierarchies: symbols of vulnerability, dominance, adaptation, and survival across minority groups. These predator–prey dynamics, she explained, are not strictly about race relations, but rather explore deeper questions of humanity and belonging. They explore how communities assign vulnerability and power, and ultimately how those roles shift over time. 
One standout piece, Evolutionary Byproduct, embodies these themes through surrealist imagery. Using a photograph of a friend as a base, Madison layered a rabbit head, then a wolf outline, over the figure’s face in a way that blended realism with allegory. “It’s about minorities masking themselves, assimilating to seem less attackable,” she explained. The rabbit–wolf dynamic felt natural for that tension. In contrast, a ballpoint drawing titled Bitter Rot, turns inward. It inquires into past and present selves, perfectionism, and the unattainable: a young figure—Madison herself—reaches for an apple that decays before it can be grasped. Rendered with careful detail, the apple becomes both alluring and repellent. “It’s symbolic of how past selves yearn for things that don’t exist anymore or aren’t permanent,” she told me, reflecting on the transience of ambition and expectation. The choice behind the fruit is not accidental either. “I used the apple as a symbol for American academic culture. At first glance, the apple looks like a symbol of achievement, but here it’s being eaten and decaying. I liked playing with that contradiction.” The work lingers on the ache of perfectionism and the quiet grief of realizing that some ambitions, once attained, dissolve on contact.

Evolutionary Byproduct

Bitter Rot

If Evolutionary Byproduct and Bitter Rot grapple with transformation and decay by centering on the individual, Desert Ritual does so specifically within a broader cultural landscape. This mixed-media piece layers acrylic paint over torn pages from 1930s Western magazines, which Madison sourced from an antique store in her hometown. The yellowed paper, filled with idealized images of frontier life, forms a collaged backdrop steeped in Americana. Over it, she painted an animal skull—the kind she often encountered in the Colorado fields of her upbringing—and affixed a Korean bok charm, a talisman associated with good luck and protection.

Desert Ritual

Scattered across the surface are hand-carved rubber stamps of Colorado moths, each species carefully researched, drawn, carved, and printed by Madison herself. The moths, native to the region, made me think of how their gentle fragility is inseparable from their nocturnal persistence. The result becomes a layered meditation on inheritance; both what is carried and what is lost in translation across landscapes and generations.

Besides high school teachers and her mother, Madison cited painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Norman Rockwell as her key influences. From O’Keeffe, she borrowed a reverence for animal skull paintings and desert forms. From Rockwell, a curiosity for capturing Americana with that vintage look that Madison told me she loves.

Even amid serious artistic work, Madison preserves a sense of whimsy. She cracks her knuckles, collects receipts for scrapbooking, and maintains a playful sensibility in her observations of life. Her dream dinner party guestlist includes Ariana Grande, Spider-Man, and JFK seated together while being served Rice Krispies treats. When I asked her how she would like to return to life after death, she chose an anglerfish or a blobfish: “They’re so deep-sea that I’d just…be left alone,” she said. “I’d have a light on my head so I could see everything. And I’m somewhat of an introvert, so being somewhere no one bothers me actually sounds quite nice.” 

We laughed at the silly appearances of those creatures, but her answer hinted at a refrain in her work: a resistance to the neat moral and social binaries that govern who takes the role of predator and who takes the role of prey, who is legible and who is expendable. Madison’s art dwells in the liminality of the in-between. It occupies the space where vulnerability meets resilience, where decay becomes evidence of life, and where identity is not fixed but continuously negotiated with the environments that shape it.

Yuhan Zhao

Feature by Angel Wu

Photos by Alec Stangle

Yuhan Zhao (BC’ 27) studies Political Economy and Art History at Barnard College. She works with a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and public art. Her pieces often poignantly explore gender, East Asian culture, and the locality of her works in relation to their sites.  

Before entering the café where Yuhan and I had agreed to meet, I paced outside of Dodge for a while. We’d exchanged a few rounds of Chinese pleasantries over text; she’d been incredibly easy to communicate with and very lenient with her schedule.

We hadn’t actually planned on conducting the interview at Dodge that day. After a brief kerfuffle of more pleasantries where neither of us could decide where to go, we settled on a fairly public space: the tables right outside Dodge.

Our conversation began among sirens, the rustling wind, and a very persistent house sparrow. It felt like the whole city was speaking alongside Yuhan.

...

With a varied portfolio ranging from massive public installations to acrylic, watercolor and pastel paintings, Yuhan’s artistic journey seems difficult to summarize.

Driven by her own sense of identity, her art has explored themes like gender, environments, and East Asian culture. In the past few years, she’s been mostly pre-occupied with public art.

“When I first started out, I liked expanding the size of my works,” she said. “Regardless of whether it’s paintings or installations, [larger works] tend to have a very striking visual effect.”

However, she only began her foray into public art when she realized that larger works “have an inherently stronger connection to the public.” Ever since then, she’s been interested in exploring how art interacts with its audience and environment.

In fact, one of Yuhan’s primary concerns with her art is its locality: art’s connection to the land, culture, and people that it is situated in. Early on in our conversation, she also mentioned a classic quote from filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha: “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby.” Minh-ha is describing a complex idea that discusses how the artist should situate themselves in relation to their art; how they should portray subjects that they do not completely identify with or subjects that they identify with too closely. Trinh T. Minh-ha later clarified in an interview that art based in speaking nearby “does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place.”

This philosophy is central to how Yuhan approaches her subjects. They’re rooted in the cultural and physical spaces they belong to, and Yuhan often interacts closely with these spaces in order to create her pieces. Perhaps with this idea in mind, she found it initially easier to portray subjects that were already close to her.

Yuhan explains that she often draws inspiration from mundane events that happen in her everyday life. For instance, her work “Chastity Arch (牌坊)” is a remarkable installation made out of roughly 300 cut-up secondhand books. It resembles an ancient type of Chinese monument erected for wives who remain virtuously unmarried after their husbands’ deaths. Each book is titled with deeply misogynistic advice for women: “Marry the Right Husband, Change Your Life,” “Women: You Should be Gentle All Your Lives.”

The tragedy? Yuhan tells me these books were repeatedly read and heavily annotated.

Chastity Arch (牌坊)

Yuhan’s inspiration for this project partially came from seeing a community poll for the “Most Beautiful Army Wife” on Chinese social media. She recounts the details of the poll to me with vivid accuracy: the women were ranked on what kind deeds they did, what part of the army their husbands were from, and how many elders they took care of.  “It appalled me,” she gestured, “to see something like that in this day and age.” To her, it represented the long past of women being only memorialized for their “virtues” as loyal wives and caring mothers: something that should have disappeared with the ancient laws that subsumed female agency under male needs. She added, “Though people don’t erect chastity arches anymore, they persist in other forms.” 

In talking about this piece, Yuhan also noted that the process of choosing a medium of expression is extremely important to her. She puts careful consideration into whether each step in her artistic process serves an ideological purpose. 

“To cut up” versus “to grind [the books into pulp]” delivers distinctly different messages, she points out.   

I think I understand why she insists on this step of the process. Words seem so light by themselves, but she described the books (that have piled generations of misogyny atop one another) as being harder to cut than wood. It’s such a physical way to represent the weight of the layers of expectation that have been placed upon women, and it’s also reminiscent of how women have had to objectify and sculpt themselves to fit within these virtuous standards. 

Speaking nearby is also very much related to the writer’s equivalent of “showing a story” versus “telling a story.” Yuhan seems to be very invested in the act of “showing.” 

When I asked her about any particular process of creation that was especially interesting or memorable to her, she spoke about creating “Soil and the Ghost.” It’s an installation created at the Yale Norfolk School of Art Program. Taking inspiration from Norfolk’s wartime history of industrial manufacturing, the installation consists of a series of unfired clay pieces made from locally sourced clay. Chosen for its strong connection to the locality of Norfolk, Yuhan notes that leaving the clay unfired was a crucial step, as it would allow for the material to erode and merge back into the land it came from. It’s a process that speaks nearby to the industrial history of Norfolk by illustrating how things are made and unmade.

Soil and the Ghost

For Yuhan, this was a grounding experience that helped her better understand the landscape of Norfolk. She vividly describes the process of having to venture into the mountains to painstakingly look for soil to make into clay. It’s a drastic departure from the materials she has used for other works — which tend to already exist in some other form. “It’s different from using something like planks, which are already pre-made for you,” she clarifies. “I found it to be a particularly interesting experience.”

Created in 2025, “Soil and the Ghost” happens to be one of Yuhan’s more recent pieces. Because she perceives her art as something that constantly evolves with her identity, her artistic subjects have varied as she continues to learn and change.

When I asked if she felt like there was a piece that was the most representative of her, she laughed and said it was her current one (which is a work in progress). Watching spiders and other insects in her old New York apartment, she’s been thinking about the creatures that originally occupy a space. She tells me that she’s still in the stage of “sawing wood.”

At this moment, Yuhan seems to be at a period of uncertainty in her artistic career. Though her capacity for exploration has allowed her to establish a hugely varied artistic range, it’s also created feelings of stagnation and boredom. She jokingly says that if she does something over three times, she gets bored of it.

“I know many mature artists tend to have established forms of expression, but I’m not sure if I want to stick with public art,” she states. “In the future, I might take up public art, or painting, or something else. I don’t know yet.” In fact, Yuhan doesn’t feel like art should be the thing that purely defines her. She’s equally influenced by her major in political economy; and she can’t envision art as being the only thing she does. “Art is a product of my life, but not everything in my life revolves around art,” she asserts. It’s true. Yuhan is evidently not an artist who is ever truly defined by a category of her identity. It’s her positioning of herself to her art that allows her to “speak nearby” on so many subjects so aptly. As our interview ends, the city’s voice swells as hers fades. Here, in New York, there’s still so much for her to “speak nearby” to.

Leticia Abasto de Castro

Feature by Tai Nakamura

Photos by Moksha Akil

Leticia Abasto (GS '28) is a painter and traveler. Her paintings–"continuations" of the understanding she gains through her meditative practice–offer people the opportunity to feel a Uniqueness and a Universe simultaneously.

The air turned warmer as the apartment door opened. Leticia Abasto welcomed me in and led me down a hallway to the living room. This apartment–walls lined with luminescent paintings–serves as Leticia's art studio and gallery of sorts. Some pieces stare back at their onlookers; these works looked at me, but not persecutorily. A desk light washes the ceiling fleetly in circular rainbow. After a while, I start to imagine the paintings radiating this same light, and Leticia, too, as she brings coffees for the two of us. We sit on a nice sofa. I am seated under an artwork which proclaims: I AM WORTH OVER 2 TRILLION EUROS. Indeed! We begin talking.

Leticia was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. She says that though it's called a "grey city," her experience growing up in a neighborhood on the boundary between the forest and the people was far from monochromatic. The forest always bleeds into her imagination; as a child, she loved mixed colors—"young colors," as she called them, over unmixed primary colors—"old colors." Next to me on the sofa, Leticia sits right below Unconditional Love (2021), her first painting conceived through meditation. "It's quite magical," she observes, because "[people] that I ask, What do you feel when you see this painting?... answer things associated with nature, which was the idea when I made the painting."

Unconditional Love (2021)

Before the pandemic, Leticia had been a fashion design student at Parsons. When COVID hit, though, she felt that the city was not the place to be (even if her roots are, she'd confessed, the urb). She decided to visit a friend in Hawaii, but the excursion unfurled longer and longer till she was all over the world–the next stop she made was Turkey, followed by Egypt, then the Amazon rainforest, the Galapagos Islands, Mexico, Guatemala, France (where she met her fiancé), Portugal, Iceland… she tells me that her book, Riding Clouds – The Journey Back to Paradise (No Caminho Das Nuvens), owes its origin to a TV documentary that told her the Amazon grows so lushly because clouds ferry nutrient-rich sand from the Sahara desert across the ocean. I ask her if she sees herself as the sand, and she answers, "I say… more like, I am the cloud."

