This short documentary explores the ongoing issue of environmental racism in Fontana, California, where the rapid expansion of warehousing and manufacturing has reshaped the landscape and the lives of its most vulnerable residents. These zoning ordinances target low income, predominantly minority neighborhoods. The film exposes how pollution, noise, and light from warehouse operations have created hazardous and unhealthy living conditions for people in these neighborhoods. While these communities endure the environmental and health consequences of this new industry, the city’s leadership channels tax revenues and development funds into revitalizing the wealthier north side of town, while ignoring the communities most affected by the warehousing. The documentary aims to highlight the human cost of unjust urban development and spark a conversation about environmental justice, civic accountability, and the right to a healthy living environment.

This is a long-term project which I have been working on since the last two years and I hope to work on later as well, after completing my degree at USC. I am in touch with the nuns and can contact them for interviews over video call when needed. 

Little girls are enrolling as nuns at a remote Himalayan nunnery at 4400m altitude, to access better education. The nunnery teaches religious texts as well as formal courses approved by the Indian government.

But since the past few years, due to the glaciers melting and irregular weather, the nuns have had to do untimely agricultural labor, collect grass earlier for cattle during freezing winters and store food at irregular intervals. Water became scarce resulting in more time taken for collecting water, washing clothes and the whole schedule revolving around availability of basic needs. 

This has been directly affecting the education of the little nuns as the adult nuns are mostly keeping busy with these unexpected increased chores.

I lived at the nunnery during the summer months for the last two years. It is located in Zanskar Valley, Ladakh, India. 

Omi Tutu is a multi-disciplinary project concerned with the relational and connective nature of water.

“Mujeres Verdes” shines a light on Latina changemakers, everyday women, and ancestral practices that link identity, resilience, and environmental care. Through film, photography, and digital storytelling, the project highlights the unique role Latinas play in climate action, blending personal stories with collective power. It’s part oral history archive, part creative art showcase, and part call-to-action, uplifting how Latinas lead sustainability efforts at home, in communities, and in movements.

SELEGNA SOL is a massive video collage in motion, weaving together hundreds of clips to create an immersive experience of Downtown Los Angeles’ cultural and environmental memories. Drawing inspiration from muralists such as Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, and Diego Rivera, the project reimagines California’s muralist tradition in the digital age by intertwining animated archival materials with contemporary digital assets.

The title SELEGNASOL reverses “Los Angeles,” suggesting a new perspective that counters Downtown’s official narratives of redevelopment and renewal, while foregrounding stories of displacement, ecological erasure, and more-than-human agents shaping the district across time and space. This multi-dimensional work reflects on the connections between past and present while imagining potential futures in the heart of California’s most populous city.

Synthesizing nature and urbanism, “Soft Architecture” imagines a new architectural aesthetic for high-performance sustainable design, one that embraces softness, organic growth, and long-term regenerative systems. Inspired by the principles of soft cities and the Living Future framework (where buildings are entirely net-positive, producing more resources and energy than they use) this Master’s thesis project envisions architecture not as an isolated object but as a living organism, inseparable from its ecological and social context.
A particular emphasis will be placed on transit and urban systems as living networks, analogous to mycelium, that weave together diverse scales of public life. By foregrounding the aesthetic and spatial language of regenerative systems, this project seeks to propose an architecture that is porous, adaptive, and symbiotic, offering a vision for a built environment that coexists with, and evolves alongside, organic life.

“Roots” is a four song EP, with each piece exploring different aspects of our relationship with nature: its capacity to heal; to be a tool for introspection and self-understanding; and to provide joy, grounding, hope, and spiritual connection. The EP will feature musicians from USC Thornton, as well as some of my mentors from around the country. The project also includes a release concert, which will serve as a fundraiser for an environmental nonprofit such as the Surfrider Foundation. The performance will take place at a venue on the coast, and audience members will be invited to participate in a beach cleanup before the show. This will be the Sound Waves Foundation's first event on the west coast – a project which I hope to continue growing post-graduation.

This sculptural installation reinterprets the ancient rock cairn—a stack of stones marking a path—as a work of functional environmental art. Designed to be part of the climate solution, not just a commentary on it, the sculpture is constructed from Zement low-carbon concrete. This innovative material utilizes carbon capture, directly addressing the fact that conventional cement production is responsible for nearly 8% of global CO2 emissions. The piece is therefore transformed from a passive object into an active tool for healing.
The artwork's symbolism is twofold. The carefully stacked form represents the precarious balance of our planet's ecosystems, while the cairn itself serves as a contemporary landmark for climate leadership. By merging an ancient symbol of guidance with modern, sustainable technology, the piece stands as a tangible call to action, inspiring viewers to become pioneers and lead the way toward a resilient future through their own impactful actions.

