This seminar explores the understandings of the US through an analysis of race, class, gender, and national identity in films and TV series. It questions the role of authenticity in film and TV representation, focusing on works that examine how Americans define themselves and each other. Students screen, discuss, and write about recent films and TV series made by Americans who intervene in simplistic narratives of their own diverse cultures. Through the creation of their own essay films, students compare these contemporary works with earlier media to investigate the ways American culture(s) has evolved onscreen, and how far it still must go.

This course will introduce students to the foundational principles and techniques of screenwriting, taking into account the practical considerations of film production. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays. The course will illustrate and analyze the power of visual storytelling to communicate a story to an audience, and will guide students to create texts that serve as "blueprints" for emotionally powerful and immersive visual experiences.

This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays. The course will illustrate and analyze the power of visual storytelling to communicate a story to an audience, and will guide students to create texts that serve as "blueprints" for emotionally powerful and immersive visual experiences. Final portfolio will include one short exercise and two short screenplays.

This course looks at the way Italy has expressed its historical, cultural, political, and social individuality in major cinematic works from the 1960's to the present. Directors such as Bertolucci, Tornatore, Benigni, Ozpetek, and Sorrentino offer a panorama of a generation of filmmakers that has contributed to the renewal of Italian cinema. Topics will be drawn from current issues, and will include the Holocaust and questions of memory, terrorism, political violence, migration, gender ideologies, the Mafia. Emphasis on film style and techniques.

This seminar examines contemporary Latiné cinema, focusing on films produced in the U.S. by the Latiné diaspora who represent a significant and growing portion of the US population. Through an analysis of cinematic techniques, narrative styles, and thematic elements, the course will investigate how Latiné filmmakers address issues such as identity, gender, race, family, migration, colonialism, the Dreamers, and politics. Students will explore how Latiné cinema serves as a medium for both cultural heritage and resistance, offering visions of defiance against socio-political restraint and aspirations for a transformed future.

This intensive workshop explores performance as a site for an evolving, transdisciplinarity that is in mindful relationship with artistic movements, cultural continua, contemporary resonances, and individual agency. Rather than fetishize the urgent development of a legible, "authentic", or (impossibly) unique artistic identity, we will instead strive toward a practice of radical honesty, fluid curiosity, fierce courage, intentional consumption, and rigorous reflection. To that end, students will regularly create, perform, and document original solo & group work that syncretizes multiple disciplines.

MUS 415 explores the design and creation of audio-based artmaking practices. Classes will combine hands-on practical learning with creative presentations from faculty, students, and guest artists. Projects include designing synthesizers, microphones, speakers, pickups, analog effects, and self-led designs. Using the resources of StudioLab, we will develop skills in electronics, physical computing, and the use of tools such as laser cutters, 3D printers, breadboards, and soldering. Additional topics will be led by student interest and expertise. This class will be valuable for any students who use sound in their research or artistic practice.

Intro to Stage Design is an interactive course where students will explore the world through a design lens to develop visual literacy and investigate how visual cues shape our understanding of the world. This studio course will explore Scenic, Costume, Lighting and Sound design. Students will take on the role of designer across disciplines, developing analytic, research and collaborative skills, and exploring and questioning power structures in the process. This hands-on course will emphasize communication and collaboration within creative and production teams in support of bringing design visions to life.

This course will introduce you to the art and craft of scenic design. It will be an exploratory and hands-on course in the use of physical scenery as a way to tell a story, introducing you to the processes and tools of scenic design as a way of gaining greater understanding of theatrical texts. Over the course of the semester, you will be introduced to a process of interpreting ideas, conceiving and designing physical environments for the stage, television and live events. We will discuss histories and theories, explore the physical craft of creation and present your ideas to your peers using research, sketches, collages and models.

The great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act. Students will be introduced to the basics of line, shading, proportion, composition, texture and gesture. You'll also maintain a drawing journal, and use it as a regular space for observation and personal expression. Through exposure to a variety of mediums and techniques, you'll gain the skills and confidence necessary to develop an individual final project of your choosing.

An introduction to the materials and methods of painting, addressing form and light, color and its interaction, composition, scale, texture and gesture. Students will experiment with subject matter including still life, landscape, architecture, self-portraiture and abstraction, while painting from a variety of sources: life, sketches, maquettes, collages, photographs and imagination. Students will progressively develop personal imagery that will inform an individual final project. Princeton will provide all materials for the painting class.