Leticia is fascinated with religion: "And I'm reading the Bible, and then, the next week, I'm reading the Bhagavad Gita" (I spy a book titled Pagan Britain on her bookshelf). Traveling, Leticia loved to compare how human ingenuity manifests cross-culturally, how universality can be defined as the unique expression of each being. She adds sheepishly: "Even I think that's probably something annoying about traveling with me because I'm always like, This looks like [that thing I saw] in Turkey." We're facing Kundalini (2024), and she starts explaining: it visualizes the seven transmutations of the chakra. She describes one of the transmutations, the crown chakra:

"This is my first semester at Columbia. Sometimes I overthink, and I'm like, oh my God. But do I have things in common with this person? [...] But indeed we have. I have things in common with everybody because we're all human beings. So that would be like acting [on] your crown chakra, because you are acting on your clarity like this, remembering at all times that we can always connect because we're all the same."

Kundalini (2024)

She then explains how she willed two kinds of brushstroke into this work—the blue spirals ("unity") and the X-shaped marks ("duality") within the multi-colored chakras; she lets me step closer to the painting, and I see the canvas swarming with these tiny patterns. The way these brushstrokes supplement each other is how, in Letician cosmology, unity and duality constantly pull at each other. She shows me the plant on her windowsill and compels me to think about how one spur counterbalances two leaves, another spur, another two leaves, and another, another…

“But how does this equilibrium sustain itself throughout everything?” I beseech her. How does she use painting to communicate with it? She starts by telling me that when she was in the Amazon, she contacted a shaman to try ayahuasca, in hopes that she might "see" a work of art…one twelve-hour trip later, she concluded that it did not provide the concrete experience hearsay had promised her, but instead, an abstract expressionist churning of energies. Inspired by this newfound way of visualizing things, she (sober) then meditated Unconditional Love into fruition. Another meditation two years later had an afterlife in the marvelously pink Self Love (2023); "They say it's not like official chakra, but above the throat, there is a self love chakra that is pink [...] for this one"—Leticia points to a green-and-pink painting with the square of Unconditional Love superimposed onto the four-pronged shape in Self Love—"I didn't even meditate it. I just combined the two paintings I did [while] meditating before."

Self Love (2023)

This painting, Open Heart (Com Jeitinho), is centered by a fuzzy white circle that suggests a heart beating—only after self love, she asserts, can someone express unconditional love; only after the two, complete love; only inside of complete love, that heart. Having built up the ability to switch on, Leticia doesn't need to meditate as often now, though she tells me that she can sustain a thirty minute session whenever she desires.

Open Heart (Com Jeitinho)

Leticia is getting settled in New York studying Visual Arts and Art History in Columbia's School of General Studies and believes she is ready to begin retelling her experiences through painting (though her fashion design thinking still lives on through her marvelous outfit). Her journey to date has been that of a cloud, dissolving across unfathomable distances and within ineffable spaces; she recalls Göbekli Tepe (an Anatolian Neolithic archaeological site) and the Pyramids of Giza as particularly memorable. However, as beautiful as the green of the Amazon is in person, her key idea is that the seed of that beauty is portable (even to places like New York City, which sometimes feels like a Tarkovskian Meat Grinder). Now she wants to create things that give people the opportunity to interact with this energy, this unique universal, without having to have undergone the difficulties of travel. Her current fascination is with appropriating history painting (originally an institutionalized Western genre depicting moralizing narratives on huge canvases) for the allegorical presentation of energetic interaction. She is beginning to incorporate print and text into her previously non-inscriptive œuvre; she leads me to her studio in another room and points me to two works-in-progress, one which contains humanoid figures and hieroglyph-influenced print, and another whose therianthropic creatures and zig-zaggy lines spill from Leticia's love for cave paintings.

Multiple times during the interview, Leticia encouraged me to come up with impromptu explanations for the works on her wall. When I tell her that I might be over-interpreting them, she comes up with this gem: "No, but this is the point. Over-interpretation is the point. So you expand the painting, [...] the viewer is a necessary part." Leticia wants meaning, but never wants that meaning to be preconceived for her audience; she muses to me whether titles are too prescriptive for her work. Though Leticia observes that "[in] all books of religion I have read so far, [they say] God is in everything [...] it never says God is just this," she also sees how writing is limited in communicating this everything-ness: "I feel like this is what misses a lot in religion [...] it [is] written and it's less about feeling." Thus, her voyage: could painting clear ideas over the Bermuda triangle of translation?

Eventually, she tells me, she would love to have an art temple where people can "merge with the energy of the paintings," where the divine is a matter of personal exploration. Hilma Af Klint (a print of No. 2 from The Ten Largest is on Leticia's wall), who conceived of a similar idea, is brought up, as well as Mark Rothko, whose chapel in Houston (built in 1971) continues to attract many visitors. She's also inspired by how ARTECHOUSE in Chelsea uses VR to construct an immersive experience, though she wishes to use it for something that has more of a "human touch." Human touch: a crucial component of Leticia's artistry. The temple is an "eventual thing," she expresses to me. Breaking the horizon and yet lining the apartment walls right in front of me, what she is manifesting makes me think that for her, eventuality is not something that is unclear or indeterminate. Leticia Abasto, painter and traveler, catches this wave with her canvas, and in doing so she, too, forms outside time, in every place.

Meher Lakdawala

Feature by Vivian Wang

Photos by Arden Sklar

Raised in San Diego, California, Meher Lakdawala (BC ’29) is currently a freshman at Barnard College intending to study biochemistry. Having grown up around nature and the ocean, she explores organic abstraction at the margins of soft and sharp through a variety of mediums.

On one of those brisk and particularly quiet mornings, I met Meher on a bench outside Avery Library. Both of us bundled up against the sharp wind, as we began talking about the early scaffolding of her practice. She attended an art-focused elementary and middle school where, as she puts it, “making things was just part of the day.” Then came a large public high school, where the tone became more competitive, but she carried that early sense of play with her. Her mother worked at her elementary art school and is a chemistry teacher, while her father is an engineer. That mix of arts in education and science in the family reads through her work as curiosity made material. “I like experimenting, and I've always been drawn to the intense learning side of things,” she noted. 

I was surprised to hear that she is now dedicated to pursuing a career in the sciences, given how professional her work seemed. Art, she explained, would always be a steady companion and a way of thinking that travels between her lab notes and sketchbooks. At university, she expresses this through her work as an illustrator for the scientific magazines on campus, such as the Columbia Science Journal and the Global Health Journal. 

Looking through Meher’s portfolio, I noticed a throughline of natural forms, from seed pods to tree branches, to the spiral logic of shells and corals. These motifs are not simply decorative; they’re the structural questions she keeps returning to. “I get inspired by the abstraction in the shapes of branches, leaves, and shells. I wonder if natural perfection exists, and how humans fit into the natural world,” she explained. 

She won’t stick to any one medium; part of her practice is figuring out how a material behaves and how far a medium can be pushed before it gives way. 

That experimental impulse produces work that often sits at the eerie border between the familiar and the uncanny. One of her pieces began with these spiky shells. She laughed when I brought it up. “I wanted to make something creepy,” she said, and the result was a small ceramic figure whose most unsettling feature is a baby’s face rendered in a way that makes you feel both protective and uneasy. “There was no big message to it at all, it’s just really eerie. Maybe the message is my subconscious,” Meher admitted. The modestness of that explanation, art as a trace of the unconscious, feels honest and raw. 

Technical rigor is also important to Meher. She spoke at length about a ceramic work that challenge both her and the material’s capabilities: balancing thin, jutting forms that threatened to collapse under their own weight. As I listened, I imagined the kiln disasters and last-minute armatures; instead, Meher treats those constraints as the objective rather than the obstacle. “This piece pushed the medium of ceramics because of the balancing aspect. It was very technical. I was really nervous that it just wouldn’t support its own weight,” she said. The nervousness is conspicuous in the final object, tension held in fired clay. 

Material play extends beyond clay. Her list of projects reads like a natural historian’s sketchbook crossed with a craft-supply wish list: a crustacean-inspired lamp made of wire and papier-mâché, a chainmail chrysalis that hangs like a small, engineered cocoon, a seaweed-like installation built from scrap yarn and wired supports, and experimental woodcuts and large self-portraits that translate the grain of wood into the grain of a face. Each piece is an inquiry into how a medium can embody a concept, whether it be protection, movement, or fragility, without flattening it into an explicit narrative. 

There is an evident kinship between Meher’s scientific training and her studio practice. She talked about ceramics the way a lab partner might describe an experiment. When I ask her how she starts a piece, she tells me that she prefers to start and finish many of her works in a single sitting, with ceramics as the exception- a slow conversation that rewards patience. “I don’t really make plans. I’m bad at extending projects over multiple days, other than ceramics. I try to finish a whole piece in one sitting because I’m very impatient,” she said. This impatience is more about energy than about rushing. The initial spark yields work that feels direct, offering an immediate sensation within her enduring investigation of the natural world. 

Meher’s artist statement crystallizes the themes that surfaced throughout our conversation: the obsession with organic patterns, the balance between meticulous order and chaotic growth, and a practice that moves freely between soft and hard materials. In her words, 

“My work explores organic perfection, drawing from the natural shapes of shells, corals, bones, cells, muscles, rocks, and more—forms where patterns emerge that are at once meticulous and chaotic. I use a range of mediums—some soft, some hard, some fragile, some durable—each serving as a material expression of nature’s systems, from the macroscopic to the microscopic. Within my art also lies an element of introspection through self-portraiture, where I examine my own connection to the most elemental states of existence and confront the reality that I am composed of the same atoms and particles as everything around me.” 

At the end of our conversation, I realize that Meher’s artistic practice is less about finding beauty than about studying it, tracing its anatomy until it reveals something deeper. The strange logic of living systems, the tenderness of structure, the patience of form. Regardless of the material, her pieces seem to breathe. They remind us that the line between art and science is porous, that curiosity itself is a kind of art, and maybe that’s what I love most about Meher’s work. It makes you feel, for a brief moment, like you’re seeing the world from the inside out. 

We walked together towards the dining halls for breakfast. As we reached Low Steps and faced that quintessential view of Butler Library, campus, for an instant, felt like one of her sculptures, balanced precariously and caught between growth and collapse.

For Meher, art will remain a constant even as she explores paths in healthcare and biotech. “I’m keeping all my options super open,” she said. “Art is more so a hobby, but something I’d always pursue to some extent in my life. It’ll always be a constant in my life, especially ceramics.” 

More of her work can be viewed on her art Instagram account @rottenstarlightt._

RAY ATLAS

Feature by Nika Raiffe
Photos by Audrea Chen

Ray Atlas (BC’26) is majoring in Visual Art and Archaeological Anthropology at Barnard College. She works primarily in oil portraiture. Her visual thesis, We Dream of a World Not Threatened by Destruction, focuses on attentive portrayal of Palestinian families, with all raised funds donated to families in need. Guided by a Jewish upbringing grounded in remembrance and liberation of the oppressed, her art grapples with themes of placehood, memory, and mutual aid. After graduating from Barnard, she hopes to pursue a PhD in Anthropology.

When I meet Ray Atlas in her senior studio, she is wearing all black. She confesses she had slept through her alarm, apologizing for the late start and its trace of chaos. I feel a quiet joy as the formality between us dissolves. When I ask how often she comes to the studio, Ray says she tries not to let every day be an exaggeration. She motions to a bag of pretzels and hummus, and tells me she plans to stay here all day.

She’s busy at work on her two senior theses: her ongoing series We Dream of a World Not Threatened by Destruction, which intertwines portraiture and mutual aid, and her archaeological anthropology thesis transcribing her grandfather’s oral testimony—he survived a death march in Auschwitz, moved to New York, and opened a bakery. Her grandfather’s experiences shape the way she conceptualizes her place in society, yet she is careful not to invoke his voice as justification for her broader work. Her portraiture is an attentive dialogue with both her subjects and her own subjectivity, while transcribing his testimony becomes his portrait. She aims to honor both memories independently.

Informed by her studies in anthropology, Ray is attuned to the ethical responsibility of representation and the long history of artists aestheticizing suffering in ways that turn grief into spectacle, and compassion into consumption. Aware of how perilously thin the line between honoring and voyeurism can be, she strives to let the presence and the vibrant individuality of her subjects move through her work. Each portrait is guided by dialogue and mutual recognition.

