The Program in Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University will present new work by students at two separate film screenings. On May 7 at 7:30 p.m., the Junior and Senior Film Festival screening will feature 11 short films in animation, documentary, experimental, and narrative genres made by students who are focusing on film as their independent work. On May 8 at 7:30 p.m., the Student Film Screening will feature 23 short films created by students in spring 2025 semester courses. Both events will be held in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street and are free and open to the public. The Film Theater is an accessible venue. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Still from a film by Princeton student Paige Morton ’25 as part of their senior independent work in the Program in Visual Arts. Photo courtesy Paige Morton
The 11 juniors and seniors presenting their films on May 7 are either pursuing minors in the Program in Visual Arts with a focus on film while majoring in another area of study at the University, or they are completing degrees in the Practice of Art track offered through the Department of Art and Archaeology. The screening includes work by seniors Isadora Alsadir Knutsen, Nathalie Barnes, Paige Morton, Stella Amyot, and Tiffany Deane. Juniors showing films include Daniel Yeo, Joe McCauley, Joseph Kim Sexton, Michelle Tang, Simone Kirkevold, and Tyler Wilson.
The screening on May 8 includes short, new works created by students in the courses “Animation II” taught by Tim Szetela, “Narrative Filmmaking I” taught by Moon Molson, and “Carceral Cinema and the Abolitionist Imagination” taught by Christopher Harris. In Szetela’s intermediate-level course, students investigated a wide range of techniques and technologies while experimenting with varied modes of audiovisual storytelling, time-based collage, and motion graphics. They produced short, animated films using a blend of analog and digital materials and tools. Molson’s course gave students an introduction to narrative film production and taught the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media, including camera operation, nonlinear editing, sound design, and visual composition. In his course, Harris led students in examining the relationship between the carceral apparatus and the commercial/industrial cinematic apparatus. According to Harris, they considered “paradigms of crime, policing, prisons, resistance, rebellion and abolition in relation to questions of innocence and guilt, racialized criminality, property relations, and the potential for a socially transformative cinema.”
“I always look forward to seeing how student films from across the department look when viewed next to each other in a group screening like this,” notes lecturer Szetela. “Different types of stories, varied perspectives, and approaches to filmmaking (both live-action and animated) can inform one another in surprising and unexpected ways.”
Still from a film by Princeton student Joe McCauley ’26, created in the spring course “Animation II” offered by the Program in Visual Arts. Photo courtesy Joe McCauley
The undergraduate students presenting their films on May 8 include Alex Conboy, Amanda Sparks, Ana Rico Rubio, Chanyoo Sohn, Irene Kim, Isabel Irwin, Joe McCauley, Kamila Isaieva, Konstantina Aliki Vekri, Lily Webb, Louisa Sarofim, Lucia Tsurumaki, Megan Hannon, Mia Beatty, Naomi Felix Monanci, Paige Morton, Rachel Bejo, Roberto Sampaio, Shahad Aljumayaat, Stephenie Chen, Tiffany Deane, Zavier Foster, and Zeynep Gul.
In the fall, Harris joined the Princeton faculty as a professor of visual arts. He makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature. Harris was recently named a 2025 USA Fellow, and his films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout the U.S. and internationally. This spring at the Lewis Center, Harris organized Seeing the Big Picture: An Experimental Film Series, which was a nine-week series featuring 16mm analog films by internationally celebrated experimental filmmakers working at the forefront of artists’ films.
Molson’s short films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, screened at over 250 international film festivals, and have received more than 100 awards worldwide, including the Grand Jury Prizes at Palm Springs, South by Southwest (SXSW), and the Student Academy Awards. His screenplay Johnny Ace was a finalist for Best Screenplay at the 2018 Urbanworld Film Festival, and his most recent screenplay, Hyper/Space, was selected as a finalist in the AT&T Untold Stories competition at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and won top honors at the 2022 Urbanworld Film Festival. He has attended the 2008 Sundance Screenwriters & Directors Labs, the 2008 Film Independent (FIND) Directors Labs, the 2015 Warner Brothers Television Directors’ Workshop, and 2016 FOX Global Directors Initiative as a Fox Director Fellow. Molson was named a 2017 Pew Foundation Fellow, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video, and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in summer 2007. He has received grants from the San Francisco Film Society, The Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Sundance Institute.
Szetela is an animator and designer who explores structures of media, language, and geography via iteration and archives. His films have screened at numerous international animation festivals including Anima Mundi, Annecy, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts and Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, as well as a variety of digital art, game, and technology festivals and exhibitions. Szetela has taught courses in digital animation and data visualization in Princeton’s Program in Visual Arts and Freshman Seminar Program since 2017. At Princeton, he organized Games &&, a symposium featuring artists, designers, and researchers who explore and experiment with the tools and techniques of game design and development. He also co-organizes the Art of Science exhibition, which features work from the Princeton community that sits at the intersection of science and art. Rewordable, the game he co-designed using computational linguistics, was published by Penguin Random House.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
