Recent Honors Projects
Film Studies
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Rafaela Horle “Female Rage and Autonomy in Contemporary Cinema”, 2025.
In a critical study of gender and genre, Rafaela Horle analyzed the complex portrayals of female rage in the recent films, Jennifer’s Body (2009), Gone Girl (2015), and Ex-Machina (2015). Rafaela examined the ways in which the female characters in these films transcend the femme fatale roles in which they are positioned. Informed by the work of theorists like Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Judith Butler, Rafaela explored the simultaneously empowering and entrapping ramifications of female rage in these texts and the questions that they raise about how one might achieve autonomy and self-actualization within patriarchal systems.Past Projects
Emma Liao, "Narrative Techniques, Feminist Discourse, and Consumerist Incentives in Douyin Micro-Dramas", 2026.
Jiaman Gu, "Disjunctures in Global Contra Flow: A Case Study of Dalian Wanda Group", 2025.
Tiffany Namkung, “Voice: The cinematic conveyance of documentarians' subjective intervention against modern Russian authoritarianism”, 2024.
Noor Aldayeh, “Hayati: My Life / My Love - A queer Middle Eastern and North African archive”, 2023.
Allison Rothman, “Romancing the Robot: The Artificially Intelligent Female Companion in Science Fiction Film”, 2023.
Paula Acocal Ramirez, “Vain Bodies: Predictions about the climate catastrophe, late capitalism, and biopolitics in a short film”, 2023.
Sophia Jay, “Into the Manosphere: How Reddit Facilitates Online Misogyny”, 2022.
Haley Grissett, “Pleasing: The Patriarchal Pleasure Hierarchy Revealed in 2010s Coming of Age Films”, 2022
Charlotte He, “Show Me the Gukhip: Representations of South Korean Hip-Hop in TV and Film”, 2022.
Alice Bodge, “Digital Communities and the Cultivation and Normalization of Eating Disorders”, 2021.
Sarah Garner, “Cinematic Possessions: Colonialism, Horror, and Documentary”, 2021.
Elizabeth Greene, “Constructing Cultural Memory: The Cinematic Legacies of the Old South”, 2021.
Lauren Eve Ladov, “Acknowledging Difference: Looking At Film Looking at Food”, 2021.
Carlos Gutierrez Aza, “To Be Seen, To Be Heard: Hypervisibility of Underrepresented Minorities in Mainstream Hollywood Cinema”, 2020.
Lauren Karr, “Liquid Liminality: Swimming Pools and the Contemporary American Teen Film”, 2020.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch A Study on the Illusion of Control and the Potential of Interactive Film”, Alexander Liederman, 2020.
Evan Amaral, “Curating the Future: Programming a Virtual Film Series in the COVID-19 Era”, 2019.
Maron Tate, “Maternity and the Aging Female Body in Postmodern Hollywood Horror Film”, 2019.
Kathleen O’Keefe, “The Unholy Alliance: How Jeff Zucker Powered Donald Trump’s Rise From Reality TV Star to US President”, 2018.
Anjali Maya Mahesh Patel, “Streaming the Sitcom: The Minority Experience in Netflix’s Dear White People, Master of None and Chewing Gum”, 2018.
Screenwriting
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Erin Devine, The Cormorant, 2025.
In her feature-length screenplay, The Cormorant, Erin Devine balanced and comedy and drama while seriously addressing issues surrounding disability. The narrative follows a pair of scrappy Irish orphans, a teenage girl and her rambunctious one-legged brother, as they navigate the foster system. When the twins are forced into the custody of a curmudgeonly lighthouse keeper in the provincial town of Kinsale, the pair plot to escape. Naturally, mayhem ensues.
To bring her creative vision to life, Erin researched depictions of disability in film, the Irish foster system, and the history and culture of Kinsale, Ireland.
Past Projects
Sam Cooperman, Camp Infinite: Animated Film Series Pilot, Additional Episodes, and Bible, 2026.
Alicia Brown, Banned: An exploration of Black girlhood, queerness, and educational stagnation, 2026.
Sofia Hayes, Nation State, 2025.
Evelyn Landy, Unscripted Content, 2024.
Sarah Marzouk, Moving Mountains, 2023.
Erika MacArthur, Lower Broad: A Feature-Length Screenplay Examining the Representation of Women in Country Music, 2022.
Jacob McClain, Closet Cases: A Slasher Flick Gay Romantic Comedy, 2022.
Alyson Lo, The Inheritance: A feature-length creenplay exploring difficulties of existing in the Asian-American hyphen, 2021.
Julian McCarthy, Section 230: Big Tech’s Legal Shield and the Ultimate Threat to Democracy, 2021.
Film Production
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Lingxi Li, Blood and Water: A Coming of Age Film, 2025.
To create a short film ready to submit to film festivals, Lingxi Li (BA, 2025) wore many hats: She wrote, directed, and co-produced, Blood and Water a thirteen-minute fiction film about a Chinese teenage girl named Emma who was adopted and raised by a white American couple. One day, Emma finds her world shaken when she overhears a conversation in Chinese between new girl in her class and the girl’s. A welter of questions begins to swirl around Emma concerning her unknown roots and her relation to her adopted community.
To fund the film’s production, Lingxi launched a Seed&Spark campaign whose success enabled her to hire a professional art director, gaffer, cinematographer, and sound-mixer. These industry-seasoned creatives worked as department leaders, training and directing Lingxi’s crew of Emory students.
Zuri Greene, The Salt in the Sea of Life: Visual Archive through Contemporary Black Cinema, 2026.
Kamea Alleyne, Threads: An Exploration of Queer Authenticity Through Film, 2025.
Jacob Stauff, Terminus: A War Film, 2024.
Isaac Gazmararian, Remembrance: An Animated Short Film, 2024.
Daniel Cooley, Andy: A Documentary Short Film, 2023.
Alexis Catherine Jenkins, Do You See It?: A Psychodrama, 2023.
Kheyal Roy-Meighoo, Provisions: A Stop Motion Film, 2023.
Samah Meghjee, Bad Muslims: a Comedic Television Show Capstone, 2020.
Tyler Bailey, Inhuman: A Science Fiction Film, 2019.
Toby Teitel, Self-Fashioning - A 360 Virtual Reality film on queer representation and self-determinism, 2019.
Photography
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Ruthie Baker, Seeing and Being Seen, 2023.
Combining written essay and photo montage, Ruthie created a book-length work focusing on the pervasive presence of surveillance cameras throughout the Atlanta area. With 50 CCTV cameras for every 1,000 people, Atlanta is the nation’s most closely watched city, and Ruthie explored the social and political implications of this surveillance regime. She turned her camera on the CCTV cameras themselves, photographing the inhuman photographers hiding in plain sight. Through images resembling landscape photographs and others like Instagram snapshots, Ruthie captured CCTV cameras throughout the city, from sleepy residential neighborhoods to the Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. From this voluminous collection of images, she assembled a panoramic view of Atlanta, describing and criticizing its panoptical culture of alienation and anxiety.
Jason Kraft, The Gnat's Supremacy, 2025.
Ameer Rifai, There is No Certainty: My Mind Tries in the Utmost Conjecture, 2023.
Justin Kaminuma, Changes: A Portrait of Life in Perpetual Change, 2022.
Katie DeBerry, Something Worth Saying: A photo-essay on Women’s Experience Living with Trauma, 2020.