Featured Student Projects

The Wild Center, the natural history center and museum located in the Adirondacks, lost 75% of its volunteers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a nonprofit with a small full-time team to support the operations of The Wild Center, they rely on volunteers to help with animal care, office tasks, and facilities maintenance. This capstone team researched what volunteers were looking for, created a publicity campaign, proposed remote volunteer opportunities, and updated the Wild Center's volunteer webpage in order to increase volunteer retention rates and target younger demographics. The Wild Center's volunteer base increased from 40 to 120 six months after this project launched.

Rising seas come at the cost of all living things. In the work “Overwatered,” artist Odessa Amaryllis explores how sea level rise disrupts and damages ecosystems. This representation comes to life through a collection of photographs demonstrating the gradual deterioration of an arrangement of dried plants under prolonged exposure to water. 

As climate change disrupts our ability to experience nature, we are left only to recollect distorted
memories and fragmented camera rolls.

I wrote this essay in the weeks that followed the ADK Climate Stories retreat, as I reflected on what I had seen, felt, and learned. During the retreat and my internship at the Wild Center, I witnessed the beauty and fragility of the Adirondack landscape, listened to the stories and struggles of local communities, and felt my relationship with the environment shift. With this piece, I hope to bring some of the hope, joy, rage, and grief I experienced—emotions that aren’t always contradictory, I’ve learned—to audiences beyond that cottage by the lake, and into a time that extends beyond this summer.

Northwest Junior High School serves a predominantly economically disadvantaged student population, with up to 95% lacking equitable access to technology and resources. To bridge this digital divide and empower students as future problem solvers, the school plans to transform a 400-square-foot space into a digital media lab with recording spaces and workstations. This student team designed a media lab tailored to the needs of Northwest’s students, fostering creativity, experimentation, and problem-solving. Through collaboration with the Student Voice Committee and extensive user research, they empathized with students' requirements, ensuring the lab was equipped for recording, compiling, and storing audio and video content. Additionally, drew insights from similar school media labs to create a sustainable, functional, and impactful space.

This project evokes childlike creativity and imagination by drawing on the aesthetics of children’s drawings. The multi-modal nature of our project represents a fusion of the real, “adult” world and the imagined, “childlike,” with both the physical and digital elements of this piece leaning into the playfulness of imperfecktion. By having the archival cherry-picking footage interact with the hand-drawn animation, and then projecting the video onto the canvas—featuring lopsided clay borders, glued-on wildflowers, and childlike drawings—we tried to blur the lines between whimsy and pragmatism, suggesting the radical potential of joy and storytelling as a climate solution.

This capstone team collaborated with Pawsitive Cat Cafe to improve their functionality by designing a medical tracking tool, developing an educational video game for adopters, redesigning the website, and creating a targeted outreach plan to enhance community engagement.

The United States is plagued by an ever-growing problem: waste. In their critique of the rampant cycles of production and consumption that fuel the urgent need for additional landfill space, artists Carly Velicer and Odessa Amaryllis explore a satirical future in which some of America's iconic natural sites serve as garbage dumps. Velicer and Amaryllis bring this future to life through their pseudo-company called "Pollution Solutions," which advertises its success in converting the Great Lakes and the Grand Canyon into landfills with unmatched capacity. The artists give viewers a glimpse into the reality advertised by Pollution Solutions by juxtaposing maps of the two sites with images of garbage. By imagining “solutions” that are far from practical, Velicer and Amaryllis highlight the scarcity of human accountability for environmental crises and its devastating consequences. If humanity continues down this path, how long before projects like this are not comically outrageous, but rather a reflection of reality?

