
Louise Lessél looks like she wandered off the page of a Scandinavian lifestyle magazine. Freckled and fair, she meets me in clean, white clothes. As we shake hands, I mention that I haven’t met many Danes at NYU. She reminds me that higher education is free in Denmark; there isn’t much of a reason to go abroad. So why, I wonder, did she decide to come here to get her master’s in Interactive Telecommunications Design? Surely there were plenty of free programs available to her in Denmark. As it turns out, there are. In fact, before coming to Tisch, she…

Tisch alumnus Julián Cordero ’19 doesn’t own a single modern video game console. He doesn’t like to play games for more than a short period of time. He rarely interacts with big-budget releases. Yet the anti-gamer not only majored in Game Design, but has created several video games himself. His passion for the medium roots itself far from the traditional likes of “Super Mario Bros.” or “Call of Duty”; the designer has instead embraced the trippier, more abstract side of gaming. When considering whether video games could be considered art, Cordero laughed. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “That’s a big…

Claire Kearney-Volpe is a problem-solver. She is also a technologist, a designer and an art therapist. With three — soon to be four — different degrees, it is only natural that she has many titles. But despite her major in visual art, she is not an artist. Kearney-Volpe is a Ph.D. Candidate in NYU’s Rehabilitation Sciences Program expecting to graduate in 2020. Her work revolves around making technology more accessible for those in the disabled community, but her path — from making oil paintings and abstract drawings to designing and developing accessible technology — was anything but linear. She became…

“To become a content generator, a low-level government clerk at the Office of Content Generation involves a long and complex process. One important milestone in the process is the qualification test.” This is the introduction to Carrie Sijia Wang’s performance piece, “The System.” In “The System,” Wang sits at a keyboard and types furiously in order to complete “The Content Generator Qualification Test.” The test loops between what Wang refers to as Content Generation, Integration Reinforcement and Subject Realignment. Content generation demands the subject to type as fast as possible, while Integration Reinforcement calls on them to dictate, aloud, slogans…

“I love being the stupidest person in the room,” Mueller said. 25-year-old Morgan Mueller is a second-year graduate student at NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and he is proud of everything he has yet to learn. With the pragmatism of an engineer, Mueller tells me he’s only been an artist for a year. Whereas many young creatives are certain of their own pre-eminence, Mueller earnestly absorbs all that his peers have to offer. His persona as an artist is defined by his background in engineering, a dedication to community enrichment and the journey that brought him to the mecca of…

When asked about the one thing she wants people to take away from her work, Tisch graduate student Ashley Jane Lewis splits the question into two categories: art and education. Her influence in both fields is extraordinary and it is apparent why she was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to watch in 2016. Lewis grew up in a small town in Ontario and did exceptionally well in school. She had a love for music and visual art, so when it came time to look at universities, she searched for a school that would allow her to combine…