Innovative, relevant, and ambitious, thesis and capstone projects from across MICA’s graduate programs consistently demonstrate the impact creativity can have at home and around the world — as demonstrated by honors garnered for thesis work from Saskia Kahn ’22 ( Photographic & Electronic Media MFA), Akshita Chandra ’21 (Graphic Design MFA), and Jes Standefer ’21 (Data Analytics and Visualization MPS).
Kahn was recently announced as a winner at the 2022 Global Design Graduate show, presented by ARTS THREAD in collaboration with GUCCI. With over five thousand graduating students entering work, it is the largest ever online showcase of graduating artists and designers worldwide.
Recognized as the photography winner in the Fine Art / Photography / Craft category, Khan’s work, Skatepark Baltimore, is a collaborative photo project about a self-created youth community that worked to make a city skateboard park a more inclusive space. Skaters who felt uncomfortable using the park alone realized the need to work cooperatively in order to claim this space as safe — particularly those who identified as transgender, gender-nonconforming, Black-femme, women, and/or queer.
Emotional Gamut, the graphic design thesis project by Chandra, garnered the Discovery of the Year prize at the 2022 Indigo Design Awards. Celebrating cutting edge visual design from around the world, the awards honor practitioners in the fields of graphic, digital, and mobile design, design for social change, branding, and freelance. This year’s winners hailed from Austria, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the US.
Chandra’s project presents visual analogies for the seven primary emotions — love, surprise, joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust — each having a palette of colors as well as unique shapes and typography. Depicting the complex interconnections of emotional experiences, Emotional Gamut comes together as a visual system that helps to express how emotions overlap to become rich and layered.
Standefer’s work, Slowly Drowning, was shortlisted for an Information is Beautiful Award. The honors celebrate the outstanding work of data visualization, infographic, and interactive and information art practitioners from around the world.
Through a series of visualizations, Slowly Drowning explores the increase in drinking amongst American women as well as the physical and mental toll drinking causes. The piece provides a better understanding of problematic drinking, how prolonged alcohol consumption has irreversible and fatal consequences, and what steps could be taken to prevent long-term damage.