"Path Dependency" is the third piece in a series of collaborative artmaking between students in DMS 230: Climate Interventions: Performing Arts + New Media. Through a rapid-response format, the first collaborator produced a piece of art in response to a collected climatic story; the second collaborator responded to the first art piece in another media; the third collaborator responded to the second art piece in a different media without seeing the first art piece. "Path Dependency" was produced through this process of creative telephone. It is a tryptic that remixes Flemish painter Hieronomous Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" along with lines from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and photos of climatic warming passed through a psychedelic "Apocalypse" filter. Bosh's triptych depicts heaven, earth, and hell in his signature zany style, both instructing and inspiring viewers to consider the implications of their choices. The bi-directional arrows and their path from apocalypse to utopia may be read as progress, regress, or a stuttering synthesis between advancement and setback. This piece plays with humanity's varied predictive models for the future--religion, fever-dreams, science, literature--and highlights the power of path dependency in our decision making-processes.

I had the opportunity in my Climate Interventions course to delve into various topics in class that provided us with a chance to hear different perspectives on critical issues. One issue that stood out is the observation by many adults of changes in the climate and ecological issues over time. This issue affects young individuals who desire tangible memories to live fulfilling lives. It is our responsibility to create tools and resources that help people appreciate living a well-rounded life and make it more fulfilling. Therefore, I named my work 'Portraits I Can't Send' because I want to highlight that creating meaningful memories is an essential part of human experience and deepens our connection with nature, life, family, fun, etc. Those of which can all go away. It's crucial to develop a connection with nature and the outdoors, as it can have a lasting impact on our lives.

With a quick online search, you can find that 365 - 988 million (or 1 billion) birds collide with windows and other reflective and transparent surfaces on buildings and other manmade structures each year in the U.S. We don't always see the bodies of our feathered friends since they are quickly disposed of by groundskeeping and other animals, so I wanted to create an art piece that illustrated some of the local songbird species in Rochester. This piece isn't meant to guilt anyone or spur on a movement for bird-proofing windows. It is simply to bring attention to an issue that many may not have noticed or heard of.

The Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery tasked this capstone group with enhancing access to the stories and information of holocaust survivors buried in Range 10, which contains 60 graves. To achieve this, they created an interactive map connected to the existing database that houses these stories and details. The goal was to make this valuable information more accessible, engaging, and visually presentable to the public.

Students at the University of Rochester with physical disabilities face significant challenges navigating campus due to inaccessible buildings, broken elevators, malfunctioning automatic door openers, and unexpected detours. Finding accessible routes to classes, dining halls, and essential spaces often requires extra time and effort, causing frustration, exclusion, and in some cases, physical pain. To address this, we will create a website that maps accessible routes, factoring in detours and individual mobility needs, helping disabled individuals save time and energy while removing one of the barriers they face in academia.

I wanted to explore this intricate relationship between capitalism and climate change through a documentary-style short film. I intended to connect the stories of students and faculty at the University ofRochester to the perceivable impacts of climate change locally. 

We developed an augmented reality app that allowed users to scan their furniture and create 3D models, which could then be used to virtually rearrange their room. Using an open-source photogrammetry framework, the app captured furniture from multiple angles to generate detailed 3D models, which were stored for future use. Built with platforms like Reality Composer and Unity, the app provided an interface for users to view their room in augmented reality, place scanned models, and access design resources and tips for organizing their space effectively.

Pip, a voice-enabled mobile application that works with smart home assistants like Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa to help its users manage their food inventory and balance their grocery budget

A VR project aimed at creating empathy and understanding for LGBTQ+ friends and family members who man not fully understand the reality of their queer loved one.

The SPIRIT NYS capstone project aims to improve SPIRIT NYS’s marketing presence and organizational awareness. Helping SPIRIT NYS reach out to more potential donors and volunteers.

Before presenting "Trash City" to the public, I created a blueprint of its design, sourcing all materials—including art supplies—from garbage and discarded leftovers. The middle tray featured a “park” with creative details like trees made from Mardi Gras beads and bread twist ties, grass made from an avocado bag, and a lake crafted from leftover wrapping paper. The top tray was left open for contributions, with a “hospital” made of clayed-over caps, houses from corks and caps, and a street lined with “light posts,” while the bottom tray provided leftover supplies, prompts, and curious trash pieces to inspire community participation.

Nautalis engages with stuednt mental health and suicidal ideation by creating an interactive, immersive play-based rest space.  This VR project debuted during finals week and was locared in the library.