Student Creativity Grants

Timi Adelakun + 24 crew and cast members
Pomona
Pitzer
Scripps
HMC
CMC
Testing Free Will (docu-series)
Our Place (stage production)
Testing Free Will is a docu-series exploring the production of Terry Gabbard’s play, Our Place, by a student with limited knowledge of the production process. The series chronicles the entire creative process of producing the play: finding designers, casting the show, the rehearsal process, marketing, and engaging the audience. The docu-series experiments with free will within the Claremont Colleges community, celebrating human potential and embracing challenges. The live performance of the Our Place play is in the Allen Theatre, and a separate screening of the Testing Free Will docu-series is in the Rose Hills Theatre, both followed by engaging talkbacks.

Chi Adi
Celine Bernhardt-Lanier
Sofia Presser
Pitzer
CMC
Org Sigma!
Students revive, relaunch, and design a physical and intellectual space for an organization using an alternative, non-hierarchical approach to student governance. Organizational Studies students create an online resource base and promotional materials to engage and inform students, as well as train with organizational consultants who specialize in sociocracy, a decentralized, peer-to-peer governance with an emphasis on equitable and collective decision-making. Org Sigma! Is a 5C Club open to everyone, fosters a community of Organizational Studies students and practitioners, conducts leadership workshops, and provides organizational framework modeling for those interested in adopting the sociocratic method.

Celine Bernhardt-Lanier
The Living Classroom: Weaving Biophilia Into Learning Spaces
This project bridges the gap between humans and nature by exploring the concept of biophilic design and its impact on educational spaces in three Scandinavian cities – Copenhagen (Denmark), Oslo (Norway), and Stockholm (Sweden) – renowned for their innovative efforts in integrating nature into their educational systems. How do the spaces we design shape our learning experiences? How can nature be seamlessly integrated into educational settings? What specific biophilic elements are most effective in enhancing student creativity and the overall learning experience? This project delves into the intricate relationship between nature, architecture, and pedagogy and explores how nature-inspired classrooms can become more than just a learning space; how they can nurture a dynamic, student-centered learning culture. By examining how nature can be mimicked in classroom design, this student discovers how classrooms – the very roots of our learning – can evolve from static, conventional settings to flexible, vibrant hubs of learning and well-being for both teachers and students.

Claudio Castillo
Tara Mukund
Pomona College
Computer Science Yearbook
Students document, archive, highlight, and celebrate the largest and fastest-growing department at Pomona College with a yearbook that includes photos, memories, and profiles of students, faculty, and staff. This project is circular, so that the next generation of students have a process and product to use for future academic years, while being inspired by how computer science has evolved. It is also replicable as a template for other departments to engage with faculty, students, and staff outside the classroom, while also highlighting and memorializing their academic community.

Betsy Ding
Pomona
Connecting with our Roots: Farm-to-Table and Third Culture Cuisines as Modalities of Community Building 
This project features a tasting menu of five dishes of third-culture cuisines, utilizing ingredients from farmer's markets and the Pomona farm. The relationship between nativity, our roots, and a modern, ever-changing world is explored through the lenses of evolving cuisines, farming, and agriculture. The project examines how industrialization and cultural exchange can develop and/or erase critical historical and cultural human practices. In the form of a dining experience, diners are empowered to reflect and share their own relationships with the dishes and what eating and consumption means.

Justin Guo
Pitzer
Stupid Shit No One Needs + Terrible Ideas Hackathon
Have you ever been to a hackathon and seen a profoundly useless or terrible project? This event is like that, but for every project. Participants make whatever they want, as long as it works and contributes nothing whatsoever to the world. Teams create stupid, terrible ideas that nobody needs and bring those bad ideas to life!

Kayla Hankins + 10 cast and crew members
Pomona
Heart^2
This low fantasy short film follows twins who get into a fight, which unleashes an ancient curse. The two must work together to stop the curse before it's too late. This project dives into various African diasporic theories surrounding self, duality, and family, while aiming to display the life and beauty of African-American ancestry.

JaQ Lai
Ian McClure-Chute
Aiden Karpf
Pomona
Unfold: A Multisensory Series of Workshops + Community Gatherings
This interactive audio/visual series of workshops and events inspires deep listening and embodied experience, and provides a regenerative community space for the 5Cs. The project offers accessible exploration and improvisation, and a communal deep-sensory (listening, watching, feeling) experience through pop-up workshops leading up to a final event. The final installation is a shared, communal experience (co-listening and co-creation) and features a co-operative sound system in tandem with a fiber art installation and light show.

Aisulu Malik
Pomona
Scents of Our Earth: Homemade Potpourri from Campus Plants
This is an experimental project centered on a desire to bring the beautiful aromas of the natural world into our living spaces, which are often filled with artificial scents. Ingredients will be foraged from across the 5Cs, using materials that would otherwise be disposed of, supporting and encouraging the use of sustainable natural scenters. The project is focused on researching economical and efficient ways to assemble potpourri entirely at home, with the findings shared with students to use in scenting their own living spaces.