In this introductory studio course, participants explore the world wide web as an opportunity for self-publishing. We'll understand the web's history and original design as a decentralized system for publishing on one's own terms. But it's easy to forget this, as today the corporate and platformed web captures and sells our data and attention. Through hands-on exercises and projects, this course aims to demystify the web, removing barriers to basic web coding and publishing by focusing on the foundational skills in making websites with HTML and CSS. We'll remember what makes a web a web: links made by humans.

An introduction to the processes of photography through a series of problems directed toward lens projection, the handling of light-sensitive material, and camera operation. The processes will begin with cyanotypes and culminate with large format film exposure and processing, and printing. These processes trace the origins of photography. Final projects will examine new potentials in photographic expression including images that hybridize analog and digital interfaces. The goal of this course is to make art, and by doing so, understand the necessity for the invention of photography.

This studio course introduces students to the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical implications of digital photography. Emphasis is on understanding digital equipment and protocols, print management, and familiarity with the digital workspace. The "afterlife" of analogue photography in digital media will be emphasized. Slide lectures, readings, and class discussion of texts and with student work in critique format will augment critical and conceptual understanding of recent contemporary photography and art.

The practice of graphic design relies on the existence of networks for distributing multiple copies of identical things. Students in this course will consider the ways in which a graphic design object's characteristics are affected by its ability to be copied and shared, and by the environment in which it is intended to circulate. Through hands-on design projects, readings, and discussions, students will delve into different material forms of distribution - the printed newspaper, social network software, the community radio station, the PDF.

This class will be a studio introduction to sculpture, with particular emphasis on the study of how form, space, and a wide variety of materials and processes influence the visual properties of sculpture and the making of meaning. A balance of indoor, outdoor, and/or transient assignments will lead to the development of an understanding of contemporary sculpture, as well as basic technical facility with found objects, common materials, natural earthworks, ergonomics, and three-dimensional design.

This course takes an exciting approach to color photography using methods of cameraless and lens based analog photography. We will experiment with Lumen Printing, analog color printing and Polaroids. Participants are encouraged to experiment, using the medium to convey observations and ideas. The possibilities of color in photographs are endless and together we will expand the ability to interpret color. The class is augmented by lectures, readings, critiques, and a visiting artist.

This course is an introduction to the fascinating history of collage. Students study techniques employed in the iconography of China and Medieval Europe, and expand to its historical resurgence in the form of keepsakes and scrapbooks. Students evaluate the relationship of collage to historical advancements in photography, assemblage, and décollage. Students discover collage's relationship and technical developments to the radical histories of trauma, disruption, and desire by studying contemporary artists. Projects are structured around mixed media drawing, printmaking, painting, along with found object sculpture.

The "truths" found in traditional archives are incomplete: books and mainstream film productions are often biased; silences and omissions enter every level of archive-making and historical production. Students will engage in the critical analysis of the historical relationship between race, diaspora, and citizenship as they appear in film, media, and cultural productions. Building on original stories and artistic materials presented in class, students will create their own project (short film, podcast, story map). The goal is to make the archive a tool for teaching, learning and an artistic piece for the larger community.

In Alternative Fictions students will analyze and produce films that challenge preconceived notions of storytelling, character development, preformatted structures, and the division between documentary and fiction filmmaking. The course merges conceptual ideas and practical hands-on instruction to foster the successful development of three group exercises and one individual project. Classes include theoretical discussions, equipment demonstrations, in-class exercises, film screenings, and presentations with critical feedback of assignments.

Through a series of short exercises students will learn the craft, history and theory of alternative modes in documentary filmmaking. We will emphasize experimentation with various formal strategies to probe the impulse to engage the "real". Topics in this course will include portraits, interviews, ethnography, space and place, narrativity, personal film, re-enactments and performance. Students will be encouraged to draw unexpected connections and use experimental approaches in their aesthetic pursuits.

Create your own unique books! An experimental book making class that correlates texts and books into sculptural form. Students will acquire skills of various bookmaking techniques, enhance their writing skills, and focus on sculptural craft with different mediums to think beyond traditional binding methods. We will learn about various artists that include bookmaking as part of their practices, the artist's book organizations, independent publishers and book fairs. Guest visits and field trips to book art spaces will support in expanding the possibilities of bookmaking.

This course will examine the relationship between the carceral apparatus, i.e. the matrix of police, prisons, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc., and the commercial/industrial cinematic apparatus which has historically valorized and naturalized hegemonic constructions of crime and punishment for popular consumption. Instruction will consider paradigms of crime, policing, prisons, resistance, rebellion and abolition in relation to questions of innocence and guilt, racialized criminality, property relations and the potential for a socially transformative cinema.