Ray grew up in Sleepy Hollow, a small town upstate that inspired one of Tim Burton's movies—the town’s football mascot is the Headless Horseman. In eighth grade, Ray’s art teacher organized a field trip to Bushwick to see street art. “That experience blew my mind,” she tells me, “I knew right then that I wanted to be a mural artist.” If public art is the medium, then mutual aid is the leitmotif: she led her high school’s Interact–Rotary Club and sold her AP Studio Art pieces to raise bail funds during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Her faith and family history converge in the Haggadah her family reads during Passover, a prayer book her father made with friends at Columbia’s Teachers College amid the HIV/AIDS protests in New York City. Ray keeps a copy in her studio. She describes Judaism not as a set of rigid rules but as a framework of ethics: a guidance for living a good life, for being kind to others. “It doesn’t demand that you acquiesce,” she tells me. We meet during the High Holidays, and the timing is not lost on me, as I’ve been reconnecting with my own relationship to Jewish ritual. We look through the pages of the Haggadah together. The first line of the final prayer is “We dream of a world not threatened by destruction,” inspiring the title of her ongoing series.

The series began with two pieces Ray painted during the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia: “I wanted to devote my energy to representing people who were very much silenced,” she says. “I also needed to express my own pain and frustration in a way that could be productive, instead of just wailing at the sky.” Then, she went to Paris for the summer. She hadn’t brought a canvas—just a journal—and began painting portraits of migrants being cleared out by the city ahead of the Olympics. Back in New York, she worked briefly as a portrait artist in Washington Square Park, but by junior year, when she was given her own studio, she felt she couldn’t paint anything else. “This was the only thing I was really thinking about. The only thing that felt worthwhile.”

An Outstretched Arm

At first, the work was instinctive rather than deliberate. Those early paintings are thick with paint, color, and catharsis in a quest to reconcile with intense emotion. She felt the need to represent the humanity of people in Gaza, and hoped that the work might generate support or attention; it wasn’t yet about having a dialogue with the person in pain she was portraying. Over time, she began to understand what these portraits do for her, and in turn, what they can do for others. She realized she wanted to shape them in a way that honored both. That shift began with Miriam, painted on Rosh Hashanah last year—exactly a year from our conversation. Ray’s previous work was all from photojournalism, but she got the photo of Miriam from her GoFundMe. Proceeds from Ray’s painting go directly to her family. “[In the painting,] she’s looking out at you, and it’s kind of a witnessing of our own inaction,” Ray tells me, gesturing to the large canvas leaning against the wall behind me. “Not an accusatory gaze necessarily, but a witnessing of your own actions, or lack thereof. There’s a sense of frustration, but it’s frenzied and bright.” In today’s desensitized world of constant visual exposure, Ray’s portraits offer a different kind of engagement with those images, one centered in active recognition and attention. 

Miriam

In her studio, Ray often works on multiple canvases at once, cycling through mini portraits while developing larger pieces. She experiments with texture and integrates text—prayers, news headlines, excerpts from fundraising campaigns—into her work. She likes carrying brushes in her mouth while she paints, like a pirate. “It’s messy, but it keeps me moving.” She looks at the work of photojournalists until a photo stops her, and she can’t stop looking into someone’s eyes—that’s when she knows she needs to paint it. If the reference photo isn’t linked to a fundraiser, she identifies families in similar circumstances and directs any profits made from the work towards their campaigns. More often now, Ray has been finding reference photos through families that message her over Instagram, asking for help.

Young Boy at Nasser Hospital

She painted Mahmoud Al-Najjar while in conversation with his son, Osama, who had fled Gaza to Belgium. “We texted about his daily life, his cooking videos, my life in New York,” she recalls. When the portrait was done, she mailed it to him. “He loved it, and I loved that he loved it. He has it now, and he’s studying French in college. He sent me pictures of the blackboard.” Proceeds from prints are sent to Mahmoud's fundraiser to help him evacuate.

Mahmoud Al-Najjar

Tattoos are another layer of Ray’s medium, a nod to Oscar Wilde’s letters on making one’s life a living artwork and seeing the body as itself a living canvas. It is also a tool that subverts a practice harmfully imposed on her grandfather in Auschwitz, reclaiming it as an instrument of self-expression and love. Birds are a recurring theme: her family assigns one to each member, with Ray’s being a magpie. Some designs are illustrations from the Haggadah. The names of her parents in Yiddish, a language she gravitates towards both because it was spoken by her grandfather and because it invokes resistance and proletarianism. Around her neck, she wears a chunky necklace in the shape of the Chai symbol, discovered on a hiking trip in upstate New York. When asked about her artistic influences, she tells me she’s always loved the drama and chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Goya, though now she’s obsessed with the Italian artist Ettore Aldo Del Vigo.

As my final question, I ask Ray about what she believes to be the biggest misconception about her. “That my self-expression reflects self-hatred. People sometimes see my tattoos, piercings, or my choice to paint political subjects and assume negativity, but everything I do is rooted in love, remembrance, and ethical responsibility.” There’s a sense of urgency in Ray’s voice, the same pulse that runs through her work—an attentiveness that I find deeply refreshing in today’s world, where fast-paced living often results in looking away from discomfort.

FEDERICO STOCK

Feature by Caroline Nieto

Photos by Natasha Last-Bernal, Sophia Lopez, and Sophia Zhu

Federico Stock (CC’26) is studying philosophy and history. 
His music can be found at this Spotify link or this Soundcloud link for his unreleased music.

When I sit down to talk to Federico, it is the sunny final day of September, where the “summer’s still struggling to live,” a description I’ve pulled from his song, “Anything.” We perch on the steps of St Paul’s Chapel, in full view of the swath of students rushing to class during a passing period. We’ve chosen the location because Fed has a class in Philosophy Hall in an hour, and I can’t help thinking we’re in a corner of campus that’s been engineered to represent the musical catalog of Federico Stock. Religion and philosophy are tenements of Fed’s psyche as a songwriter, which is clear not only in the imagery he employs, but in his deliberate, thoughtful approach to writing as a whole. “I really like the Platonic idea in Symposium about seeing something beautiful and realizing, ‘I saw that before I was in a body, and I need to see that again,’” he says. “That feeling leads you to practicing philosophy, but I also think it leads you to make music, because you’re trying to translate it.”

The first time Fed recalls trying to translate a feeling was during a school break in high school. He had recorded a guitar part on Logic, and played it over and over again while he jotted down lyrics that he didn’t want to sing, "because I was shit at singing,” he says. These early teenage years were naturally a time of transition for Fed, and the changes he weathered coincided with his taking music more seriously. Growing up, music was merely a casual interest for Fed. “My music taste was pretty bad until I was like fourteen,” he claims. “I listened to a lot of pop music, mixed with the Beatles, mixed with random songs that I knew from my parents.” He names a tradition of his youth that informed his taste the most—“I would be playing Minecraft on the family Mac and I would press play on the keyboard and it would just play the first album in alphabetical order on iTunes, which was The Beatles’ single album, One.” If you listen to Fed’s music, it certainly sounds like he’s been fed Beatles songs through subliminal messages. His songs are evocative of McCartney’s tender melodies and the guitar parts of the band’s acoustic tracks. But it took Fed a while to render his musical influences into polished songs. “As a kid, I didn't know anything about theory—I mostly still don’t—but I would be thinking, ‘Wow, in these songs there’s just these moments of really intense feeling. There’s just chords that people play that make me want to start crying. How do I do that?’”

Fed claims he still hasn’t learned music theory. There was a period in middle school where he took guitar lessons, but “It was mostly classical,” he says. “I never practiced.” His musical education was much more successful when it took the form of collecting inspirations. He remembers playing The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californiacation” at a middle school talent show with his friends. “That was the band that most people knew was my favorite band up until I was eighteen.” At this moment, he finds himself a bigger fan of the likes of Christian Lee Hutson and Elliott Smith—of the latter, Fed says, “he just succeeds more than anyone else in making me feel a way that enhances an experience.” The Smith comparison is a no-brainer when you hear Fed’s music. His first single, “Half-Man,” is a touching folk track that could slot neatly into place on Smith’s New Moon. It’s composed merely of Fed’s wispy vocals and the light, soft strum of his guitar. “Half-Man” exemplifies Fed’s tendency towards the clean, candid lyricism of his stream of consciousness. He explains that the first lyric of the song, “I feel uneasy between my shoulders” is a real description of a physical sensation he felt when he couldn’t sleep one night. Fed often writes down little phrases or feelings that inspire him in the notes app on his phone. Another resonant lyric of “Half-Man”—“Nostalgiamania is in my bloodstream/and in this river/and I am drowning”—is also the product of this ongoing list. “I’d written down this word, ‘nostalgiamania,’ because I thought it described my most common state of being,” he says. “Half-Man” certainly depicts nostalgia from top to bottom, even in places where Fed didn’t intend it to. His grandmother had died a year prior to writing the song, and while the peak of his grief had mostly settled, Fed found himself evoking her in the lyric that holds the song’s title: “a half-man/that’s what my Grandma called me.” “I always thought I couldn’t write a song about the death of my grandmother because it was too real to write about. But now every time I play it, it is about that.” 

Almost every song of Fed’s is tinged with a childhood memory in one way or another. “Paper Plate” recounts the first time he questioned his belief in God. “When I was ten, I was driving to my grandma’s house and stuck in traffic. It was completely dark, and I thought, ‘what if I die and there’s nothing?’ And then I felt so fucking awful. And that still happens to me sometimes.” As the song progresses, Fed traverses his relationship with faith as he’s grown up—oftentimes, he feels that same pang of doubt he felt when he was ten. But he finds solace in these spaces of uncertainty, allowing his questions to linger in the in-between. Take the premise of his song “Little Cross,” which is inspired by a real moment of ambiguity. While on a ski trip in the Alps, Fed recalls driving around the and seeing crosses on the mountain peaks. “A lot of the peaks in the mountains will have crosses on them, because people will mark them to say they’ve been there. But they also have crosses where people have died in mountain climbing incidents, so it’s a little vague.” This lack of clarity was eye-opening, and Fed began to wonder the meaning of each new cross he passed. As he sings in “Little Cross,” “did somebody die there?/or did somebody climb there?” The song eventually becomes a meditation on leaving things behind, a concept that permeates all of Fed’s songs. 

Fed’s music is certainly introspective across the board, and it may seem that each song is steeped in some kind of melancholy. But Fed rejects the popular tendency to reduce artists to people that make “sad music.” “It’s really a positive thing to hope someone will know how you feel,” he says, “even if that emotion is sad.” Part of this idea of Fed’s lies in his conception of these emotions altogether: “Happiness as an emotion is like laughing at a joke. It’s different from sadness, which is an emotion that is very physical for me. Happiness, for me, is kind of the absence of any of that.” While sadness, grief, and nostalgia have all colored the themes of Fed’s songs, happiness exists in smaller, simpler doses. It’s the moment in “Anything” where Fed describes “light in the palm of my hand.” It’s the moment when “the rain is louder than the cars” in “What I Want.” For Fed, happiness feels like “right after I’ve woken up when I’ve slept well.” An infinitesimal, fleeting moment that will inevitably be clouded by the day. But it’s a moment, nonetheless.

NAA AYORKOR LARYEA

Feature by Mira Krish
Photos by Iris Pope

Naa Ayorkor Laryea, or Koko, is studying Psychology at Barnard in the class of 2027. She is from Maryland and recently transferred from University of Maryland. She paints bright, detailed portraits inspired by reflection, connection, and her cultural heritage. 

It is a warm Sunday evening when I meet Ayorkor at her apartment for our interview. Sinking into her couch I can see out her living room window. The setting sun paints the opposing building a golden color, the warm type of shade often used in Ayorkor’s paintings. By the end of our conversation, the sun is gone and the buildings have returned to their ordinary hue.

Upon entering her apartment, I knew only two things about Ayorkor: she is a psychology major and she paints portraits. So naturally, one of my first things I asked her was why, what connects the two? She explains to me how she sees it: psychology is the study of the mind, and portraiture is the study of people. They are, at their crux, one subject matter through different lenses. Two sides of the same coin. Ayorkor has always had a love for people—understanding them and portraying them. Laughing, she recalls asking her dad for a psychology book in fifth grade.