Jason Nguyen
Alex Chun
Sebastian Fish Mathurin
Sidney Tchanyoum
Anna Beattie
Joey Cacciarelli
Michele Tang
Pomona
Pitzer
HMC
My Beautiful Rainbow Trout
This science fiction short film, distinctly told through a queer lens, follows two 20-something fishmongers, who unearth a magical rainbow trout. Unaware of the dangerous forces trailing them and the challenges ahead, the fishmongers bring the mythical glowing fish home, only to realize the true nature of this magical trout.

Mari Nishitani
Alyssa Marie Hernandez
Shamiya Morajeune
Pomona
Scripps
People of Color Outside
People of Color Outside is an organization providing a safe space for people of color to explore a variety of places and environments, with this particular project centering on creativity. Students visit the Getty Museum to reflect on their own relationships and the kind of environment they thrive in while engaged in making activities. While at the Getty, the group creates a multimedia collage compiled in a zine as an artifact of their experience. Their journey is documented through film, to be shared via social media, to further awareness of the creative space the group offers to all 5C students.

Alexandria Nyx + 17 cast and crew members
Pitzer
Pomona
Lost at Sea
This film project explores themes of grief, death/loss, healing, trans resilience, and childhood trauma, showcasing a story not typically seen in mainstream media. Queer characters typically look like a Hollywood stereotype or die off for no reason, but this film shows a queer, trans person of color discovering love in a world built against them, finding people who have their back throughout life, and suffering great loss and recovering from it.

Alexandria Nyx
Pomona
Joy as Resistance
This black and white photography exhibit centers around queer, trans, BIPOC, and APIDA Claremont Colleges students, looking at how movement and dance intersect with identities, and is used as a form of resistance. The joy of movement and dance is a small act of resistance to the hatred, racism, and bigotry in the world, and this project displays the meaning and joy of living a life of resistance.

Gerrit Punt
Pomona
Gargoyle
This short gothic horror film is in the style of German Expressionist cinema, and a second creative project from a celebrated Hive student user. Gargoyle follows a young man, disillusioned with the state of the world and frightened for the future, who finds himself haunted by strange voices from a creature from the past.

Total Proposals Submitted = 20
Total Grants Awarded = 14
Total Students Awarded = 78
Total Grant Awards = $14083

Alexandria Nyx + 17 cast and crew members
Pitzer
Pomona
Lost at Sea
This film project explores themes of grief, death/loss, healing, trans resilience, and childhood trauma, showcasing a story not typically seen in mainstream media. Queer characters typically look like a Hollywood stereotype or die off for no reason, but this film shows a queer, trans person of color discovering love in a world built against them, finding people who have their back throughout life, and suffering great loss and recovering from it.

Annika Hoseth + 10 cast members
Pomona
Pitzer
Scripps
HMC
CMC
It Just Takes Time: A New Musical
A student team writes, produces, and directs an original ensemble musical about a variety of characters and their perspectives and experiences during the pandemic. Through situational exaggeration and light-hearted storytelling, the characters share lessons learned and personal growth. The production includes a cast of 10 members from The Claremont Colleges, performing in the Seaver Large Studio April 21-23.

Brian Bishop
Alexej Latimer
Pomona
FashIoNMotion
Building off two prior student creativity grants involving art and performance, this project explores fashion and moving artwork. Two questions are posed: How can we bring still art to life utilizing new technologies? How can we express ourselves as artists more holistically? To answer, animations are created that showcase the intersection between fashion and dancing.

Isabel Fajardo
Pomona
Quilt for Migrant Children 
Over the past several decades there has been an influx of Latin American migrants to the United States, many of them seeking refuge or asylum. Migrants are often given a reflective plastic sheeting called Mylar to keep warm in inhumane detention facilities, where many children suffer and die. To counter the acerbity of such a garment, as well as its association with children, creating this quilt symbolizes their struggle and offers them grace. Each square of the quilt represents one child who died while in customs and immigration custody.

Kushnerniva Laurent
Scripps
Hyperaware Online Zine
Hyperaware is an online zine dedicated to music, art, social issues, and events of interest. Cultivating a print version of Hyperaware, released 2-3 times a year, fleshes out the different formats the zine can be offered. To boost additional awareness and interest, vinyl stickers and signs are created and shared.

Lauren McAllister
Scripps
5C Music Room
5C students need and want a room where they can gather and play band instruments. To meet this need, this project renovates a music room with Hive-like design, and outfits it with musical instruments that student musicians can collaborate and compose with. The students also use these collaborations and instruments to attend open mics and jam at the Hive and other outdoor spaces.

