seniors
NANCY WU
Nancy Wu is a graphic designer based in Los Angeles, pursuing a BA in Design Media Arts at UCLA. Currently, she works at The Underground Museum and the UCLA Art|Sci Center.
She is a fan of words and text and explores their many forms through her work. Her multidisciplinary approach is concept-driven; sensitive to form; and spans printed matter, visual identities, websites, videos, interactive environments, and software.
ivana dama
Ivana Dama studies Design Media Arts at UCLA's School of Arts and Architecture. Born and raised under the post-communist regime in Serbia shortly after the end of the civil war and during the time of NATO bombing. The tension between former Yugoslavian countries was still undoubtedly present. The memories of living in a small shelter with the sounds of bombs and vibrations have contributed to her interest in sound and space ranging from microscopic, architectural, and satellite scale. It was at UCLA when she realized that sound is an invariably important part of her work. She has since begun to explore audio’s potential and work on experimental and improvisational projects.
elsie wang
Elsie Wang is a happy game developer.
amy fang
Amy Fang is a multimedia designer exploring conversation and its manifestations in typography, printed matter, and the web. Her practice primarily engages with words and letterforms as imagery and as cultural markers, especially with the increasing digitization of our visual landscapes and interpersonal communications. She currently spends her time looking at type, watching NPR Tiny Desk videos, and working towards her bachelor's degree at Design Media Arts.
Instagram: @az.fang
KAI WATANABE
Kai Watanabe is a media artist and designer from the Bay Area. He explores the creative applications of motion graphics and interactive platforms to better communicate his perceptions of the world. In an increasingly digital age, he feels that the need to create sympathy through digital platforms is becoming more imperative. In this desire, he is perpetually interested in technologies that provide greater opportunities for immersive and interactive environments.
In his off time, he spends hours diving into a rabithold of creative coders, 3D modelists, graphic designers, and DJ artists on twitter.
Emily Teng
Emily Teng (DMA class of '20) is a multimedia artist based in San Francisco. She's passionate about the storytelling potential of video games and interactive media, and her latest game combines her background in illustration with her love for writing, animation and game design. She has previously led the development of a horror video game made in partnership with UCLA Creative Labs, illustrated a published graphic novel for In Hiatus Studios, and worked as a teaching assistant for the UCLA Game Lab's 2020 Character Animation class. She is currently looking for career opportunities in the animation or gaming industries, where she seeks to further expand her artistry in a creative, collaborative environment.
Email: emilyteng@g.ucla.edu
KAIZE XIE
Kaize Xie is a 4th year Applied Math & DESMA student with an interest in video editing, 3D modeling, web & game development. Originally majored in Math, Kaize became interested in design after taking DESMA 160: Intro to VR in summer 2018, and applied to DESMA two years later. With a strong programming background, he enjoys creating interactive experiences with strong emotional empathy.
Connor Hinson
Connor Hinson is an artist exploring the points of friction generated by the material coming into contact with the immaterial. Connor's practice is generally research based, including sculpture, 2Dd & 3D design, and A/V performance. Awaiting connection
@ [ nervous.works ].
Myles Mullen
Artist / Designer based in Los Angeles with a focus on the enhancement and alteration of physical media through digital media.
Website under construction
Email: mylespagan@g.ucla.edu
Instagram: @myles.pagan
juniors
Clinton Van Arnam
Clinton Van Arnam is a sound and visual artist currently working in Los Angeles. Growing up in the farmlands of southern New Mexico, Clinton’s fascination with the interaction between sound and visual noise started at a young age. When he was 18 years old, he left New Mexico to move to Los Angeles and live in a van. While living in Los Angeles, Clinton discovered synthesis and media arts. This lead to his pursuit of the academic field of electronics and art. He now studies Design Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles and focuses his attention on visual art and sound interaction. His work explores the idea of desolation, systematic design, order, chaos, and consciousness.
@clinton_vanarnam
Floria Huang
Floria (Xiaoshan) Huang (b. Shenzhen, China) is a junior student majoring Design | Media Arts and minoring Film, Television, and Digital Media in UCLA. I am currently interested in working on animations, experimental films, stop motions, and interactivity. My works are trying to visualize personal emotions and information that may not be practically significant to human eyes, and also about the fusions of Chinese and Western cultures.
Contact me at: floria0312@g.ucla.edu
Min Li
I am a transfer student of 2020 Fall. I still feel lucky about this. So this is my first term at UCLA.
I am an older student and have moderate hearing loss. I want to be an artist, so I come back to school.
I am a big fan of Blender. I feel lucky that we are using Blender in 24 Motion this summer, which is my first animation course. I am happy about what I have learned this summer.
I really like Blender. Blender is a Free and open-source 3D software. The EEVEE render of Blender is very fast! So I can render this animation on my own PC.
