Dick Wolf Cinema & Media Studies Awards 2020-21

Our happy congratulations to the winners!


Yuxi Wei, CW'21 | Best Research Honors Thesis
Yuxi Wei’s thesis reads like the work of a seasoned scholar. He explores Chinese film noir by focusing on the career of screenwriter and director Diao Yinan. Diao’s career proves to be a perfect lens through which to understand how film noir style, tropes, and subjects have been traveled from post-WWII America to 21st Century China with many stops along the way.


Luke Hrushanyk, C’21 | Best Creative Honors Thesis
Luke Hrushanyk's creative thesis beautifully utilizes the graphic essay style to interweave and analyze Obayashi's Hausu and Svankmajer's Alice. Using both the tools of the visual medium of comics and academic research-based frameworks at his disposal, Hrushanyk discusses how the Freudian uncanny binds the two films despite their geographic separation. I am so impressed by Luke's command of graphic narratives, and hope this is the first of many graphic essay projects on which he intends to embark!


Isami McCowan, C’21 | Best Undergraduate Essay
Isami McCowan's paper beautifully weaves together the study of dance, movement, and music alongside formal film analysis. It is a highly complex argument, and covers impressive ground in its eight pages.


Xitong (Nava) Wang
, LPS'21 | Best Undergraduate Creative Project
Nava Wang's graphic memoir / mini-comic describes a grandmother's life beautifully through abstraction, using color and line in meaningful and often surprising ways. It packs an enormous amount of pathos in its few pages, and its style is perfectly suited to its content.


Luke Hrushanyk, C’21 | Best Undergraduate Service
Luke Hrushanyk managed many aspects of our CIMS office and made the work of faculty and staff in our program extremely enjoyable and gratifying. He literally revels in any challenge that is offered to him, and, no matter how chaotic and messy things get, Luke is always a model of cheerfulness, neatness, and decorum.


Sam Samore
, PhD Candidate in ENGL | Best Graduate Essay
Sam Samore's essay, "Trauma and Adolescence in The Diary of a Teenage Girl," sidesteps the critical impulse to reduce Phoebe Gloeckner's diaristic graphic novel to a trauma narrative, interpreting it instead with an eye to its construction of desire. Informed by Freud, LaPlanche and de Lauretis, among others, the essay demonstrates sensitive and mature textual analysis deftly interwoven with its theoretical and conceptual apparatus.


Anat Dan
, PhD Candidate in COML and CIMS | Best Graduate Service
Anat Dan excelled as a CIMS Grad Student by teaching and TA'ing for many of our CIMS courses, and curating film series and talks for our program. She also generously gave her time and expertise in guiding and leading graduate students' inquires and research projects to our CIMS faculty.