A warm and enthusiastic welcome to the exceptional individuals joining our newest cohort of Film & Media Ph.D. students this fall! We’re excited to have you bring your unique voices, talents, and ambitions to our vibrant community at Cal. Your presence promises to deepen and energize our shared intellectual environment. Here's to a rewarding and inspiring journey ahead - full of discovery, creativity, and academic achievement!
Michael Cordova
Michael received his BA in African and African Diaspora Studies & Women and Gender Studies from UT Austin. His work seeks to unravel the underlying antagonism between blackness and the psychedelic, focusing on how film and science orient the structure of the psychedelic. Through his engagements with black critical theory, continental philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, he reads for the constitutive lack that blackness must occupy for psychedelic discourses to find and orient their aesthetic projects.
Eleanor Ford
Eleanor is a media theorist and artist whose work engages paradigms of efficacy and risk in the media technological landscape, focusing specifically on diagnostics of addiction and the slippages between gambling and gaming. They have worked as a curator, writer, sound designer and editor across the visual and cinematic arts, as well as media and publishing corporations. They hold a BA from Reed College.
Rosalie Liu
Rosalie received her BA in Radio/Film/TV and Comparative Literature from Northwestern University and MA in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. She works on Chinese language cinema and media, focusing on how medium transformation reveals (re)conceptualization of environment, elements, and infrastructure.
Nita McDaniel
Nita studies the development of convention in motion pictures alongside the history of film formats. She is interested in how material contingency shaped the limits for expression, the identification of the spectator, and the articulation of social norms in moving image practices. Her current research centers on the composition of the plastic negative support and the linking of cinema, as a set of formal expectations, to a specific context of production and distribution (the studio picture). She holds a BA in Art History from Reed College.
Hui Wong
Hui received a BMS (Bachelor of Media Studies) with a minor in English literature from the University of British Columbia, followed by an MA in Communication Studies from McGill University. He has written about reclaimed wastewater, air-conditioning, and eco-art in Singapore. He is interested in the aesthetic, affective, psychic, and subjectivizing claims of large-scale infrastructural disasters and their representations, especially in relation to postcolonial and transnational modernity.