Jude Ferrigno, C’25 & MA’25 and Weike Li, C’25 & MA’26 | Research Honors Thesis
Jude Ferrigno is a double major in Cinema & Media studies and English as well as a submat student in English. He hails from the cultural mecca of the United States — Deptford, NJ. Concerning CIMS, he loves their near-limitless tea supply, the kindness of the students and faculty, and their boundless willingness to entertain even the oddest of projects he has in store.
Award Commendation:
Jude Ferrigno performs conceptual gymnastics with “pandemic nostalgia” offering sophisticated theorization of the term in a vocabulary that bristles with formal inventiveness and meta-poetics as he discusses the deeply-embedded impulse among theorists to characterize nostalgia in terms of its spread, through the logics of its contagion, transmission, and infection. Interweaving theories of affect, epidemiology, and performativity, Jude boldly analyzes a range of empirical case-studies of pandemic mediations to emerge with a feeling and an argument that “It is not that we long for the pandemic nor entirely resist its affective seductions but that we long with/in it.”
Weike Li is a senior studying Cinema & Media Studies and English, and a submatriculant in the English Department. He comes from Chongqing, China. He is interested in common practices like walking and sleeping, and the mediated everyday life. Regarding CIMS, he loves the dark chocolate, the coffee machine, and most of all, the kindest and the most intelligent people in the world.
Award Commendation:
Weike Li analyzes the peripatetic journeys of the characters in Devos’ films to think through the practice of urban pedestrianism across multiple phases of modernity. Bringing together Baudelaire and Benjamin’s work on the figure of flaneure and Elena Gorfinkel’s study of neoliberal fatigue, Weike provides stimulating analysis of how the characters in Ghost Tropic and Here reveal the pernicious cycle of enduration and impasse in exhaustion.
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Miette Gourlay, C’25 and Sean Park, C’25 | Creative Honors Thesis
Miette Gourlay is a senior double-majoring in Cinema & Media Studies and Health & Societies, and is originally from New York City. She is interested in exploring all aspects of the human condition through documentary film, believing stories help us learn and grow from one another. Her three favorite things about CIMS are the unique course offerings, incredible travel opportunities (going to Uganda was the highlight of her time at Penn), and professors who are all super supportive of their students' projects.)
Award Commendation:
Every documentary is a leap of faith. You start out with an intuition and hope that the world will cooperate. Even when the world is on your side, it takes a lot of work and skill to pull it off. Miette Gourlay’s documentary Ocho is a truly exemplary example of the form. Miette found a great story - always the hardest part. She gained the trust of her subject, cancer survivor Howard Aaron. And she put in the time, effort, and curiosity necessary to capture his story and show it to others in a compelling way. It was nice that Howard set a world record while Miette was filming, but it was more impressive that she was there with her camera at the right moment.
Sean Park is currently a senior studying Cinema & Media Studies and Chemistry and was born and raised in the greater Philadelphia area. His next chapter being medical school, he is interested in exploring the intersections between being a practicing physician and the arts and has become deeply invested in the role that empathy plays in storytelling, specifically cinematography and writing. Sean appreciates that the CIMS department offers an in-depth education on not just production but also film theory which is essential to contextualize existing films and incorporate ideas into new works, and he also likes that the CIMS major requirements span diverse fields. His favorite thing about being a CIMS major at Penn is all of the incredible professors he has had the opportunity to learn from, in and out of the classroom (special thanks to Kathy Van Cleve, Scott Burkhardt, and Meta Mazaj).
Award Commendation:
Sean Park wrote, directed, starred in, edited and scored his short film, Haraboji. The film is about a Korean-American teenager coming to a greater understanding of his culture and his father's death through the visit of his Korean grandfather. To take on so many roles in a project is to risk that any one might be less than and sink the project as a whole. But Sean, with the help of an amazing and supportive cast and crew, managed to create something both visually dynamic and emotionally resonant. It is a fitting capstone to his filmmaking career at UPenn.