My IGAinsleigh Douglas
Ainsleigh Douglas is a multimedia designer and artist who focuses on biases and malleability of the human mind. Raised in a household of architects and engineers she finds the digital can’t be explained without representation in the physical. She has a large interest in the intersection between art and science, physical and digital, and explores those boundaries through experimental mediums. Her goal is to illustrate indescribable feelings through the ins and outs of interactive installations and architecture fusion. Currently she is exploring the possibilities of software and hardware, with a passion in arduino and AI.
Instagram: @ains_leigh
Skye Hoffman
Kat Sung
I am a junior in DMA and my work is mostly 3D/2D animation, though I am very interested in and work with a variety of design. Material or digital, I tend to center my work around the sensations and experiences of fun and excess, often creating pieces with a maximalist aesthetic. I grew up around fantasy--fantastical worlds, characters, monsters, powers, all the sort. Even now (or especially perhaps) I submerge myself in the comforting embrace of my fantastical dream worlds and aim to recreate that experience with my art. I'm particularly interested in animation as I find the field's flexibility and multitude of styles inspiring and exciting. Outside of digital work, I greatly enjoy working with my hands, indulging in different textures and carefully placing pieces together, scrutinizing the tiniest of details. Though I do not have a direct goal with my work, I aim to be a jack of all trades kind of individual to preserve the genuine fun I get from creating.
Natalee Decker & Emma James
Natalee Decker (she/her) is a Chicago born, Los Angeles based, artist currently pursuing her undergraduate degree at UCLA, majoring in Design | Media Arts and minoring in Disability Studies. Employing a multidisciplinary and ever shifting approach, she investigates the disability aesthetic and the transformation of scarred memories. She is a white queer disabled cis-gendered woman.
Emma James (she/her) is a multidisciplinary queer transgender artist, currently living in New York City. Her work includes sound design, music composition, performance art and poetry. She focuses on exploring themes of queerness, trans identity, trauma, grief and inner transformation.
Hua Chai
Hua Chai is an animator, designer and Chinese⇋English translator from Malaysia.
Hua's animation works have been selected for festivals like Cartoons Underground (Singapore) and Animation Chico (CA, USA). Hua has also contributed translation services for documentary films, software applications such as FaceSec, and online journals such as New Naratif. Currently, Hua is exploring video and interactive games as mediums to pursue research in fantasy, LGBTQ+, Southeast / East Asian and (im)migrant narratives.
For more info, please visit:
huazzers.carrd.cosophomores
Sejun Park
Sejun Park is a multidisciplinary visual artist pursuing a BA in Design | Media Arts at UCLA. He specializes in mediums ranging from photography and graphic design to 3D modeling and rendering. When he isn't creating his own artworks, he spends time freelancing graphic work for music artists or taking a walk.
Christine Kao
Fascinated by visuals’ impact in amplifying voices and addressing issues around us, Christine Kao manifests her passion for learning different perspectives into graphic designs and photography. She is based between Taiwan, where she was born and raised, and Los Angeles, where she is pursuing her BA degree in Design and Media Arts.
Witnessing her hometown Yuanlin undergoing land consolidation to become a city, Christine is committed to documenting shared memories and unique stories precious to the community. Her solo photo exhibition "Light Source in Taiwan" advocates for public appreciation of ordinary local cultural landscapes by showcasing aesthetics of light movements and distinct use of lights in Taiwan. During the past summer, she worked as a photographer for the official magazine of Changhua County, where she grew up, to present the tales and beauty native to Changhua. Currently, she is a photojournalist for UCLA’s student newspaper Daily Bruin. Other than capturing moments from events like Women’s March, her gallery for the paper, “Exploring the Original Los Angeles Flower Market” examines the meanings of flowers to patrons and vendors in the flower market.
Through her works, she aims to share narratives close to the pulse of folks’ everyday life and reflects diverse human experiences.
Nick Brogdon
From the San Francisco Bay Area, Nick Brogdon is a second-year Design|Media Arts major at UCLA. Heavily experienced in the arts, Brogdon is a trained photographer, musician, and digital creator. His creative experience began over a decade ago when he first began drumming. Since then, he has won numerous awards including the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award. Today, Brogdon focuses mainly on photography and digital media. From 2018-2019, he worked as an intern at LightGrid Studios under the mentorship of photographer Bill Delzell. Brogdon is currently the event photographer for the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture and editorial photographer for UCLA’s META MAG. Recently, Brogdon has been exploring the world of 3D modeling and fabrication, looking to expand his skills in the world of digital arts.
