Video Transcript: 2025 VIS Open Studios

Pam Lins [Interim Director of Visual Arts, Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts]

Welcome to Open Studios for the VIS program at Princeton University. Students have prepared their studios. It’s work-in-progress, it’s discussional.

Star Ross [Anthropology major, Visual Arts minor]

This work was definitely inspired by the theme of wanting to take up space. I was trying to experiment with the walls themselves to see how much space I could take up in the least amount of time. The individual bodies you see on the wall all correlate to a different emotion I feel being a Princeton student. So whether that be being creative or feeling anxious or feeling excited about something, everything correlates to a different realm of being an emotional woman on Princeton’s campus.

Sahaf Chowdhury [Practice of Art major]

What I have projected in the back here is just a world that I created in Unreal Engine 5. Because of the fact that this is a video game, there’s a dynamic component to it that you don’t have in video. So I wanted to see how can I make this different from if I were just to project a video onto the screen,

Like this is not… And people with fresh eyes seeing, they’re like, “Whoa, wait, this is so cool.” I’m like, “Oh wait, this is cool,” because the experience of the viewer is really important to the overall piece here. It kind of refreshes my own perspective of what I’m even doing.

Maya Cabrera ’27 [Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major, Visual Arts minor]

I’m from San Antonio, Texas. It’s very hot in Texas and there really isn’t a winter there. Since I’ve been here, I’ve never seen such a wide leaf diversity, so I was really inspired by that for all my work. Art, to me, is like a lot more fluid. You don’t necessarily have to know the ending point, but it’s more like the process that you take to get there.

Charlotte Pfenning ’27 [History major, Visual Arts minor]

Originally, when I had applied to VIS my sophomore year, I was doing a lot of painting. In this semester I am learning to do ceramics and so I have been working on these tiles. A common thread amongst all of the different mediums though, are really textural work, trying to bring color and things like that back into my work too.

Nivan Dhamija ’27 [Anthropology major, Visual Arts minor]

This is an exhibition piece that I’m trying to work on. It’s mostly in India, but it centers around this archive that my grandfather left behind in 1999. I hope to produce an essay film that uses the visual material or the stuff that I filmed and the audio along with these letters to tell a story of my grandfather.

Colleen Asper [Associate Director of Visual Arts, Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts]

The exhibitions that we have in the spring for the thesis, that’s a moment where the public is also invited into VIS into 185, but that’s a moment where students have selected the edited-down, paired-down version of the work that they wanna present more formally. And the Open Studios is a different experience where you can see things in progress, things that in the end, the student might decide not to show formally in an exhibition, resource photos, materials. It’s just a much more intimate way to experience a work of art.