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Ejun Hong, C’25 | Screenplay
Ejun Mary Hong is a senior double-majoring in Fine Arts and Cinema & Media Studies, with a minor in Design, and is from Edmonton, Canada, and Seoul, South Korea. She is a storyteller who brings life to her dreams and the lost stories of the world with her animated films, and she has created four animated films that explore personal yet universal themes, offering connection, meaning, and the potential for healing. Her three favorite things about the Cinema & Media Studies department are the supportive and inspirational group of professors who have taught her how a love for one's passion can inspire others to continue dreaming, fellow students who hold the same love for cinema, and academically enriching cinema courses that broaden students' perspectives in the world of cinema.
Award Commendation:
Ejun Hong's thesis project, SKETCHBOOK DREAMS, encompasses all that is singular about Ejun: it is creative, original, professional and above all, inspiring. A 2025 recipient of the Penn President's Engagement, Innovation, and Sustainability prize for a program that extends the spirit of her thesis into practical application, Ejun's thesis uses her own experience as a young girl with medically-perilous vision issues and transforms it into a work of art that inspires and delights. It is no small feat to navigate the threat of blindness as a youngster - it is an astonishing feat to use this story in a way that will demonstrate to all children (and adults) how imagination can conquer even the worst fears. Ejun's thesis (which consisted of a screenplay, an illustration book and a zine) represents the best of the Cinema and Media Studies Honors Creative Thesis program in its scope, execution and artistry.
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Maria della Porta, C’25 | Undergraduate Essay & Creative Project
Maria della Porta is an Urban Studies major from Philadelphia with a lifelong passion for film. She remains endlessly curious about the best vehicles for storytelling, exploring and experimenting across filmmaking, journalism, ethnography, fashion, and modern art. When it comes to CIMS, Maria is grateful for the wide-ranging courses she’s had the chance to take -- from Italian to Japanese cinema -- the kindness and support of the professors, and the movie posters lining the Fisher-Bennett hallways.
Award Commendation:
Maria della Porta's paper on consumerism and advertising techniques in Obayayashi Nobuhiko's Hausu deftly brings together historical context, formal analysis, and exciting, out-of-the-box arguments. Its writing is lucid and lively, taking the reader in unexpected directions. By juxtaposing Hausu with two short advertisements also created by the director, della Porta is able to demonstrate how the younger generation in the film is equated with consumer culture. Provocative and intriguing, the paper demonstrates a keen eye towards both history and aesthetic form.
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Taylor Whitehead, C’25 | Undergraduate Community Leadership Award
Taylor Whitehead is a CIMS major from Philadelphia Pennsylvania. His main interests are acting and writing, and he’s loved film as long as he can remember - dating back to his dad taking him out of class to go to the movie theater - and Penn CIMS has allowed him to express this passion to the furthest extent imaginable. Penn in Cannes was life-changing, his two summers spent working through the Penn CIMS internship program helped to inform his career aspirations beyond explanation, and his time spent in the CIMS office working for Nicola and the department at large has turned that Fisher-Bennett room into his happy place on Penn’s campus. He’s extremely thankful for his time here.
Award Commendation:
Taylor Whitehead managed many aspects of our CIMS office, including to be a TA for our CIMS classes, and made the work of faculty and staff in our department extremely enjoyable and gratifying. In fact, it is enough to simply speculate about the possibility of a given project, and Taylor will take it from there, immediately mapping out all that needs to be done, and proceeding to go through all the steps in an organized, logical, and efficient fashion. He literally revels in any challenge that is offered to him and, no matter how chaotic and messy things get, Taylor is always a model of cheerfulness, neatness, and decorum.
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Anat Dan, PhD in Comparative Literature | Timothy Corrigan Dissertation Award
Anat Dan studies contemporary documentary media cultures and teaches courses in film and media at the University of Pennsylvania. Her multimodal dissertation explores contemporary tensions between humanist and posthuman aesthetics in experimental documentaries within the film festival circuit. For the past six years, CIMS has been her second home. A community of cinephiles and theory buffs who care deeply about both Philadelphia and the world we live in, CIMS taught her the value of asking questions, engaging in conversations, and making humble contributions.
