IDSVA awards several PhD and MPhil degrees at the 2024 Commencement Ceremony

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Dissertation abstracts can be found here.

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MPhil in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory

Julius Brewster-Cotton (in absentia)

Jessica Rae Crocker (in absentia)

Nathan William Earley (in absentia)

Lard Eian Alexander Kouri

Jill O’Connor (in absentia)

Waseem Rahman (in absentia)

Jennifer Rempfer (in absentia)

Amalya Tumanian

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PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory

Michael Deane Adams
Redeeming Michael Fried’s Theatricality: The Work of Art as a Nexus of Temporality and Ontology

Eric Anthony Bess
Emptiness and Empathy: An Artistic-Philosophical Study of Mastery

Sara A. Christensen Blair (in absentia)
The Domestic Sublime: Liminality, Infinity, and Paradox in Contemporary Art

Margaret Phares Coleman
From the Ground Up: An Anarchic Methodology for Creative Practice Beyond Capitalism

Eileen Marie Doktorski
Adrift, Uncertain And At Risk: Liminality, Movement and the Art Encounter

Hector Rolando Garza
Queer Shapeshifting: Latinx Graphic Novels as Forms of Continual Resistance

Samantha Cherie Stanko Jones
Wild Care: A Vital Surrealist Inquiry On Loss In The Wood

Carrie L. Kellerby
Dwelling in the Woven Threshold: Unraveling the Habitat of Entanglement and Reweaving the Oikonomia of Flourishing

Rachael A. M Rollson
Freedom and Connection: An Eco-Aesthetic Process

Carolyn Jean Martin
The Historical Presence and Vernacular Traditions of Black Women Artists Since 1980

Rikiesha Antonia Christine Metzger
Black Artistic Thought: Contextualizing the Spiritual as an Art Form Through the Voice of Black Women Artists and Thinkers

Mersedé Mirshamsi
Chance Aesthetics in Quantum Realities: Sentient Observers and Artificial Intelligence as Architects of Information’s Journey

Angela M. Mosley (in absentia)
The Trans Performative God: Hip-Hop’s Retelling of the Woman

Sheila Rae Neal (in absentia)
Post-Feminism, Philosophy, and the Aesthetics of Comic Book Characters

Silvia Márquez Pease
Mujer Visible: Re-Thinking Mass-Produced and Embodied Argentine Art

Gabriel William Reed
Being and Clay: Ceramics and the Restoration Ecology of Material Imagination

Kim M. Reiff
The Caretaker: Bearing Witness in Public Art An Examination of the Role of Contemporary Artists Addressing the Effects of Environmental Injustice within Michigan Communities

Gale Newman Richardson
A Critical Phenomenology of Violence: At The Intersection Of the Ontic and The Ontological in the Gaze and the Reimage of Violence

Novel (Idea) Denise Sholars
The Black Sublime and the Possibilities of the Impossible

Jeffrey George Siemers
Being in Play: How Otherness Emerges Through the Playful Event

Nic Márquez-Sterling Tanner
The Hidden Intimacy of Wonder and Trauma: Genealogical, Hermeneutic, & Phenomenological Analyses of a Fundamental Mood & Its Relation to Thinking, Seeing, & Being-in-the-World

Angela R. Whitlock
Uncovering Abjection Through Utopian Dreaming: How Techno Subverts Hierarchical Structures and Continues to Forge a Synergetic Experience