Ayorkor feels a sense of certainty in the idea that art and art creation is her purpose. Growing up her household was consistently saturated with art and culture, giving Ayorkor her longtime love for art. Ayorkor’s mother is a musician, and her father is a lover of African art. Ayorkor’s father has always ensured that she was aware and appreciative of her culture. Being West African, half Nigerian and half Ghanian, she tells me that in her childhood home her father is always wearing traditional clothing and cooking traditional food. As a result, Ayorkor feels deeply in tune with her heritage in her own accord; she sees it for its beauty and feels that it is often misunderstood. A lot of the time Ayorkor’s paintings are about portraying her heritage and identity in a way that she can connect to and feel proud of. 

untitled 1

At the time of our interview, Ayorkor’s sister had been staying with her. The two of them had been spending time reflecting about their childhood, and she shared with me a conversation they’d been having. “Our parents genuinely surrounded us with art, and not just visual art, but music. We were always listening to music in the house. My mom would take us to jazz concerts, even on school nights. And we would just sit there with older people, and I feel like my perspective for life just developed really fast.”

Ayorkor’s portraits are bright, playful depictions of people. Her subject is usually someone she knows, if not from an online reference, and her work is an attempt to capture their aura on canvas. Her art depicts the world as she chooses to see it, it’s based on observations and intricacies that capture her attention in the everyday. She conceptualizes her portraits in series with distinct themes, a few thus far have been Remembrance, Elders, and Black professors. Though, she admits to me that it is difficult to be both a student and an artist—so far her only complete series is Remembrance. It began by painting children, like her younger cousin. “I started off with just like painting kids, because I love kids and I feel black children aren't always shown in ways that I think represent youth.” She feels that her work is her part in creating representation. 

yemi

She has another series focused on the elders in her life, she has one featuring a family friend, and one about her grandfather is in the works. This series began in direct response to Remembrance. She pauses, trying to explain her inspiration to me, “I think it was about transition, again. I love transitions and adaptations. I previously painted kids, and I wanted to go the opposite, so elders. I didn't find it that different, even though obviously an older person has more wrinkles and their face looks different. But I definitely do believe you look the same, that the older you get you kind of revert back.” The proof of her belief in this sentiment is in her painting. Her portrait of her family friend catches him in a sort of youthful unburdened happiness, despite the obvious signs of his age. It makes me feel happy, she says that it makes her happy too. Her friend has been an art collector for his entire life. After years of looking at his collected paintings, she has been able to depict him in one of his own. 

the collector’s edition

Another series of Ayorkor’s commemorates Black professors. She started this at her previous college, University of Maryland, and is still deciding whether it should be resumed at Barnard. Ayorkor’s work consistently depicts Black life across generations. When I asked her about why she has made this choice thus far, she told me, “To me, it's kind of like a resistance. American culture tells us white people are the center. And I find it liberating to not care about that.” Interested in this artistic constant, I then asked her if she sees herself painting Black people exclusively in her artistic future, she told me she does not. At the end of the day, it comes back to Ayorkor’s love of people: this will continue to be the driving factor in her art regardless of how it looks. 

It is obvious that Ayorkor has always loved art, however, she only started painting portraiture in the 9th grade, when as she recounts, she simply felt a drive to pick up the paint brush. Telling me about how her painting process typically goes, she said,  “I don't like copying things. I really like using a reference, and building from it, and kind of just developing my own style.” She will typically underpaint her canvas a shade of burnt sienna, a color that reminds her of the soil in West Africa. She sketches her reference in pencil, a practice that is frowned upon within the confines of traditional painting etiquette because the graphite marks can sometimes be seen in the finished piece. But Ayorkor doesn't care—she prefers the control that the pencil gives her. 

While she loves portraiture, Ayorkor tells me she feels a shift in her style oncoming. She feels her move to New York has come with many new observations which will serve as inspiration for her new work. She already has some inkling of what this will look like. She hopes to create something about the corporate scene or perhaps something about scenes of life in New York. While she is not entirely sure of the form these ideas will take, she feels a pull towards the  representational rather than the literal. She also wants to experiment with new mediums, like ceramics. 

untitled 2

I was impressed with the confidence that Ayorkor possesses when it comes to creating art without any formal training. She gives herself a lot of freedom when it comes to her painting and maintains a certainty that art is her purpose. When I asked her about where her confidence stems from, she told me something her mom always tells her: "You will do what you want to do—, there are no constraints.” These words are embodied in almost every aspect of her creation, style, process, subject matter, and medium.  

With that, our interview was almost over. Ayorkor told me that she is very much excited about her move to New York and the transition to Barnard, and that she has not been painting at all since she got here but hopes to start soon. When she does start, she will be painting in her room, as she always does. She has big plans for the future, while she has just started her third year she predicts that she will pursue a career in psychology. As one of my last questions I ask her if she will continue to create art she says definitely, stops for a moment and then continues, “I feel like it [art] is my purpose 100%, in the sense that it is not only one of my first loves, but it feels like what I'm drawn to do here while I'm here on this planet.”

WON JONG

Feature by Alexa Zacarias

Photos by Harper Rosenberg

Won Jong CC’26 is a South Korean composer whose works have been performed across North America, Europe, and Asia. He moved to New York City from Seoul, Korea, where he is currently pursuing a degree in Composition at Columbia College. Won serves as Artistic Director of the Columbia University Bach Society, as well as having received the 2025 Boris and Eda Rapoport Prize, an honorable distinction in music composition from Columbia University.

Won Jong sat across from me, criss-crossed on a swiveling chair, on a relatively sunny day in New York; his East Campus suite illuminated by the strings of light gliding in through his window. While he gathered the materials he wanted to showcase throughout the interview, I took the opportunity to look around. 

His set-up was simple, almost quaint. His workspace (his desk) had a ceramic lamp surrounded by a couple of pens, ink, and a penguin plushie hidden behind a light-blue mug and a ruler. Handwritten compositions were neatly placed on the right side of the tabletop, with a half-read book on a stand right next to them. The inscriptions on the staff paper were subdued, hushed, willed with incredible detail. There were notes, of course, with curves and small, almost unreadable phrases dispersed throughout the page. I then headed to his bedside table, his diffuser dispelling citrus-fragranced air into the soothing atmosphere of his room, a couple of essential oil containers tidily placed around each other, along with three bottles of cologne. Everything seemed to have its own place. The oils on the table, writing materials in the writing space, books stacked onto one another on the shelf, and Won in the middle of it all, his reflection present in every corner of the tiny space. 

“desk”

Won grew up in the bustling Seoul, Korea, living in a tranquil area near a mountain along with his grandmother, and graduated from a high school class of thirty students. Won began his musical prospects as a pianist and a percussionist, but as an introvert, he hated the stage, proclaiming, “I think what I dislike the most about performing is the fact that, you know, music is a temporal art form, right? And you're essentially judged on a singular strip of time.” Over time, his love for composing grew and diverted him from performing, as it gave him more agency over the rendition. He became the orchestrator of alluring pieces of music from the shadows, sitting in the corner of the concert hall surrounded by his scores. He states that “You can judge a piece of music independent of the performance.” 

Leaving behind the frenzy of Seoul and welcoming the similar buzzing of New York, Won takes it upon himself to find pockets of silence and stillness between the chaos, just like he did back home and in his musical career. Much like his pieces, Won is sparse, self-contained, filled with long moments of quietude. However, Won isn’t a solitary creature, despite the stillness of his music. He finds time to go to art galleries with his friends, always with a smile and a double-handed wave ready for anyone who bumps into him around campus. His desk carries the weight of all his compositions and every piece he’s ever created: waking up at 7:30 AM every morning and taking some time to practice his creative pursuits before class. His music doesn’t arrive pre-designed, but it unfolds like something tenuous you find in the dark— with the essence of discovery making defeat inevitable, and therefore more human. To Won, failure is not the opposite of art, but its very condition. 

“fragment of a score”

Won describes one of his “most stubborn qualities” to be his necessity to compose and engrave his score on paper, with meticulous attention to detail. He proceeded to show me a recent engraving of a piece titled, “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze - antiphon in two parts,” a composition inspired by the 1894 black and white silent film of Fred Ott’s Sneeze, the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the U.S. (fun fact, the snapshots of the film also happen to be Won’s computer wallpaper). Although I have little knowledge of music composition, I had never seen an engraving quite like this one, with the spacing so intentional, squiggly lines between notes, and unusual arrows. The manual engraving is a depiction of Won’s artistry and creativity, allowing him to fully feel and engage with his material as he writes it. This process allows Won’s work to “look closer to what it sounds like,” teetering on tension and audibility.  Some may call this process inefficient, but to quote Won, “If I wanted efficiency, I’d be an economist.” 

“edison sneeze score”

When asked if he had to write the soundtrack for the life of a figure–dead, alive, or fictional–who would he choose, Won mused about it for a bit, staring deeply at his screen, until finally he screamed, “Fred Ott, the sneeze guy!” When asked why he would give such a bizarre answer, Won gave a cheeky smile and said, “I would love to meet this man. He just seems so interesting. That’s my little cop out answer.” I totally think this was cheating, as he has already composed a piece about him (it was performed recently at the Maison Française). Oh well, he’s the artist, right? Whatever he says goes. 

We moved on to the actual listening experience of his pieces after looking through a couple of other scores. It was then that I remembered my first listen to Won’s “small room: anno 1130 aedificata, Eidyn,” played by a string quartet. I had to bring my phone up to my ear, sitting on my bed, careful not to ruffle my blanket, and trying to tune out the outside screeches of a cat from my window. I couldn’t truly connect. Won explained that his music was never meant to be listened to on a recording, but that it:

“...works better in live performance because with silence and such fragile material, in a live situation you’re sitting there in the audience and you become hyper aware of every single movement and little creak and sound that you’re making… That links to the idea of silence as energy. There’s a real tension to it. But on a recording, no matter what you yourself do, you’re not going to influence the recording, because it’s already fixed. So I think a lot of that energy is lost.” 

We watched a video of this performance played live, settled in complete reticence, aware of any sudden movements we made– the squeaking of the wheels of the chair he was sitting on, the soft rubs of my feet against the floor– and I understood what was meant by “fragility” in this piece. Throughout my listening and watching of the video, I was uncomfortable the entire time and extremely keen on not only the piece, but also how my surroundings added to it. Conscious of the long pauses of the musicians throughout the performance, the gaps in the production gave me time to take everything in. Though Won acknowledges how one might think of fragility as a material term, he thinks that it applies to gestures. He frames it as delicacy in music built from the possibility of failure, though he has yet to come up with a more definite definition of what it signifies for his pieces. 

Currently, Won is developing this idea further in a creative project for the ensemble “Hypercube,” consisting of a quartet of saxophone, electric guitar, piano, and percussion. It’s called… wait for it…“parchment grew hair, folio 21R,” and it’s inspired by Won’s recent interest in medieval manuscripts, medieval music, and the process by which parchment is made. Fascinated by the notion of craft, Won devoured a book of medieval scriptoriums, where they talk about the process of making parchment. Parchment is made up of animal skin dipped in lime and water solution, dried, and stretched for writing. We imagined the scribe taking notes on this process, like Won, sitting at a desk for hours a day, an observer of technique. Bored, the scribe would write small notes on the sides of the parchment, with one of them being, “the parchment is hairy.” As soon as Won read this, he knew what the title of his new composition would be. 

“parchment grew hair score”

Like a recording fails to capture the full scope of Won’s work, neither can an article. Maybe that’s the point: to attempt to write about Won as an artist and a human, knowing he himself is as tenuous as his music, slipping through the cracks, but firm in his quiet strength. Won’s work asserts that fragility isn’t a weakness– but a condition of living. To listen to him is to accept that nothing is everlasting, and that one must exist in the discomfort of the present. His work resists being captured despite its stillness, insisting on being heard in person, in a room, surrounded by others, following the musician’s every move, engaging between the space of sound and its petering out. Orchestrated from the comfort of his citrus-scented room, silence becomes charged, an invisible collaboration between the performers and audience

STEPHANIE FUENTES

Feature by Kayly Nguyen
Photos by Colson Struss

Stephanie Fuentes (BC ‘26) is a poet who unashamedly delves into the themes of grief and lust and their both vulgar and mundane depictions by using water as a thesis. She is currently preparing to graduate with an English degree and concentration in Creative Writing at Barnard College.