Award Commendation:
Anat Dan’s dissertation provides suggestive theorizations about the ways in which contemporary post-humanist documentary sensibilities go beyond concerns of representing human subjects towards questions of ethics and material agency while depicting humanitarian issues and political violence including ethnic cleansing, “climate change” and “migration crisis. Anat’s focus in her doctoral dissertation is to make sense of the turn in human rights documentary filmmaking from a liberal humanist tradition foregrounding human representations for empathic spectatorial identification to a posthumanist mode where human representation is decentered and abstracted to foreground environments (landscapes, materials, oceans) where political violence and human suffering happened. While acts of diffusing or disassembling the representations of humans might seem to be strange (or counter-intuitive) in a documentary about human rights, there is an emerging group of documentarians (and documentary/documentation projects) that Anat writes about, who believe that the traditional human rights documentaries have neither been able to effectively question structural inequalities nor bring about any semblance of social change. This is so because traditional documentary aesthetics has been mobilized too often, as Anat perceptively notes, to create spectatorial identification for privileged audiences in film festivals for human suffering unfolding elsewhere, far away. Anat’s dissertation, both sharp and moving, not only contributes to scholarship in documentary media and film festivals but also intervenes in the fields of trauma studies, new materialisms, and sovereignty.
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Janneane Blevins, PhD Candidate in Cinema & Media Studies | Graduate Essay & Creative Project
Janneane Blevins is interested in environmental and energy media — and the imaginaries used to represent, separate, embody, and metabolize nature. Her background in design and her work on various cultural projects informs her research approach through text, image, and sound. What she appreciates most about CIMS is the people - joy and welcome radiate throughout the department. She’s grateful for their embrace of interdisciplinary interests and multimodal methods. And she finds herself simultaneously in awe of and challenged to contribute to the department’s brilliant mix of rigor, work, and care.
Award Commendation:
Janneane Blevins' designed syllabus “Violence and Care: Reimagining How We Relate to Nature” grabs students’ attention with the urgency of its topics: “The destruction of Hurricane Helene, orcas ramming boats, recurring wildfires, COVID-19, deepening drought, wartime ecocide – these catastrophes of climate change are juxtaposed against calls for river rights, personhood for forests, discovery of plant intelligence, and AI conversation with whales. How do we make sense of these narratives of nature? How are we relating? Can nature be violent? Are humans violent against nature? What about the role of care?” The syllabus provides students with critical and imaginative tools designed to help students begin to make sense of the moment in which we live. The course is structured around three main questions: 1) How did we get here? 2) What could our relationship with nature be instead? And 3) What now? The committee was impressed by the creative assignments, which include a self-ecology map, a photo essay, and a group zine; by the sense of hope and collective responsibility this course inspires; and by the rigor of Blevins’ brilliant pedagogical imagination.
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Lynette Shen, PhD Candidate in Cinema & Media Studies | Graduate Teaching & Community Leadership Award
Lynette Shen was born and raised in Shanghai, China, and is a graduate student from the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research, she is obsessed with images of bad quality and failure and pays attention to how such moving images shape Sinophone women and queer subjects in diaspora. Her three favorite things about Penn CIMS are: the supportive environment for students' wild ideas, the department's embrace of interdisciplinary conversations, and the strong sense of community and mutual care. (Bonus points for the chocolates at the CIMS office.)
Award Commendation:
This award recognizes Lynette Shen's leadership in the realms of teaching and community building within and beyond the new CIMS PhD program. As a teaching assistant, Lynette has made formative contributions to our new CIMS undergraduate curriculum and played a key role in ensuring that students in large courses still feel supported and seen. During small group sessions, Lynette's creative pedagogy shines forth and helps students engage with interest and energy. Within the department, Lynette has been a dynamic CIMS presence through moving and historically-significant film programming and public conversations that have drawn large crowds and brought members of the Penn community together with the broader Philadelphia public for powerful reflections at the intersection of media, community, and identity. As the most advanced PhD student in CIMS, Lynette is forging a path for all the students who follow in her dazzling wake, and we feel fortunate to have the benefit of her insightful observations and advice. Congratulations!
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