Marina Shishkina
Sasha Shunko
Alexej Latimer
Kirby Kimball
Scripps
CMC
Pomona
Ukraine on the West Coast
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is erasing Ukraine as an independent state and a distinct people. This project counters that erasure through the art of twelve Ukrainian artists in five pop-up gallery shows across the West Coast. The shows inform and navigate the public toward peace and combat disinformation about the war, as well as provide a voice for emerging and established Ukrainian artists. Ukrainian artists in the U.S. will expand their network within the art world, give them a platform to share their work, and serve as a necessary reminder of the ongoing suffering of the Ukrainian people.

Miller McCraw
CMC
False Idols: Clay Representations of World’s Vices
A collection of clay sculptures represents some of the negative influences that can affect mental health and wellbeing. These small clay sculptures represent entities like money, fame, and beauty to visually show their allure, but also their long-term negative effects and impacts.

Natasha Gardiner-Feldman
Pitzer
Timi Balogun
CMC
PZ Threads 5C Fashion Show
The 3rd annual PZ Threads 5C Fashion Show showcases the sustainable clothing collections of 10 Claremont Colleges student designers. Held at the CMC Athenaeum, the 5C community supports and enjoys the student designers’ creativity and talent.

Paris Masiel
CMC
Ellie Griffin
Pitzer
Jason Nguyen
Pomona
Corners Narrative Film
This student team creates a short film that is a poignant, dialogue-driven story focused on characters who are faced with the cruel nature of fate, and how they react to it in their own distinct ways.

Ryan Lillestrand
Pitzer
Shaping Alaia: Beauty and Simplicity in the Waves
This project examines the deeply complex relationship between surfing and environmentalism. While surfers rely entirely on the natural world to provide the means for surfing, there has historically been a longstanding rift between the surfing community and the modern environmental movement. From imperialism to colonialism, from coastal land rights disputes to the current environmental crisis, politics has always been intimately interwoven into surfing’s global story. Historic surf craft is explored by shaping two Alaia boards, one to the exact specifications of the original Hawaiian boards, and one that reflects the exciting resurgence of Alaias in the past twenty years.

Samson Zhang
David Lee
Pomona
DIY Electric Scooter + Video
This collaborative team builds an electric scooter from scratch (from aluminum pieces/stock, motor kit) and makes a video documenting the process This project paves the way for larger, creative and technical projects (and builds something useful along the way). A YouTube video documenting this project serves as a resource for others at the 5Cs and beyond.

Sarah Meilinger
Pomona College
Peacock Shawl
5C Stitch n Bitch takes on the knitting of a peacock shawl, an involved project that uses 3000 yards of lace weight yarn.

Tesfa Asmara
Pomona College
Computers in Liberal Arts Research Experiences (C.L.A.R.E.) Club
C.L.A.R.E. Club centralizes software licenses and hardware across The Claremont Colleges by coordinating the budgets and values of the various Colleges to provide computer resources and support to everyone managed by students. This student creates various applications to showcase his latest algorithm (currently used on servers provided by Modal Labs and the Yale Center for Research Computing) and hosts them on servers provided by The Claremont Colleges through C.L.A.R.E. Club. The club moves from TCC servers to managing its own server that will host their 5C-wide applications.

Tommy Shenoi
Pitzer College
Wildcrafting, Art with Nature, and the Ethics of Foraging
This project encourages a lived understanding of wildcrafting through the exploration, craftsmanship, and development of a portfolio of wildcrafting art pieces through several different art modalities (cyanotypes, suminagashi, native plant and mushroom dyes). The student builds a perspective and opinion (influenced by different locations traveled) on whether and when it is appropriate to forage and wildcraft and identifies ethical ways to wildcraft (topics include reciprocity, utilizing invasive species versus natives).

Yaodong (Donny) Lu
Pomona College
IoT Health Care and Sustainability
This project uses Arduino and raspberry pi to create wearable tech that encourages people to maintain a sustainable and healthy living environment. This is the second part of this student’s self-directed learning of electrical engineering, with this part focusing on human-centered design and making a product that can help other people solve their problems. This student is also a mentor for another student wanting to create and build a smart mirror, part one of this project that this student successfully built last academic year with a student creativity grant.

Total Proposals Submitted = 33
Total Grants Awarded = 16
Total Students Awarded = 51
Total Grant Awards = $9549

Four creativity grants were awarded to two students, both from Pomona, working on self-initiated and self-development projects for a total of $5770 in grant funds. The creative projects included:

• Design, develop, equip and install, implement and engage the Hive SoundBox audio recording studio for Claremont Colleges students and faculty
• Practice and learn product design in electrical engineering through hands-on smart mirror design and implementation
• Present and appreciate art in a unique way by creating an original art piece through a shared hair dyeing experience and event
• Create, perform, and release a soundtrack of music inspired by and written during the hair dyeing art piece experience