Stephanie Fuentes is still grieving.

She’s lingering in this feeling that’s taken root—first through her lungs, then through her veins and throughout her body. 

It won’t go away.

She exhales and releases the feeling—but now it’s in the air surrounding her like perpetual stasis. Moving on is supposed to mean letting go, but grief won’t let her go.

That’s what poetry feels like for Stephanie Fuentes. Water comes in as a thesis and connects the poet and speaker together, a channel for all-consuming grief that would otherwise run unchecked in the body. 

As such, Stephanie’s poetry intentionally does not inspire catharsis. It lingers in absence and in longing—in grief and in lust, which you would think are diametrically opposed. In reality, they’re two sides of the same coin: this desperate desire for what you cannot have in the moment—something just out of your reach.

Of course it’s sad. It’s painful. 

But for someone looking for something to hold onto, it’s everything.

Stephanie Fuentes is a poet who grew up as the eldest daughter of a Mexican-American family and learned to thrive in the unpredictable wildness that comes with it. She’s a native to New York and has spent life moving between Staten Island, where her immediate family resides, and the Upper West Side with her grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousin, who she was also extremely close with. 

For secondary school, Stephanie left New York for Milton Academy in Massachusetts. Outside of the metropolitan bustle of daily life, Stephanie discovered a proximity to nature: an intimate connection with the world around her that eventually seeped into her poetry, which she describes by using water as a defining thesis.

When Stephanie returned to the city, that connection stayed with her. She’d often submerge herself in shallow ponds, like the third step of the childhood-defining pool in her uncle’s house, and sit, letting the emotions inside her flow like water: a substance that eventually leaves no trace in a container.

That parallel hit even harder when Stephanie lost her grandmother during the COVID-19 pandemic. She recalls close moments of her grandmother bathing her like a mother and spending every waking second with her.

A couple years later, Stephanie lost another mother figure in the form of her aunt. She describes grieving differently from her siblings and those around her, because to Stephanie, her aunt was everything, and it broke something in Stephanie to have to lose her—as if a part of her was lost when she died.

So, just as water leaves nothing behind, Stephanie remarks that “A headstone omits the actual person that was once there.” In the same way, Stephanie often draws on not only the presence of water as a defining element of her poetry but also the intentional absence of water: empty containers that used to hold water or rivers that have run dry, which also acts as an allegory for issues with sobriety.

Water, therefore, is almost universal in that way, whether it’s grief, love, or alcohol flowing into each other down the drain. Reminiscent of the phantom presence that water leaves behind, Stephanie believes that in poetry, even if something draws from a false memory, “It doesn’t make anything less real if the origin point was real.” The grief she felt over losing two mothers was real, no matter the fictional form it takes in her writing.

It’s the reason why Stephanie is so drawn to poetry: there is so much freedom to explore while inhabiting the persona of the poem’s speaker. She declares passionately that “I love the audacity in which you can cry for grief that's not your own. Making shit up is so important to poetry.”

“People forget that with the confessional day and age now,” Stephanie says. “I mean, I write confessional poetry, but the ‘I’ is never me. The ‘I’ is always the speaker, who's far removed.”

Stephanie revels in that same freedom to explore concepts usually seen as taboo and that are typically left unsaid. She enjoys writing about the “weird, warping, and vulgar forms of grief that overwhelm the speaker—the mundane and disgusting depictions of grief alike.” This is especially clear in “Chlorosis,” where the narrator subsists on material parts of a body left behind after loss:

“My sister asks, Why do you do this

to yourself.

Truth is, the year is still rendered as a year–

I find your hair strands striped along the unwashed

bedsheets and tape them to the bedroom walls.

They could be timbers. They could be longer.”

Stephanie also tends to incorporate an element of surprise into her poems. She visualizes her art as an experience for the reader, taking inspiration from how poet Yusef Komunyakaa describes his own work in relation to music. In fact, in a profile by the Academy of American Poets, Komunyakaa explained that "Jazz has space, and space equals freedom, a place where the wheels of imagination can turn and a certain kind of meditation can take place. It offers a meditational opportunity.”

In the same way, Stephanie describes her poetry as an “instrument of meditation.” She doesn’t want her poetry to influence. She says, “I want someone to read a poem of mine and like it—the way they would walk down a river or see a tree.”

This kind of intentional simultaneous surprise and experience for the reader is well showcased in “Alluvion,” where Stephanie remarks that, “If you just read it like this, you’re like, killing who? Killing myself.”

“The morning after I tried killing

myself, you

climbed into my bed and smoothed my

hair down the length of my back,

     your soft fingers the water

carrying itself back to the harbor

There are things I would have done

had your love been smaller”

Stephanie’s unexpected enjambments serve to remind the reader that this poem is not about relief from overpowering emotions: it’s about living in a moment of grief with the poem’s speaker, where line by line takes you by surprise.

(It’s like: you—you what after that? There are things you would have done—done what? 

Oh, I return to your love once again. I am left still grieving for you).

And at the end of the day, that’s what Stephanie writes poetry for: to be swallowed in the feeling of grief once again, like suffocating underwater. The reader just happens to experience it with her.

“I fell into poetry after this deep period of grief. And so, poetry was something that left this emotional residue on me. I was suffering and other people were suffering, but poetry was grief and that was it. That was all it needed to be. Just an acknowledgement of grief.”

So, Stephanie Fuentes is still grieving. She has not moved on.

Through poetry, she can let that be okay.

Work Cited

“Yusef Komunyakaa: An Argument against Simplicity.” Poets.Org, Academy of American Poets, 4 Apr. 2019, poets.org/text/yusef-komunyakaa-argument-against-simplicity.

Andee Sunwoo Lee

Feature by Nathan Ko

Photos by Cas Sommer

Andee Sunwoo Lee is a Senior CC ‘25 at Columbia College, majoring in visual art with a concentration in psychology. She grew up practicing art and exploring different mediums, such as sculpture, photography, and videography. She seems to prefer a lemon Spindrift over a grapefruit one, perhaps stemming from her fondness for the color blue. 

I’m one minute late for my interview with Andee. And, even worse, I have no idea how to get into Watson Hall. Luckily, Andee came down to help me. I’ve never met Andee before, and sometimes we, as people, unfairly create ideas of what the artist may be strictly based on our impressions of their art. In the case of Andee, it was really hard to imagine what she might be like based on her art due to the variety of her artistic expressions. In my first few interactions with her, it was clear that she was incredibly approachable. We sat down in her senior studio at Watson Hall. She offered me the nicer chair. I declined out of courtesy. She insisted. I accepted out of joy.

Andee’s passion for art traces back to her roots. Born in Los Angeles, she then moved to Seoul, South Korea, while attending a boarding school in Jeju Island. Her older sister did art from a young age, though she was more interested in the theoretical side of art. Watching her sister practice art was exposure to a different world that Andee could enter. She started to make art at a young age.

A lot has remained and changed since Andee was a kid. When she was a kid, the clash between Los Angeles and South Korea as a locus for home, as well as her father’s love for Daoism, exposed her to the dualities in the world. She attempts to incorporate some of those dualities today. Yet, what changed, or perhaps what became more apparent, is her artistic voice that is now both loud and shy.

“I’m now trying to overcome that fear and insert my voice into the images I make. The main feelings present in my art stem from hiding from people, but screaming, ‘Look at me.’ But when people pay attention, it becomes, ‘Don’t look at me.’ This liminal space I have in my art may be why I’m dabbling in different mediums.”

This longing to own her artistic voice is perhaps most evident in Through The Eyes, Beneath the Soil: A House of Flesh. In this video piece, Andee incorporates the voices of other artists. For example, she uses Kusozu Japanese art and the poems of Na Hye-sŏk (known as one of the first Korean feminist poets), the latter of which incorporated the plot of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Andee also cites Japanese artist Fuyuko Matsui and, specifically, her portrayal of a woman’s body decaying as an inspiration. Amidst all these different historical artistic voices, Andee aims to add her own artistic voice to create a new contemporary understanding of different issues, in particular femininity.

“I was doing a lot of collaborations with my friends who graduated, and this is one of them . This was for an exhibition in Shanghai, and the theme was like Blood Bowl sutra- this Buddhist hell where women are sent to because of the sin of polluting the earth with their menstrual blood. I was inspired by this Buddhist concept. Also, I studied the Japanese artist Fuyoko Matsui, and she has a painting of a female body that’s decaying. It’s a reminder that everything is ephemeral. The female body, sexual issues, it’s all transient. A lot of the images in the video are found images. I was trying to merge those existing narratives into my own image to make a modern adaptation.”

Through the Eyes, Beneath the Soil: A House of Flesh

It’s impossible to talk about this piece without mentioning her Korean background. When noting how the female body can be “liberating but also restricting,” she mentioned that Korea has influenced her views on femininity. In particular, growing up Korean, the concept of a “house” was not necessarily comforting. A house can be seen as a very patriarchal setting, reflecting it, simultaneously, in a domestic and cultural setting. In the video’s last scene, the physical body and the house relate to Andee’s interest in exploring the concept of a house as a “vessel of something very conflicting.” She made the house in the video.

“The house is something I made with 3D tools. It’s a collage  I made with decaying flowers. And I always get to add a twist to existing symbols. Flowers, for example, often symbolize life and purity. But what if it's decayed? I always like to add those twists to common symbols. That's why I wanted to make this female body using decayed flowers, referring to the reproductive system. It's supposed to look like a uterus. Combining the image of the female reproductive system and the domestic home as a site of both violence and life is my main motif, and I think [Hye-sŏk’s] poem kind of penetrates that idea of what it's like to be in a body you don’t have autonomy over. These experiences and questions are ones I can’t fully answer, and I just like to leave it to the audience. I'm just  leaving narratives and letting the audience do the interpretation.”

Andee mentioned the influence of David Lynch in her video. For example, thinking about the historical narratives surrounding the male gaze, she made the decision to have the video of the flickering eye at the start of the behavior in black and white. And, in the rest of the video, she’s again intentional with color, darkness, and light. These choices are for her “ways to construct [her] own language.” Yet, when she mentioned David Lynch, I immediately thought of the way Lynch would describe Inland Empire. Inland Empire is one of Lynch’s most experimental and abstract movies. It truly is a movie that cannot be encapsulated by words. When asked to explain Inland Empire, Lynch is succinct: “It’s about a woman in danger.” The 3-hour movie provides its audience with the joy of interpretation. This process of letting the audience interpret the work is similar to Andee “leaving narratives and letting the audience do the interpretation.” Yet, in Lynch’s film and Andee’s work, there’s both a clear unease: one cannot just relaxingly eat a melon wrapped in prosciutto while looking at Andee’s video work. One must sit down and watch. And try not to pause, even though there is a fearful addiction to what may unfold next.

The attention to detail in Andee’s work stems from her ascetic work habits. While discussing this video work, she opened a small and dainty notebook. Inside such a notebook, there were so many notes that were deliberate in explaining the project’s inspirations, goals, etc. She told me how she planned for the video through her notebook, and by looking at how packed her notebook was, it was obvious that it took incredible detail to create such a video. In many ways, this asceticism is an art in and of itself. Like Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, or Fasting Buddha Shakyamuni, there’s an awe I felt when looking at her notebook. Like damn, I don’t know if I could do that. 

View fullsize

Window and Tree

Compared to her video work, which was planned rigorously in an ascetic fashion, Andee’s photography arises from the desire of the moment. It’s not months of planning on a notebook that drives the shot, but rather the sudden impulse to capture a given moment. This sudden impulse can come from any stimulus- a striking feature or a pretty color. At the start of the interview, I offered Andee a Spindrift: she could pick either the grapefruit or the lemon. She, out of pure instinct, chose the lemon one because of the blue can. She even noted that her choice to attend Columbia was based partly on an instinctual fondness of Pantone 292. These sudden inclinations, such as regarding color, are what determines the photo for Andee.