My project is an experimental documentary, currently under the working title “Where Will My Children Live?” I am a very personal filmmaker, and all of my work stems from my emotional life and lived experience. This project is a visual poem, to be shot on 16mm analog film, that meditates on my anxiety and existential dread about bringing a child into a world that I don’t believe will be habitable for them to live in. I want to become a mother, and I think about my future children regularly, but at the rate we are going I genuinely fear that cataclysmic environmental events will prevent them from living full lives. I fear that I will still be around to see my children suffer on a planet that can no longer support their lives. I once expressed these feelings to my parents, and they were shocked and devastated. It is dark, but this is a true dilemma that most of my generation is forced to grapple with. I wish that I didn’t, but it’s our reality. I hope that by making this film, I can express the emotional turmoil and sense of urgency in keeping our planet habitable.

Through Waste to Wear, I collect sargassum seaweed from the ocean and transform it into biodegradable bioplastic tops and bags. Sargassum has become a major environmental issue, damaging marine ecosystems, harming coastal communities, and releasing toxic gases as it decomposes.
Through this exploration, I hope to highlight the harms of sargassum while expanding what we can do with seaweed as a material. By turning this invasive ocean waste into wearable items, I aim to challenge how we see waste and open up new possibilities for sustainable design.

In Eating From and With the Earth, I will be creating a ceramic dinnerware set, decorated with wild clay from the Los Angeles area that I will dig myself. Each vessel (plates, bowls, cups, pitchers, and serving platters) will be detailed with carvings using a technique called Sgraffito. The carved designs intend to inspire connection to the local lands through foods and community with images such as native plants, fruits and vegetables, hands, quotes from activists, and other symbolic imagery.

The dinnerware set will be made with love and is meant to be used with love, holding local meals eaten in community. By eating with vessels made from the same Earth our food has grown from, I hope to invite people to slow down and reflect on the richness of the Earth that we find ourselves within.

LA’s Living Web aims to raise awareness of the human role in the broader native Los Angeles (LA) ecosystem, drawing inspiration from indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) within the context of the modern cityscape. I plan to build a terrarium of LA that is a visual and tactile illustration of the cycling of biological energy synthesized by plants through the food web. By revealing the interconnected role that all organisms play in the ecosystem, I intend to pay homage to the Tongva land stewardship practices that have maintained the rich native biodiversity in the LA basin. Controlled brush fires, oak grove pruning, and basket weaving are all customs I plan to spotlight in my terrarium, as they emphasize the intentional way LA’s native people have interacted with nature. I plan to include a small diorama of the LA urban center in the middle, challenging the modern notion that nature and city are irreconcilable. I seek to suggest a way forward where urban planning incorporates TEK to create a novel, sustainable type of city that does not extract from the life around it, but contributes to it.

To simply be is the most radical act in a world that denies one’s existence. Black people are significantly more likely to reap the harms of climate change; the generational violence has never fully been addressed. But to maintain one’s ontology is a natural expression of resilience. For humanity to thrive in the shift of climate requires the most vulnerable people to thrive in the new system. Therefore, the following art pieces in the medium of metal, showcase Black bodies thriving, grounding to spiritual expansion through the medium of healing physical acts. Showcasing Black bodies - eating fruit, sowing seeds, doing yoga - expanding, creating a new image of what is normal: seeing Black bodies existing peacefully and in luxury. 

I have chosen the medium of jewelry, because often those harmed by environmental injustice are deemed unworthy of things as simple as fresh water, safe and clean housing, and nutritious food. Jewelry is associated with luxury, therefore through using this medium I want those who have been disenfranchised to feel worthy of their means of survival and furthermore, a beautiful and abundant life. 
 

“Sand Drawings: Migration Stories" is a new stop-motion animation created with sand collected from the desert in Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico. By animating the material of the land itself, the project highlights the fragile relationship between environment, movement, and imposed boundaries.

An interactive digital memory-matching game that teaches children ages 6-12 proper waste sorting and recycling habits with gameplay. This game requires players to match various household items (visualized as anthropomorphic icons), such as banana peels, plastic bottles, and electronic items, to their appropriate disposal "bin buddies" (compost, recycling, and landfill) to make a big and happy friend group where every member gets along.

The project leverages my four years of teaching experience to create age-appropriate and visually engaging content that instills practical and actionable environmental knowledge. By gamifying waste sorting, I hope to help children develop and internalize essential and sustainable habits while having fun.

The goal for this documentary is to support, amplify, and contribute to research and conservation efforts which seek to repopulate Axolotls in their native Mexican habitats. With the boom in Axolotl visibility and popularity in the United States, Axolotls have also become popular as pets, with more Axolotls bred in captivity than in the wild. Axolotls are considered critically endangered due to the pollution of their native habitats. It is estimated that only between 50 and 1,000 adult Axolotls are alive in the wild. All hope is not lost, however. Researchers at the Autonomous University of Baja California have successfully introduced Axolotls raised in captivity to wetlands in Southern Mexico. An impactful documentary would be one that sheds light on such repopulation efforts, and funnels donations towards this work. Success would mean that audiences walk away with new knowledge about Axolotls, and are motivated to contribute to Axolotl research and conservation initiatives.