An introduction to narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques. This course teaches the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media by providing technical instruction in camera operation, nonlinear editing, and sound design paired with the conceptual frameworks of shot design, visual composition, film grammar and cinema syntax.

In a digital world, this course promotes hand-made printed images. Students will examine two kinds of printmaking: relief and intaglio. To make images that matter, students will learn to cut blocks, fashion stencils, plan and execute color layers, etch and drypoint copper plates, and understand the range of mark making possibilities available in printmaking. Students are encouraged to draw regularly to cultivate themes and content, and to develop a basic knowledge of print in contemporary art. Woodblocks have been around since the 8th century; etchings for 500 years. Students will make something completely new from something old.

This intermediate-level studio course will build on the foundations of animation covered in Animation I. Students will investigate a wider range of techniques and technologies, while experimenting with varied modes of audiovisual storytelling, time-based collage, and motion graphics. For the final project, each student will direct a short film using a blend of analog and digital materials and tools, explored during the semester. Screenings and class discussions will dive more deeply into the history and potential of animation, as well as its connections to other forms of visual art, filmmaking, computation, and design.

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning the fundamentals of working with clay. A wide variety of hand-building will be taught, enabling students to make utilitarian vessels as well as sculptural forms. Students will learn about glazing and colored engobe application methods and how to operate electric and gas kilns. Studio work will be complemented by readings, field trips, and slide presentations.

This class will focus on how contemporary painting considers the human figure. Portraits without people, the selfie, imagined figures, forgotten figures, fragmented figures, figures from our lives, abstract figures, cyborgs, crowds, and composite figures will be considered within a structure of exploratory painterly approaches. This class will NOT focus on "how to" paint the figure. No experience painting the figure is necessary.

Drawing is a distinct process; it can also serve as a mode of documentation or as a preparatory step in many other processes. This allows drawing to point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and/or to serve as a model or plan for what is to come. We will explore these multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through approaches that emphasis a wide range of formal effects - space, mark-making, value, perspective, gesture - while simultaneously exploring how artists have turned to drawing to record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize.

This course is designed to help advanced photography students enrich their artistic voice. Projects will be assigned to suit individuals' trajectories. Technical components of the class will cover advanced and large scale analog black and white printing; use of the view camera; precision and experimental color grading; analog to digital processing; and lighting. Conceptual issues such as the challenges of representation, appropriation, hybrid photographic practices, and artificial photography will provide this class a platform from which to engage with visiting contemporary artist and gallery visits. 

This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes. VIS 415 is structured around one semester-length assignment which connects graphic design to the design of software interfaces. The single project allows an individual in-depth investigation of a broader class assignment and will leverage the online setting with students working together to refine their individual projects through a mix of critique and user testing. Studio work is supplemented by guests, readings, and lectures. The course will explore information design and visual problem solving specifically for electronic media.

This year, students will design, build, and critically analyze three common objects - a Cushion, a Prosthetic, and a Light Fixture - each of which will be informed by the diverse structural properties of a single material: ash wood. Assignments will be three weeks long and will be executed round-robin. The round-robin structure allows students to lead the way on some assignments, and learn from the work of their classmates on others, supported by concrete data gathered from visiting artists and lab work. A larger goal of this class, then, is to compare and contrast methods of evaluation in visual art, engineering, design, and ergonomics.

This class features weekly screenings by experimental filmmakers working in 16mm film in a variety of idiosyncratic forms, often with handmade methods using unconventional materials.

This sculpture class will engage contemporary approaches to the figure with an emphasis on the figure as body. With the advent of postmodernism, the singular forms of classical and modern sculpture have fractured into composite, disjointed figures-even cyborgs-in keeping with the era of the "post human." Students will take a multivalent approach to the historical precedents from which current representations have emerged and explore the limits of what constitutes the body and figuration in contemporary sculpture through the process of class discussions and making sculpture.

Students will investigate ceramics in relation to the archive through numerous studio-based projects, museum visits, historical precedents, and understanding contemporary ceramics as a serious artistic pursuit. Ceramics serves as an ideal archival material and therefore has been a record of time and place over thousands of years. Students will research source material from the history of ceramics, and by creating their own personal archives. Student projects include analysis of bricks as universal symbols of the grid, image in ceramics, ornament and narrative in historical vessels, and using clay as a meaningful record of the body.