Andee is deeply intentional with photography, though. For her, photography is uniquely alluring when she can play with its texture. She works to capture the dimensionality of texture with visual mediums. Also, I noticed that her photography captures movement in a sophisticated way. Her photograph of a tree explores the feeling of it being caught in movement, and capturing such a time-specific moment in movement under the backdrop of blue contributes to Andee’s talent of contrasting color with movement in her photos. 

For Andee, photography can also emerge from personal reflection. In her Self-Portrait Series, there’s a photo of a shower that again captures the compressed texture, in this case, of water. There’s a feeling with the photo: perhaps a suffocation of sorts. This makes sense, as the dorm shower overflowing can become suffocating. The shower is also an intimate space where one clearly sees their body in a bare manner. 

Self Fossil

While this photo may seem distanced from some of Andee’s sculpture work, there’s a similar barren, concrete feeling that emerges in both. In her sculpture Embedded, she depicts a bed in a way that emerges from her experience growing up in boarding school. There was a tension between the bed as a private space as well as a place to socialize with others. There’s also an element that a bed is a way to mark time; we’ve all spent so much time on our bed, and it changes so much over the years as we evolve.

“I tried to see how I could make this bed into a fossil of myself, where I’m traveling between different timelines in my life. In making this piece, I was collecting a lot of objects in my room and putting them in plaster liquid. Then, I would solidify it into the shape of a mattress.”

Embedded

This piece reminded me of a quote from William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.” In a lot of Andee’s works, a lot of grand ideas are being played with (time, femininity, etc.), but they all arise from physical objects. Andee operates as an artist of detail—she takes perhaps banal objects like a bed and reappropriates them in a way that is packed with many layers and intertwining ideas. There’s also that sense of unease: the solid, black legs of the bed and the messy, broken-down mattress render the bed not as a soft home to return to but rather something more solid and painful.

The Nature of Being Born

In her diptych sculpture piece The Nature of Being Born, she again explores the concept of time. In this piece, there are attachments of boobs, barnacles, and the crying faces of babies. She sees a parallel between babies and barnacles as a form of dependent parasites. The nature of their time can also be seen as dependent, as a parasite must take the time from another for its own time. That feeling of unease—the tingling over the left shoulder—emerges in this piece. Perhaps it’s my personal tyrpophobic fear of barnacles, but when I first saw this piece, a silence ushered in my bones. This makes sense, as I felt a similar way with one of Andee’s inspirations for this piece: Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided, a sculptural diptych with a mother cow and her baby calf separated by the structure of the sculpture. 

While a lot of Andee’s work operates within abstraction, there are tangible things that I associate with her as well. Lemon Spindrift. Black clothes. Big smile. Use of the word” “gotcha.” Senior studio with her photographs on the walls. And we don’t ask why. Rather, we enjoy these little things, these little moments. And we interpret it. Like Andee’s photography, we let things be. And I don’t think that’s just her way of art; it’s also the energy she brings. There’s a deep methodical order, an ascetic madness, but all with an energy of ease. Perhaps that’s one of the dualities in her life.

Cate Mok

Feature by Anushka Pai

Photos by Arden Sklar

Cate Mok is a Senior at Barnard studying architecture and computer science. Though Mok's art primarily centers around her academic fields, she enjoys working with diverse mediums, often blending her design skills with her interests in performance, creative writing, and technology. 

We met at the School of Journalism on a rainy afternoon, a fitting location for our discussion. Mok explained that she had previously taken a course at the school, wanting to improve her interview skills. This is a common practice for Mok, who seems to have an endless capacity for new knowledge. I wasn't surprised to learn about Mok's vast intellectual pursuits, as they are reflected clearly in her creative work, which weaves design, technology, and philosophy together with precision. 

Mok arrived at Barnard with plans to pursue creative writing. However, it wasn't long before she fell in love with architecture, drawn to the opportunity to construct physical spaces and explore how design interacts with the human experience. She simultaneously grew interested in computer science, viewing the digital world as another space to be built and felt. 

"We increasingly live and build in a digital world using digital infrastructure. As technology has developed, the digital world has gained a physical footprint, interacting with us and the environment," stated Mok. 

In one of her many explorations of the digital and physical world, Mok used data centers to study how digital actions all have a physical location. Her project, Cloudland, explores how data centers can be redesigned to adapt to changing advancements in data and energy storage. Most data centers, like those built near Mok's hometown, Washington D.C., use large plots of land and rely on high intakes of energy. Interestingly, these expansive spaces are not built for human circulation, hosting less than 20 people daily. However, despite being physically inaccessible, data centers can be easily accessed digitally. Whether through an email or a simple Google search, our digital activity finds its physical location at a data center. In conceptualizing how data centers can be modified, Mok investigated one of her central curiosities: how interactions between people, the physical world, and the digital plane are multidirectional, all inevitably finding ways to influence one another. 

"In this project, I spent a lot of time arguing that traditionally, we see architecture as a means of providing shelter and creative expression. But I also think there's a huge aspect [of architecture] that involves the communication and organization of information. So I started looking at cave paintings, libraries, churches– all these ways to express and store information like we do digitally," said Mok.

Following a deep dive into the archival photography books in Avery Library, Mok found herself fascinated by the platonic ideal of an American diner: modest and non-threatening, a place you can go to disappear. Her project, the Heartbreak Diner, offers its customers an opportunity to seek closure through one last conversation with their loved ones. It is a space to grieve, reminisce, and vent, designed to be entered through virtual reality. The diner acts as a digital recreation of the physical world, a way to encourage intimate connection despite the barriers of distance and time. 

"No one can see your reaction, and as soon as the experience is over, you can still be in your place of comfort. It gets to a theme in my work, creating a space for conversations that can not or do not happen in real life," stated Mok.

Self-described as being in the 'let's not build any more buildings' phase, Mok believes architecture is most impactful when designed intentionally. She views architectural modeling through the same lens. Remaining conscious of the materials used and waste generated as an architecture student, Mok emphasized that 'intentional modeling' offers an opportunity to think critically about social impact and pursue unconventional constructions, such as edible, hanging, and compostable designs. Her models push the boundaries of how spaces can be represented, while still remaining tethered to the issues she is passionate about. 

Model of a structure made entirely of ramps, envisioning how accessible architecture can be designed on a large scale. Made using clear acrylic, mirrors, and jewelry wire.

Model of a structure made entirely of ramps, envisioning how accessible architecture can be designed on a large scale. Made using clear acrylic, mirrors, and jewelry wire.

Curious about what computer science research would look like without a computer, Mok constructed a mini 'pop-up cafe' where she could facilitate conversations between passersby. While reenvisioning the act of computation, this project also studied the role of space in fueling conversation. Equipped with a large roll of paper and a makeshift cafe set-up, Mok presented Love, Death, and Robots at the undergraduate CS research conference. The faculty, students, and researchers who approached her table were given a 'menu,' prompting them to answer a question asked by the previous visitor. While answering the question and raising one of their own, Mok took notes, ending the night with 4 hours' worth of ideas about love, grief, and life. 

"I consider love to be constructed from public discourse and moments of connection between strangers. The dining experience was used as an interface for meaningful connection, and conversation as an act of collaborative computation," said Mok.

Mok's latest project, The Mourning Room, is an immersive experience exploring how love and grief are spatialized, using generative and haptic technologies. The event will debut in Barnard's Movement Lab in the coming week, and programming will include a research presentation, audience demo, and open installation.

“I wanted to create a space for people to consider how we might design spaces and choreographies to miss someone and sustain the physical memory and presence of them. I also wanted to ask, how can hybrid technologies prototype and facilitate architectural and digital circuitries for love, grief, and the online and physical worlds built by two people,” stated Mok.

Celeste Funari Muse

Feature by Caroline Nieto

Photos by Colson Struss

Celeste Funari Muse is a visual artist and collage marker. She is currently a senior (class of 2025) at Columbia College pursuing a degree in archaeological anthropology.

You could say Celeste Funari Muse is a born artist. Raised by two artist parents—her father a photographer and collage artist and her mother a documentary filmmaker—art was less of a conscious undertaking than a way of life. In middle school, Celeste began keeping a journal, writing down thoughts and drawing self portraits “as a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being in a body, because that felt really confusing at the time.” Since then, she has journaled not daily, not compulsively, but whenever she needs to translate a feeling. Over the past decade, Celeste has collected memories not just as a salve for the immediate, but in her words, as a “sacred way of preserving how I think and how I move through the world.”

Embrace I, Risograph

Celeste has used and replaced the same black spiral-bound journal for ten years. Recently she’s added something new to the rotation: a red pocket-sized journal with blank pages. This book houses Celeste’s most routine practice: drawing strangers on the Subway. While conceiving these images, Celeste is beholden to the time before she or her subjects reach their respective stops, and it is the thought that these people could leave at any moment that draws her to the page. Her perspective as an onlooker isn’t detached from the drawings, where the subjects are obscured by poles or face away from her view. Celeste calls this transient bond “an intimate form of connection in a city where connection isn’t expected.” For quick sketches like these, Celeste works exclusively in linework, depicting only the sparsest details to identify her subjects. While the drawings are minimalist in composition, Celeste sees their sparseness as an asset, where “a single line [creates] an image [...] that allows your mind to fill in the rest. “It’s choosing one thing to focus on and letting the rest fall away,” imagining what might live in the space.

People are what fuel and form all of Celeste’s work. While her parlay into art began as a means of self-investigation, Celeste now turns that inquisition outwards, where each person she meets, or even briefly encounters, adds to her well of inspiration. Given her history as an artist, art school might have seemed like the natural trajectory, but her fascination with the human experience led her to pursue a degree in anthropology, which has given her “a way to talk about art and film and culture without pigeonholing [herself] too early into one skill.” Celeste has found that academia, especially the humanities, can often get caught up in erudition without action; she felt compelled to balance her major with something that felt more tangible. She chose to concentrate in archaeology, a program that allows her to get her hands dirty and feel the “material action that is changing the way we think about history.” 

Opening, Risograph

This desire for the mind/body connection has its roots in Celeste’s history as an athlete: “I feel like in a similar way to finding myself through portraiture at a pivotal age, I found myself through movement and athletics.” Celeste’s art reflects this emphasis on physicality, which is difficult when drawing or working with collage, two mediums beholden to their inertia. Stilling bodies in action seems hypocritical, but Celeste considers it a welcome challenge, if not to improve her skill, but to feel “a point of connection between what have been two disparate pulls of expression for [me].” She creates the illusion of movement in her collages through texture, layering, and visual intrigue, attracting the eye to details that seem to contradict. Her collage “Aperture/Capture” features images of armchairs, two men holding a camera, and the blown up image of what appears to be a belly button, to state a few. These fragments of the physical create enough visual dissonance to keep the eyes from landing in one place, giving the experience of a moving image.

Aperture : Capture, Risograph

Where her drawings are often spontaneous creations, Celeste’s collage work is a more labored process, in which she slowly discovers patterns and images as they appear to her. Celeste finds pictures from magazines of contemporary art or photography, taking her scissors to anything that stands out. Typically, the final product comes from a night spent on her bedroom floor, images splayed about and glue on hand. Recently, Celeste has taken to sewing her collages, stitching directly onto the paper. What is left is evidence of her interference, a literal weaving together of discordant parts into an entirely new picture, forming “some kind of scene or reality that didn’t exist before.” Her collage, “Weapon Study,” is made of two images—a woman curled up and naked, gun in hand; and the roots of a tree in a forest. The images are sewn together such that the woman's bottom is overlayed with the slope of vacant space above the tree. What remains is the omnipresent reality of nature, a reminder of where our lives begin and end.

Weapon Study, Risograph

Celeste graduates this Spring, and she’s ready to live at a slower pace. She looks forward to making art with deliberation, not out of dissatisfaction with her previous work, but from curiosity at what this change will do to her expression. She plans to stay in New York, visit Italy in the fall, and work for a few years before going back to school. She doesn't feel the pressure to stick to a severe timeframe—or if she does, she doesn’t show it. Celeste dictates her pace through an internal rhythm, with the knowledge that no matter what, she will never stop moving.

