STUDENT PROFILES

Alex Auriema

Alex Auriema is an artist and experimental filmmaker. His work and research have focused primarily on labor migrants from West and Central Africa  working in Europe. Alex recently received a grant and residency from Fondazione Morra in Naples Italy to complete a film made in three parts about migration in Naples.

Alex's work has been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) Rome, LEAP lab for electronic Arts Berlin, Wunderkammern Gallery Rome, Cleapatras Berlin, and Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations Berlin. Alex holds a BFA in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master in Design Studies Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

More work can be seen at: www.alexauriema.com

Nikola Bojdic

Nikola Bojdic is a Master Candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Design with concentration in Art, Design,and the Public Domain. His research and artworks are mainly concentrated around the disruptive modalities through which public domain could be constructed and analyzed. His works have been exhibited internationally in addition to participating in several academic conferences. He has Bachelors and Masters Degrees in History of Art and Information Sciences.


http://issuu.com/nikola_bojich/docs/portfolio
http://sites.google.com/site/glassperistyleproject/

Sabrina Francon

Before coming to Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2011, Sabrina received her Master in Public Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and spent a year studying gender studies and dance at Middlebury College as an undergrad. She has worked in diplomacy (cultural and artistic affairs) in the US as well as in modern and contemporary art museums in France. Her interests include participatory art practices in urban contexts and curatorial studies. In 2012, as a member of the participatory lab at Harvard GSD, she co-curated the exhibition Participation, Empowerment in Practice. She also represents the GSD on the board of the Harvard Arab Student Association and has enjoyed doing research on the city of Algiers for the past nine months.

Sneha Khullar

Sneha Khullar is a designer/artist/architect whose current works explores cultural interventions at the interaction of humans and technology. Her academic focus in the Art, Design and the Public Domain concentration is to re-establish a relationship between ‘the public’ and design practice. Her recent works engage computing, both virtual and physical, in a social dialog within the realms of architecture, design and business. As a researcher at MIT Mobile Experience Lab she is working on developing intuitive human interactions with mobile devices.

She holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi where she received Class of 2009 Gold Medal and Product Design award from the National Association of Students of Architecture. She is currently a J N Tata Scholar.

In her professional career she has interned with architectural firms such Morphogenesis. After graduating from school, she co-founded a not-for-profit organization ARCH i in New Delhi (archforhumanit.blogshot.com) with Anne Feenstra, practicing architect in Kabul. It was a practice contemplated to begin exchange between different art and design disciplines through self-initiated public-participation projects addressing the issues of social sustainability in both urban and rural context. The work ranged from mapping heritage settlements, designing & building a school in severe Himalayan location and re-thinking urban planning approach in Indian cities. One of the projects DELHI 2050 (delhi2050.com), bottom-up envisioning of future scenarios for Delh, has been exhibited at International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2012.

Sumona Chakravarty

Sumona Chakravarty often finds herself between the role of an artist and a social worker. She joined the Art, Design and Public Domain Program with a belief that art and design can create public platforms for participation, dialogue and collective action in communities.

Graduating from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India in 2009, she worked with student groups, rural folk art communities and in urban neighborhoods in India, using artistic practices like public interventions, theater, and community art to create an engagement between people, their larger community and the socio-political environment.

At the GSD, her research focuses on the role of participatory art, design and media practices in strengthening civil society, examining issues like access to governance and marginalization, by working towards creating inclusive public narratives and facilitating collective cultural action.




Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren makes art work and writes about adaptive and assistive technologies, the medicalized and biopolitical body, and the cultural ways we comprehend and represent disability. Her work operates from the posture of the “public amateur,” the “citizen scientist,” or other modes of informal, un-professionalized critical learning. She works as a collaborative outsider between and among the expert cultures of techno-science and medicine. Project investigations at various stages include networked, low-tech adaptive architecture and user-designed prosthetics; personal genomics; and U.S. veterans and PTSD. She also runs the Abler web site.

Her work has been exhibited at the CUNY Graduate Center, the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, and with the Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In summer 2012, she’ll be an artist-in-residence at Art Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation, part of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.
www.ablersite.org.

Helena Hayoun Won

Helena Hayoun Won is currently a graduate student in the MDesS program in Art, Design and the Public Domain. In addition, she has worked as a designer in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. She completed her Doctorate in industrial design from Seoul National University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in visual communication and industrial design from Seoul National University.

Helena has developed her career as a professional designer, compiling both solid academic and professional experience. Her works have focused on visual arts and visual design, industrial design in the realms of technology, industrial design, and art, and her projects are extensive and include subject matter related to fine arts, visual communication, industrial design and user experience design. As a doctoral candidate in Seoul, she participated in visualizing and designing the future design project at the Future Concept lab and Samsung Design in Milan, Italy. Last year she contributed to a design project in MIT's mobile experience lab that focused on creative visualization related to the digital user experience and interaction between ecology and smart system design.

Helena actively participated as a lead designer on several commercial projects with multi-national corporate clients. She observes user behaviors and desire and reinterprets them through the design of new hybrid objects with strong informative visualization and innovative creativity. She exhibited her work at the Milan Design Fair, Tokyo Design Festa, Korea Design Exhibition and various other exhibitions around the world.

http://www.helenawon.com/