Spark your creativity and use art as an agent of change for the society you want to live in! Arts in Action’s Mobilize! program offers awards of up to $500 for USC students looking to channel their creativity and art into activism. Facilitate a songwriting workshop, create protest art, present a spoken-word event, or organize a community mural. Encourage health and wellness, promote housing justice, address systemic racism, or support gender equality. These outlets and ideas are only the beginning. How will you use your passion to help change the world?
LIST 2023 MOBILIZE! AWARDEES
(As of September 2023)
Tricia Lim Castro
The Troy Philippines organization conducted a “Sayaw para sa Kultura” dance workshop in spring 2023, educating participants about Filipino folk dance forms. Led by teaching arhfghfhfpreservation, and awareness of Philippine art forms and heritage, emphasizing the need to combat exclusion and erasure in mainstream American culture.
Survivor Support Community (SSC)
The Survivor Support Community (SSC) at USC supports survivors of sexual assault on campus and aims to create a safe community through art therapy and creative activities to address this critical issue by emphasizing the prevalence of sexual violence at USC.
Sofia Reyes
Sofia Reyes, Co-Health chair for Flying Samaritans, an organization that offers free monthly medical clinics in the Zona Norte area of Tijuana, Mexico, providing medical training and shadowing opportunities for USC student members, supported a public health educational campaign through the creation of patient education materials. These materials focus on nurturing community empowerment and healthier choices to enhance the educational kits and support clinic trips.
Magic Udeh
Magic, an Inland Empire native, introduces the “Swap Me” project aimed at fostering civic engagement and storytelling within the Maclin Open Air Market. Through workshops and creative methods, Magic seeks to strengthen community connections, promote belonging, and create a space for reflection and story-sharing, emphasizing the market’s affordability and accessibility as a grassroots gathering place.
Aeneid Theatre Co.
The Aeneid Theatre Company at USC independently produces three plays annually, covering classical, contemporary, and experimental theater categories, aiming to enrich the campus community through collaborative student talents and making quality theater accessible to students across all colleges and schools. Their project, “Women Of,” is a contemporary adaptation of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” explores the aftermath of fraternity-based sexual assault through interconnected stories. They plan to host talkbacks and collaborate with student organizations focused on sexual health and healing, with the goal of sparking conversations and serving as a template for change on other campuses.
Seanna Latiff
Seanna Latiff’s “so we must lie in it” is an immersive fine art virtual reality installation. This project aims to bring attention to the collective grief and loss experienced due to avoidable systemic deaths in America, particularly mass shootings. It seeks to move beyond statistics and abstract discourse by emphasizing the human impact of these events.
Angelica Brooks
The Table Music Education Conference, organized by Dr. Ron McCurdy, the USC Thornton School of Music JEDI Committee, and the Thornton Student Council, aims to address disparities in recruiting and retaining minority music educators in the field. It brings together a diverse group, including academic professors, music program leaders, mentors, students, and educators, to collaboratively devise strategies for enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in music education. The conference seeks funding to eliminate financial barriers for speakers and provide free access, whether in-person or online, to a wider audience interested in discussions on recruiting and retaining music educators of color.
LIST OF 2022 MOBILIZE! AWARDEES
Jordy Coutin
Water Drop LA member Jordy Coutin facilitated an event that shared the local organization’s efforts to provide clean water to unhoused residents, farm workers, and other marginalized communities, also inviting members of Polo’s Pantry, a mobile food pantry, to discuss the nuances of mutual aid, and showcasing the work of like-minded poets, musicians, dancers, and artists.
Natalie Serratos
Natalies Serratos’ short film delves into the lasting effects of trauma on mental and physical well-being through the character Arya, an 18-year-old who initially believes relocating will solve her problems but faces ongoing challenges. The film aims to raise awareness about mental illness, trauma, and discrimination, with a focus on inclusivity and support from a primarily female and non-binary crew.
Katyah Urban and Aaron Abunu
Urban and Abunu’s “Emotion Room” was an art activation that served as a communal and cathartic space for the USC student community to express their feelings of self-expression and vulnerability and address their emotional well-being.
Lauren Nash
Nash’s “It’s Not Just Hair: An Exploration of a Black Woman’s Relationship to Her Crown” is an online publication about identity, aesthetics, and discrimination structured into three parts: history, information, and identification.
Xinyao Li
Inspiring mindfulness of our bodies and addressing the chronic back pain that can come from sedentary lifestyles and habitual screen use, Li’s “Back to Basics” workshop taught participants basic yoga stretches to combat it, followed by a creative body mapping activity bringing attention to pain points.
LIST OF PAST MOBILIZE! AWARDEES
Whitney Anderson
Higher Ground is a bold and timely documentary by a collective of Black women that examines the controversial and consistently unjust oppression faced by Black people in South Carolina. The film will be used as an educational tool to provide an in-depth look into South Carolina’s past while looking ahead to a more optimistic future.