Chandra Gangavarapu

Feature by Eli Schalet

Photos by Alicia Tang

(Pairs well with orange cake, mint tea in a familiar mug, and Mary Oliver’s poetry.)

Chandra Gangavarapu is a musician from the suburbs of Chicago in the class of 2025 at SEAS majoring in applied mathematics and minoring in music. Her work is in the realm of neo-soul and R&B, with personal lyricism and a warm, earthy sonic palette. “I like the stories that I tell to be very honest and very vulnerable.” Connecting with her at the onset of spring break over Zoom, we speak about her forthcoming EP, embodied artistic expression, and the necessity of naivety.

Shifting in and out of focus behind the Chandra on my computer screen appears a scene lifted straight from the soundscape of one of her songs: the deep, rich colors of vacation-vegetation saturated with sun under a great blue sky; you can’t help but relax that knot in your shoulder. She tells me about her beginnings in music about an hour outside Chicago. “I grew up learning Indian classical Carnatic singing since I was four, and I started learning violin in fourth grade after literally begging my mom for four years [she laughs]. And so, from a very young age, I think music has been a lifestyle for me.” Early on, she connected with the almost ritualistic practice of lessons, honing her skills through hard work over time. 

While learning Carnatic singing she was also practicing Kuchipudi, a style of classical Indian dance that greatly informed her artistic philosophy. “Dance especially has been very interesting to me because it embodies music. Kuchipudi has both very intricate footwork and deals with a lot of complex rhythms while also keeping the upper body incredibly graceful and flowing. I think that is how I view music, and why I like to gravitate towards neo-soul. Those drums, those live instruments, the baselines, it's the grooviest shit ever. And then on top of that you have such beautiful melodies that have so much scope to them.” 

This embodiment of music is also tied to her engagement with Western music theory. Chandra firmly believes that writing and performing are the grounding force for everyone involved, audience and artists. Yet she has found theory an essential tool for technical practice and, more importantly, communication with her musical collaborators. Theory becomes the language of musical partnership, the facilitator of that singular marvel when a song becomes more than just the sum of its musicians. Her songs are personal, “a way of understanding what's in my head”, but in collaboration the art becomes its own priority. It is the collaborative process that allows her to let go. “I think it’s the only way you get better at your craft, right? You’ve got to learn, you’ve got to unlearn, learn and unlearn, etc. That's the constant cycle.” The theory allows her to abstract the music from being strictly self-directed. “But at the end of the day, if it doesn't feel right and sound right in your head or as you're playing it, what's the point?”

This feeling is the main motivator of her compositional style, which starts with something solid like a bassline or chord progression, sometimes a rhythmic pattern. Then, Chandra uses her voice to outline melodies and harmonies which are later assigned to various instruments or set to lyrics. As opposed to an instrument like the piano which is limited to discrete tones, she likes the freedom that the voice provides as a continuous instrument, unlimited in this respect. By keeping the entire process in her voice, it becomes about more than just creation. “The voice is also an embodiment of music. After singing for a long time, after a long practice session, your mood feels better. And when you're really singing with your chest, you're feeling like that air coming out of you, in a way it is meditative, and so healing, you know?” It is no shock that Chandra’s music obtains this near-devotional quality. While she wouldn’t describe herself as distinctly religious (“I’m very spiritual. It's more about calmness and musical devotion. Those are what I want to bring out in my music more because that has given me the most calm and the most solace.”), the traditions of Carnatic music and Kuchipudi dance she grew up learning have a long history with devotional and meditative practice. But what she describes also brings to mind the phenomenon of entrainment, or the synchronization of biological rhythms such as breath and heart rate in people exposed to the same music, both in performance and in the audience. It’s not just a good emotional feeling that Chandra is describing; she’s conducting a symphony of rhythms inherent to the human body, brought into harmony with herself through her art. 

When she has an initial demo, recorded with her home equipment, Chandra will see how other people connect with it. She’ll send it to collaborators and friends, refining the instrumentation, and working with producers to record a final version. “That collaborative process is so fun to me. When we were working on producing ‘The Sun’, it took all summer just because I was trying to learn how to say what I wanted to hear, and that was just really fun. My producer for ‘The Sun’ was Jacob Pappas; he's out in LA and I would hear all of his drafts and I was so impressed by everything he was doing, it would be really great calls where I felt like I could just say anything that I wanted to hear, and then he would have it down so perfectly.” 

Something that has been playing on her mind lately is finding a balance between a more live sound and a more produced one. She describes this part of her process as the careful construction of a sonic world. “It comes down to listening to a lot and building up a nice reference list, picking out specific things you like in different songs. Then, once you have that ‘world’, then you fine-tune it to something that sounds good.” The difficulty of choosing where to take her sound stems from a reverence for her collaborators and a desire to capture her live experience with them in a static medium. Sometimes what needs to be captured is the ambience of a room or the feeling hanging somewhere between those four walls. How do you record a feeling? “Live takes capture so much more emotion than you ever could with having something that's so produced. In a way, you're trying to capture the ephemerality of one take, which some people have qualms about, but I think it's beautiful. But with a more produced track you can work with more nuance, you can be much more detailed. You can have everything you want, the way you want it. Both of them are really fun, and ‘The Sun’ is fully produced. But the recording process is definitely way more fun when you're doing a live take.” As is always the case, technology is a double-edged sword.

It’s at this crossroads that Chandra sees her academic work in applied math and music come together. People often assume because music can be so mathematical that the work would have many similarities, but most of her applied math work is engineering-focused. The persistent search for authenticity in music, she says, can be pretty analogous to the trial and error of solving any tough problem. “But as I was going through college, I've realized there's definitely a lot more overlap in the synthesized world. And so I actually did have a lot of fun exploring all of that, from a more technical aspect doing a lot more machine learning music and thinking about sound in a more abstract way.” Columbia’s Computer Music Center in Prentis Hall on 125th Street has been a huge outlet for this exploration. “In Composition I wrote this piece. It was very improvisatory; it was supposed to be a reflection of chance versus choice, which [in regards to applied math] was leaning towards probability. In those ways there are fun things you can be doing between those two worlds.”

This search for authenticity is front and center in the EP Chandra has been working on for the past couple of years, as is a sense of trust, especially when it comes to the self. “There’s a lot of thinking about the theme of trusting where I am, and with that comes a lot of grappling with naivety.” This too is in dialogue with the devotional aspect to her music. That cultivation of inner peace is what many people search for through religious journeys, that sort of self-comfort. By carving out a space for herself to do the same sort of work via her music, Chandra in turn provides the same for her audience who is seeking the same comfort in a way that is less explicitly religious. 

These themes are especially present on a song from this new project currently titled “Second Time Around”, which has been in the works for almost a year now. The chord progression is one she’s been playing with for a very long time and even made its way into her composition class last semester. “It has a lifetime that extends outside of the song, which I think gives more feeling to it. But it’s a song where I fully leaned into my naivety. I was like ‘Yeah, I fully believe things are going to be this way and I am so happy with that.’ I think it's so easy to be down on yourself for feeling naive, and it was nice to just bask in such silly feelings. The goal is to feel completely aligned with where you are, but sometimes you’ve just got to convince yourself you're there.”  We laugh about it because it feels especially true now, witnessing the nonchalant apocalypse that seems to have struck our peers. In the face of immense social pressure to appear as cool as possible and care as little as possible, there's something strikingly brave about investing in your naivety at least for a moment. “Nonchalance is out in my books.” I couldn’t agree more.

Part of what makes this possible in her art is achieving a certain distance from the musical subject. When working with old material, like with “Second Time Around”, Chandra tells me, part of it is an excitement around making space for new creativity. “Somehow, though, it's really fun escaping to that feeling again, feeling exactly like you did way back when and laughing about it. That's how I feel about performing ‘Over the Phone’ or ‘Dull Pink’ these days. I'm like, ‘Wow, girl…’ But sometimes, yeah, things do take on a new life. I wrote ‘The Sun’ about a completely different situation and now there's still so many situations that make me feel exactly how I did back then, and it's still me.”

There’s a certain freedom that comes from letting go of the idea that your art has to appeal to everyone, or be made with every potential listener in mind. It takes practice and intention to obtain, and maybe it’s impossible to hold on to constantly, but striving for it should be the goal. There's something to be said about having a body of work that is specifically you, so when it resonates with people it holds more significance; it means they're resonating with a specific vision that matters to you, and is incredibly personal. Chandra’s upcoming EP is just that: incredibly her. “I was gonna say there's something for everyone. There's not, you know, there's not. I hope people find something new and something warm in the project.” 

The EP is set for release in late June. You can enjoy  “Liquid in My Feet” and her other singles until then under Chandra on all streaming platforms, and find her on Instragram @chandralekhaxx.

Fatima AlJarman

Feature by Mara Toma

Photos by Chantel Hope

At the end of our conversation, Fatima gifted me a zine she had collaborated on: What grounds do we sprout from? We fought over who should buy the desserts at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. In the end, no desserts were bought.“Surrender” is the word Fatima searches up at some point in our conversation. Fatima’s writing is an intimate act of interrogation, construction, play, embodiment, and surrender. Fatima embodies all the beautiful writing she produces; perhaps that is why I wish our meeting to be seen not as a formal encounter but as a conversation devoid of structure. Fatima AlJarman is a Junior ‘26 at CC studying English and comparative literature.

MT — What is something that made you feel something today?

FA — Currently, I am working on an application for something and, of course, I am nervous. So I had an office hour with a professor, who is also an advisor at Quarto Magazine. We sat down and reviewed my answers to the applications together and his warmth was so comforting… It made me feel something because in the moment I realized that I really don’t care if I get in or not, I am just grateful that I have someone with whom I feel so safe having these exchanges.

MT— Your writing has something profoundly “embodied” about it. It feels very sensorial, nostalgic, yet very rooted in a particular moment in time. What does your writing mean to you and can you speak to this “embodied” quality of it?

FA –“Embodied” is such a good word and it resonates with me a lot. I think this is very connected to my writing process, or what I look like when I sit down to write. At some point, when I reach a very good moment like writing a really good sentence, or discovering a strange whimsical plot, it will feel like an out-of-body experience. In that state, I embody the reader’s position completely, I have no idea what is going to come next. Truly, every word comes and I will feel shocked by it. I’ll start to cry if it’s heartbreaking… if it’s about my mom, I’ll probably cry. It feels like something passes through and the fire is ignited and I've just set up the environment to prepare for a flame to explode. Something else is exploding but it is not me.

I think sometimes I write in search of them [these out of body experiences], but I would describe them as a state of euphoria. I often write in search of those moments and they don’t always come. I remember that I had one of those moments when I wrote the end of the first chapter of my novella— the part when the daughter says {“I wish I knew everything that I know now so that I could drive you where you are”}.So again, very far and few between—it comes when it comes and it does something crazy– and I don’t question it.

MT- What is your relationship with your own biography?

FA- For most of my life, I’ve had to tow the line between speaking and being silenced, and this balance has changed throughout the years. As a child, I was a shy little girl. Freshman year of college was a turning point. I had a very interesting conversation with a friend who, at the time, didn't know me very well. He nevertheless looked at me and said, “I feel like you are a really loud person but you shut yourself up.” I got a little scared because no one in my life had ever read me like that. Honestly, that switched something in my brain and I kept ruminating about this… am I actually this extroverted human who has been conditioned to be an introvert because of her upbringing as a woman, or perhaps her upbringing in “respectable society” that wants you to be poised, quiet, and reserved?

MT — When reading your pieces I felt that you were writing from a situated, autobiographical perspective. Can you speak to this concern with perspective, and perhaps even experimenting with the fluidity of point of view?

FA — Yes, but my perspective is morphed. People often take things at face value. Sometimes people will read and they will assume things about the characters—for example, they’ll read my ongoing novella and they’ll say things like that’s your mom and that you… but it’s not my mom and it’s not me. They are versions of a conception of a mother and a daughter. There is an element of fabrication to it— I am molding and creating characters. That’s something that I always have to emphasize, especially when dealing with the story of an Arab family. I think we are not given the privilege of existing in an imaginary and ephemeral sphere. People will often read the character and assume that this is exactly what it [being Arab] must be like. I think about this a lot; people truly speculate that the daughter is like me… maybe she is but maybe she's not. That’s why I like speculative fiction and autofiction. I like those subgenres because they allow me to explore what is real and not real at the same time, and push readers to bask in what is not real. I think our current culture sees everything that you write as factual or rooted to who you are, but, sometimes, I use writing to explore everything I am not. This goes back to your point about experimenting with the fluidity of point of view—that’s what makes fiction as a medium so powerful. 