Collette Lee
Collette Lee is a multidisciplinary designer and artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently a second-year Design | Media Arts student at UCLA. Collette enjoys playing with color and incorporating cinematic elements in her work, which consists mainly of photography and video. Her practice is interested in exploring the beauties and oddities of the mundane. She also designs graphics for FEM Newsmagazine and the UCLA Campus Events Commission. Her portfolio can be found at collettelee.myportfolio.com and her Instagram handle is @cllette.
Qiao Li
I am not a political nor religious person. Instead, I am more interested in things that are more universal. It fascinates me to think about there are experiences that we all share no matter who we are. And there are so many of them: love, pride, power, hate, fear, family, and so much more! I like to make my art a part of the discussion that talks about themes like those. They can relate to you, to me, and everyone else, regardless of one’s age, race, nationality, and gender.
What is interesting is that my views will change as I’m getting older and experiencing more of the world. Hopefully, in the near future, I can look back to my early works and see not only how my skills develop as an artist but also how I grow as a person.
Joy Chen
Joy Chen is a multi-disciplinary designer in the Design | Media Arts program at UCLA with a specialization in graphic design, photography, and installation work. Chen has a love for all things design and fashion related. She is currently the Creative Director for Her Campus at UCLA and the Creative Director and Co-Founder of META MAG, a fashion editorial that seeks to decolonize the fashion industry and provide a voice for young creatives and writers. She also is a junior digital designer for fashion brand, Jonathan Simkhai, where she works on events like New York Fashion Week and fusing the future of fashion with modern day technology. Chen’s work discusses the implications of trauma and the continuous journey of processing those emotions. Her work is also centralized on creating conversations and disrupting the status quo about the lack of representation many womxn and Asian Americans have in the media.
freshmen
Migle Railaite
I am a UCLA freshman from Lithuania, but I have also studied and created work in England, Pennsylvania and Switzerland. I work mostly with mixed media; I enjoy creating installations and three-dimensional work, and have started exploring digital art as part of my major, Design Media Arts. My work focuses mostly on themes of self discovery, beliefs and exploration of the mind; my life and attempts to understand myself reflect in pieces I create. I enjoy working with color, large spaces and contrast. As a Lithuanian artist living and working internationally, my work also inevitably portrays an exploration of my cultural identity, more specifically my life in Lithuania and experiences in other countries, with other people and customs. I notice my work after high school shifting more towards conceptual, three-dimensional pieces, inviting the viewer to engage with it - “My Safe Space” is an example of such work. I have started to work with light and delicate materials, but my practice branches out to digital art, video pieces and even oil paintings, which similarly deal with colours and contrasting elements.
For a more extensive insight into my work, view my art portfolio on Instagram:
Alex Wu
Alex is a first-year Design | Media Arts student from the Silicon Valley, interested in combining his passions for neuroscience and psychology with the power of design. In high school, he explored both disciplines individually; at UCLA, he hopes to use the diverse range of opportunities the school offers to understand and synthesize the two fields together. By pulling across social and political ideas, as well as biological and computational theory, he hopes to enrich ideas regarding pressing societal issues and scientific development with a design skill set. He strongly believes in a multidisciplinary approach to matters of both art and science, with both being able to shape the direction and discourse of the other, to explore relevant ideas in ethics, interactivity, and identity.
Janie Wang
Jane(Janie) Wang is a multimedia artist and designer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She centers much of her work around themes of identity and societal justice. Currently a freshman in Design Media Arts, she is excited to continue exploring the intersections of art, technology, architecture, and social advocacy.
Taylor Che
Hello! I’m Taylor, a first-year DMA student. Before attending UCLA, I’ve never had a classroom experience for design and only dipped my toes in graphic design and digital art. My perspective of design was linear, and I was “one of those people” who considered design to be the equivalent of art. UCLA has broadened my perspective of design and its importance in everyday life, and I’m looking forward to learning more in the next three years!
At the moment, my current design interests are UX and UI design. I am currently in the process of finishing up my first design case study for my collaborative project, Duo, for UCLA’s CreativeLabs: Bloom, a community for students with an interest in UX, UI, or web development. Duo is a web-and-mobile based application for identifying different genres of music.
Besides trying my best in school and tackling side projects, I am a tutor for children ranging from the grades of pre-K to eighth grade. I also design graphics for UCLA’s Esports organization’s social media posts.
Thank you. I hope to keep in touch with you!
Yifei Sun
Yifei Sun is a first year DESMA student at UCLA. She is interested in using photography to explore unconventional spaces and share emotions. ins:
Yichen Pan
I’m a freshman in Desma. This series is a part from the studio work for Desma21 - Drawing and Color. It’s my first time getting involved in an art exhibition, so I’m super excited to be in this fun event.
I used to do many paintings, graphics and also a few video editing. I’m at the stage of trying something in everything and exploring my field of passion. My art account on Instagram is @amyyyycp. I just built this new account so there’re only a few posts right now. Will be uploading more works in the future 😉