Sue Dexter
Building upon her longstanding commitment to local environmental justice issues, Dexter developed a video and corresponding posters about truck pollution and potential mitigation strategies for high school students in low-income areas that are impacted by freight traffic and toxins.
Krystal Gallegos
Gallegos is part of an effort to organize community fridges in Orange County, directly addressing a lack of equal resources and promoting food justice through mutual aid organizing. These fridges also function as mural opportunities for local artists working to achieve racial justice.
Vanessa Herron
The Talk is a narrative short film about a couple who struggles with the idea of whether to talk to their young son about how to conduct himself during interactions with law enforcement. The story addresses implicit bias and compels the audience to re-think community relations between law enforcement and people of color.
Natasha Nutkiewicz
Till the End of the World is a documentary series highlighting U.S. Generation Z climate activists, organizers, and educators in order to encourage an international audience to take action against climate change. The series seeks to inspire audiences to use their own unique gifts and professions to address climate emergencies.
Valerie Taranto and Julia Mosher
Taranto and Mosher are creating an online publication and street installation using architectural diagrams to represent how women, nonbinary, and LGBTQ+ individuals move through space. The project asks people to question their own relationship to the city and public areas, and to foster awareness of how social inequities are perpetuated by the built environment.
Steven Vargas
Vargas’s No Humans Involved is a short dance film deconstructing how queerness is policed in America, interweaving dance, reportage, and community footage. The project seeks to convey that although progress has been made in elevating LGBTQ+ rights, much work remains to be done in decriminalizing identities.
Lindsey Bach
In 2020, Bach founded the Solidarity Arts Collective, which fundraises for racial justice organizations and causes by selling donated work from artists via Instagram, enabling these artists to directly contribute to the Black Lives Matter movement through their work.
Joshua Edward
For the past several years, composer Edward has focused his creative energy on interrogating and critiquing the role of whiteness in issues of social justice. Collaborating with USC poet and International Artist Fellow Zharia O’Neal, their work explores “dialogue across difference.”
Jordan Gonzalez and Lindsay Mulcahy
This participatory public history project is a joint effort between Gonzalez, Mulcahy, and the Alcoholism Center for Women (ACW), creating a display that tells the story of ACW. Their project draws connections between past and present movements for social justice and supports ACW’s current efforts to foster community and women’s empowerment.
Kathryn Huang
Madhatter Knits Foundation is a nonprofit organization created in 2015 dedicated to supplying knit hats for premature babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. During the pandemic, the foundation has also disseminated Maternal Protection Care Kits to many maternity clinics and hospitals, lowering the risk of mothers contracting COVID-19.
Patricia Ramirez
Ramirez’s Healing the Healer project uplifts the experiences of leaders who are working to advance collective healing in L.A communities. Her multi-session workshop series integrates storytelling for social change through a guided discussion using anti-racist, healing justice, holistic, and mindfulness approaches.
Samuel Teets
DNDheraphy is a collaborative role-playing game that helps foster personal resilience and socially minded praxis among small groups of players. The team has developed a DND campaign that is specifically geared towards promoting personal growth, collaboration, and social awareness in the midst of systemic racism and income, health, and educational disparities.
Diane Williams
Reflecting from Home is a social- practice project using craft as a tool for fostering communities and interpersonal relationships. How do we collectively strengthen mental health in struggling communities? Reflecting from Home Addresses this question by emphasizing the importance of shared art-making and active contribution, inviting community members to create craft of their choosing.
Kelly Chen
Chen’s Increase the Volume is a multimedia organization consisting of USC students and industry professionals who are building digital platforms for Asian Americans and others to speak out against racial discrimination and injustice.
Jennifer Ellis-Juncaj
Kids Make Toys is a half-day workshop allowing children to create toy inventions that share cultural traditions from their communities using recycled materials gathered from their homes. As a social-justice oriented entrepreneur, Ellis-Juncaj’s project promotes cultural confidence in participants by fostering creativity and empathy.
James Grisom
Grisom’s Eye for An i is a poetic meditation on grief from the perspective of a young Black teen named Jeremiah. The film and its accompanying healing circles for South L.A. youth offer a remedy to address cyclical violence and help those directly affected cope in a healthy, supported manner.
Kendra Mitchell
As Americans urgently demand a more equitable racial future, Reimagined explores the question: what does an equitable, Black-centered future look like? Mitchell’s documentary aims to show audiences the vibrant, radical future within their grasp and to inspire them to reach for it.
Katrina RiChard
RiChard’s project addresses the multiple viewpoints regarding the nationwide movement to defund the police. The project asks high school students: What thoughts, possibilities, images, and/or emotions are evoked in your mind when you hear “defund the police”? and challenges participants respond to this question artistically.
Magic Udeh
Africonvos explores perspectives of blackness in different parts of the world, creating a place where these narratives can be in conversation with each other and where similarities and differences can be explored. The project incorporates online international roundtable events with invited activists as well as mixed-media portraits of leaders who are fighting for change around the world.