MT — Your writing deals with an element of construction,  yet it is also highly fluid. You combine words with images, and print-making is often at the core of your craft. What is the significance of print-making in your work?

FA — Whenever I browse a book, I am the counter example of “don’t judge a book by its cover.” That is the unfortunate cost of aesthetics. I am really obsessed with the presentation of books. That obsession extends both to the paper, the binding, and any physicality you can think of. I think this obsession started when I was introduced to the concept of zines as a teen. It was a really empowering medium because it felt so accessible. I knew I could make a zine, and it could be a finalized project, and all I needed was A4 papers, a printer, and a pdf. In a couple of steps, I could make a little zine. I am really interested in experimenting beyond zine-making. I’ve been learning book-binding, so eventually I want to learn how to make a hard-cover book.  I really want to learn all these technical skills because they feel very connected to how I see my writing. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good printer and I will always support local printers, but I want to see what it’s like to do it all on my own. I think the act of book-making makes the experience more embodied and personal because my work doesn’t end with a pdf. As soon as I am done with my draft, that is just step one of a larger process. 

MT– Something that attracted me to your printed materials was that your images are more descriptive than abstract– the prints themselves could be viewed as embodied glimpses of the writing, could they not?
FA- Thank you so much, I don’t want to take all the credit because “memory-book” or “intergenerational loneliness and other things i’ve inherited” (I haven’t decided on the title!), in particular, I worked very closely with my friend Mariam Almuheiri—the photography was all her. We weren’t interested in the abstract because everything that we were writing was still rooted in something real. The dishes that were being described were in the text, or the photograph. There were so many references to cite, whether it be a signpost, a piece of clothing, or the look in someone’s eye. It felt very important to make the publication a total experience for the reader.

MT- It seems that a lot of the characters you construct often live through one another or exist within larger multigenerational stories. Are you interested in vicarious experiences or, perhaps, how we live in multiple bodies at the same time? What about representing certain cultural moments?

FA – Maybe this is a personal reckoning but my distance from home makes me so conscious of my cultural upbringing, my Islamic upbringing, my hyper traditional upbringing. Now I am learning how to honor that upbringing and recognize the perspective that that offers me in a world where everybody is nurtured in a different way… maybe my characters represent a reflection into forms of nurturing. I hesitate to say that they represent different cultural moments because at the end of the day I am trying to craft characters that feel like people. Whether we like it or not, we will have cultural moments passing through. It is a difficult line to tow, it is something that I am trying to avoid doing, but it is also an effective need. Whether you are conscious of it or not, cultural experiences impact the way you exist in space. 

MT- I want to go back to your project “an archive of grief,”and I want to ask why “archive?”
FA- In all honesty, I produced that project for an English class where we were studying archives. I remember researching the concept of an archive, and the origin of the word [archive] and being very fascinated. I love the image of an office full of metal cabinets that you open and there are files upon files of materials. Archives are kept “just in case–” this is usually the  thought process behind it [archive]. That is how I felt when I was keeping track of what I was thinking and reading while I was writing about my brother’s death. This was all ‘just in case” I needed to go back… just in case… and I am finding that I do keep coming back to it.. I am glad that I had that intuition two years ago because it’s been a very valuable archive to return to. It is an artifact of a moment and emotion that I cannot access anymore. Truly, how I felt that year I don’t think I will ever feel again… it’s so unique and it is its own signature experience that I can only access through an artifact. It feels very connected to its purpose.

MT- I think we associate mourning, particularly in this cultural moment, as a consequence. But you were just talking to me about a perpetual sense of mourning. What does this perpetual mourning mean for you?

I currently exist between two places. When I am in the U.S., I am constantly mourning my life back home. I am mourning all of the changes in weather, every single type of rainfall, or every meal that my family cooked together that I will not have access to because I have decided to spend these years on my own. When I am back home, for whatever brief period, I constantly mourn my life here – my friends, my family, thinking of New York streets, Hungarian Pastry Shop, and all the desserts that I am not getting to taste. There is a constant mourning that I experience no matter where I am at because I am so conscious that, in a different moment, if I had chosen things differently, my life could have looked very different. It is the byproduct and beauty of having the ability to make choices… the  beautiful privilege of being able to make choices. I know that I have made the choice to study abroad, but I want to also give myself the privilege of feeling what I need to feel instead of hiding or being ashamed of it. When I graduate, I will make another choice, and I will make choices for the rest of my life but I always want to hold the “what if” near to my soul.

MT– What would you say to someone who maybe wants to be a writer but is scared? How do you get to a point where the joy perhaps becomes a little bit more important than the pressure or the expectations?

FA– It is important to ask yourself why you want to write because, then, that will give you a sense of reflection as to what your expectations are. It is really easy, especially in our culture, to not want to do something unless we expect something grand at the end. I think it is so easy to fall into that, and we have all been trained for that mindset. What I would say to a fellow writer is: figure out why you want to write, and if you are writing for yourself then remember that it is only for yourself… no one will look at that page. If it is truly for your soul and for yourself, keep that in mind; we have to be honest and fearless. We have to get comfortable with gazing upon truths that are hard to bear. I think writing is a process of being very brave, even if it is something small that you have to be brave about. 

What has been so helpful for me is to remove the agenda… every single time I felt that I wanted to write to win this major award, I would not write at all because I would be so horrified. However, every single time I accessed a piece without an agenda, I felt limitless. 

I think that this is an important point of an interrogation for any writer: consider your agenda, question your agenda, and write without one.

Renee Morales

Feature by Nathan Cho

Photos by Arden Sklar

Renee (She/Her) is a Senior (class of ‘25) at Columbia studying English and Creative Writing. She is a poet who sees language and words as a site for endless destruction and creation. Through language, Renee channels her emotions into exhaustive explosions that practically feel erotic. These poems, which she puts her whole self into, are felt from the tip of your head to the edges of your toes.

When asked where she wanted to hold our interview, Renee  promptly suggested the poetry section of the local Book Culture. Truthfully, I was a little thrown off and trying to think of ways we could squeeze into the tight little aisles of Book culture that overflow with books. Having collectively decided upon a pair of old chairs as our interview setting, I felt the  presence of books slowly overtake my vision. Right then, possibly, I  began to see the world as Renee did —- replete with beautiful poems  awaiting to be  pulled off the shelf and read  aloud.

Renee (she/her) has had a creative streak all her life. An avid reader from a young age, a habit she owes to her mother, Renee has always had a fascination with the literary. In middle school, she finally put pen to paper (literally) and started her own creative writing practice. In our talk, she expressed that, at this point, her work wasn’t necessarily defined by genre. She called the pieces she wrote during this time “blurbs” or “fragments”. They were bursts of writing that would inform and eventually evolve into her current writing. As she navigated this practice, she asked herself a question that beginning authors often ask : fiction or poetry? Despite a familiarity with fiction, Renee found herself drawn to the spontaneity of poetry. She connected  her path to poetry with a larger  fascination with the ending. In fiction-writing , there is an unspoken expectation to gear the plot and characters towards a satisfying ending. Renee found herself more concerned with the precise moment of the ending. In particular, she found that the poetic medium allowed for the expression of a “precise ending” through its intense focus on the moment. As she discovered this proclivity, she found herself being more and more drawn to writing poetry.  Renee really started coming into her poetic self in high school. She was a part of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition.

20 figs to Bethany By Renee Morales

One of her favorite things about poetry, and something Renee herself loves to explore , is language itself. Hailing from the predominantly Cuban city of Hialeah, Florida,and a Spanish speaker herself, Renee sees  language as a way to connect to her own identity. In her poetry, she loves to “fuck” with English, and she loves playing with the grammatical and syntactical bounds of English. The grammar of English often expects us to express ideas in a strict ABC format, but Renee feels her ideas flow in the direction of XYZ.  By forcing these lines of logic together, Renee uses language as a site of destruction and creation. She resists linguistic conformity and creates soundscapes that create something new and beautiful out of the messiness of English. This is nowhere clearer than in her love for and inspiration of music. Rumba, traditional Cuban music, serves as a major inspiration for Renee, who tries to emulate it in her poetry. Her poems are constantly shaped by the  onomatopoeias and exclamations that echo the sound and rhythm of Rhumba. The language of her poems is constantly in tune with sound.

Sea Came Bearing Her Hip @ Night But Yemaya He Meant to Be My Husband by Renee Morales

In her works, Renee demonstrates an intimate knowledge of emotion. She discussed, for instance, her love for humor, especially when dealing with more tragic themes. She finds that this humor actually enhances a sense of tragedy. Alongside this, Renee enjoys leaning into a sense of anger. Anger, for her, becomes an avenue for earnesty where she is able to feel and express fully. All of these emotions intertwine and charge her poetry with a feeling of exhaustion that Renee seeks to convey. Her poetry becomes overloaded with emotion and the words describing it, and it feels like you're sprinting towards the end of each line. Renee sees this feeling of exhaustion as generative and as a true reflection of her own emotional experiences.

I AM HERE WAITING FOR YOUR TO RETURN MY BODY TO ME DON’T YOU KNOW YOU STILL OWE ME MY LIFE By Renee Morales

When asked where all of the power and force in her poetry comes from, Renee owed it to her natural emotional rhythm. When confronted with strong experiences, she channels herself by writing into those very moments. Inspiration flashes like emotion in a creative loop where she feels no problem with expressing her emotions as they flare and flash. They become a source of creativity and a way to connect back to herself through writing. Renee distinctly writes from the perspective of a Brown, queer woman and owes so much of her practice to the black and Brown poets that have come before her.

Wallet Poem By Renee Morales

She points to poets like Morgan Parker, specifically her poem “Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990” as being one of the very reasons she became a poet. SHe loved how unapologetic Parker’s voice was. It was concerned with being pretty or ornate. If you're looking for new poets to add to your reading list, Renee is in no short supply of amazing recommendations. Her clear respect for the poetic craft is evident as she spilled over in inspirations from Safiya Sinclair, Dawn Lundy Martin, Phillip B Williams, and more.

In her personal life, Renee nurtures her poetry in communal, informal ways. As much as her personal experiences inform her poetry, so does her poetry inform her life. She described how her and her friends connect over poetry. They help each other with each other’s poems, and they even held an informal workshop together where they just sat and shared and worked on poems. Renee gushed about these intimate, informal settings that she feels really help her develop in a stress-free environment as well as forging deeper connections with her friends.

Nadia’s Cap Sleeve Made Emancipatory Wrapped into a Breast of a Man She Loves By Renee Morales

Formally, Renee studies poetry and English. She is a Managing Editor for Quarto, Columbia University’s Official Undergraduate Literary Magazine, where she’s been since her freshman spring. Quarto has been a second home for Renee and she has been so happy to watch both the community and craft grow in her time. She noted that Quarto gave her unique involvement in the creative writing department which is often restricted even for Creative Writing majors (you are limited in the amount of department classes you can take each semester which makes it difficult to form a real community in the major). She also loves being able to read student work and being able to get a read (literally) on the literary scene here at Columbia. 

As graduation is on the horizon, the future holds nothing but possibilities for Renee. As she leaves college, Renee hopes to recenter the actual craft of poetry more. She feels that her time in school was primarily focused on an academic approach to poetry, and she wants to experiment more with the writing process itself as she leaves. She hopes to work in the literary world and expressed a hope to go into teaching poetry. Poetry is something that Renee feels is underappreciated in early education, and it’s something she wants to fix. Poetry, as it stands right now, seems to be taught from a very “stuffy” perspective that makes it hard for young students to really fall in love with it, but Renee sees it as the complete opposite. To her, there is nothing more accessible than poetry. If you can read and write, then you can write poetry. In teaching, Renee wants to show that anyone and everyone can be a poet.