PNCA Theses & Portfolios

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/10177/40121

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Adelina Ruvalcaba 2025
(2025-05-16) Ruvalcaba, Adelina
"I Am de Mis Antepasadas" is a dedication to the labor of love. I use my art as a way of honoring my ancestors’ perseverance, drawing influences from the personalities, sacrifices, and the strengths of our family that continue to shape me into the adult I am today. This is my rendition of recontextualizing identity as an artist born into two beautiful Latin American cultures—both unique in their own right—alongside being born and raised in the United States of America. Creating ceramic fossils imprinted with the ingredients of my cuisine allows me to commemorate my ancestry while simultaneously passing down heirlooms for my descendants. I create for the pasado, the present, y el futuro.
Aidryn Hinderhofer 2024
(2024-12-06) Hinderhofer, Aidryn
“Following the Light” is a picture book that deals with themes of personal resilience, community, and queer identity. The story follows a small insect faerie named Moth. They are a mail courier with one last package to deliver who, upon getting distracted by a grove of glowing plant life, finds that they’ve lost their way in the surrounding forest without a light to guide them. Moth wanders until they find their way to another faerie’s door. They introduce themself as Firefly and offer to show Moth to their final destination in order to finish their delivery. “Following the Light” is a 8x10”, 48 page, self ended picture book dummy intended for an audience of older children from the 4th to 6th grades (9-12 years old). The entire book is brought to the rough sketch stage, toned in black and white. Two important spreads, as well as the cover, are finished entirely. The whole thing is compiled in a dummy ready for publisher consideration.
Albany Case 2025
(2025) Case, Albany
Through creating a pitch bible for an animated feature film including character designs, backgrounds, and supplemental illustrations, I used the characters of anthropomorphized racehorses to explore themes of male relationships, their nuances, the dynamic shift that defines a romantic or platonic relationship, and to make an authentic and accessible narrative of male-male love. Targeted at general audiences, Off the Bit seeks to bring queer stories to a broader demographic and to remove the stigma of queer stories being only for adults. Following the story of the characters Sterling Silver, Lord Desmond, and Little Red, this work’s focus themes are self-acceptance, finding your own peace, found family, and adjusting to major life changes and how those changes affect the relationships a person has.
Ale Uriarte 2024
(2024-11-19) Ale, Uriarte
This is a visual development project, in which I developed a story around three young witches who are all misfits in their own disciplines. In a world in which magic is slowly disappearing, and you can only practice the kind of magic you are born with. An unconventional friendship is born between a healer who would rather break bones instead of fixing them, a necromancer terrified of the dark and everything spooky, and a summoner who is unable to summon in the conventional way who comes from a background of all witches with food related powers. In this project I will show character designs, interactions, prop and background designs and key story moments, which I plan to develop further once I graduate into a visual novel or, if possible, an animated project pitch in the future.
Alex Zarate 2025
(2025-04) Zarate, Alex
The First Cyber Monarch is a 28 page visual essay that tells the story of Valeria, an immigrant who moves to a new city where technology triumphs. We follow her and through her experiences as an immigrant. A vision of a new life, experiences, emotions, feelings and perspective. With her, we get to meet new people with unique personalities that comes with moving to a new place to help those close to you. Her new life, emotions, feelings, experiences, perspective are what real immigrants feel. We are not aliens, illegals or wetbacks but we are human. We experience the complexities of what it is to be human and even the mistreatment we still experience to this day.
Alexandra Lawson Mangum 2025
(2025-04) Lawson Mangum Alexandra
Pory Roku My main inspiration for my thesis in general is mythology and folklore, more specifically Slavic and Eastern European folklore. I created a 12 month calendar inspired by Slavic myths and folklore as well as Slavic culture and their associations with the seasons rooted in paganism. Each image in the calendar draws influences from different folktales as well as characters like gods, goddesses, mythical creatures, and deities. My family on my mothers side is Ukrainian, Russian, and generally Eastern European, so my personal family history has also informed the subject of my project. I have created 5 copies of the calendar as well as twelve larger posters to display the illustrations. It is an illustration project first, and a design project second, and is a deeply personal project showcasing my interests and love for mythology as well as the pride I feel for my family history and where I come from.
Alishba Rahim, 2024
(2024-11-25) Rahim, Alishba
Digital Girl World is a teaser and trial episode showcasing the viewer’s attempt at survival after being transported into a horrific version of PNCA. Your only ally, a young, hyperfeminine girl named Nami helping you find a way out of this liminal space PNCA. Can you trust this girl? She looks sweet, but something about her feels…off. Through a merging and contrast of hyperfeminine and retro horror game aesthetics, internet-core and analog elements. I will create a narrative that reclaims hyperfeminine women’s sense of autonomy in the horror genre. The genre is a psychological horror, animated as a visual novel. In the plot of the teaser, after the viewer is transported into the liminal space PNCA, they are immediately chased by shadow people. There the viewer meets Naami, who helps you out by solving a puzzle, which unlocks the elevator, allowing both Naami and the viewer to the next floor. Naami then introduces herself and informs you that the school creates puzzles depending on what the shadow people and the environment want. The two process to explore the floor, and stumble upon a Monster door that wants something to eat. Naami guides you along with a puzzle, unlocking a locker that reveals a still-beating heart. Naami fills the heart with blood and feeds it to the Monster Door. After the door is satisfied, the elevator door opens, indicating the puzzle is solved and the two are free to go. The viewer feels relieved that someone as reliable and totally not suspicious as Naami is there by your side. The core of my thesis is merging a retro horror-game aesthetic with hyper-femininity to reclaim women's sense of autonomy in animation by recontextualizing traditional feminine traits. Most media depict the 'girly girl' as vain, unintelligent, and basic. Someone who has not earned their agency. This correlates with how the interests of young girls are seen through similar lenses of lesser value. Instead, misogyny encourages both men and women to invest their me with traditional masculine, interests/fields/appearance, which are more respected and important in society. This is especially relevant in horror movies, where the hyper-femme girl who is neither the ‘succubus’, ‘femme fatale’, or ‘final girl’ is treated to be insignificant and weak—the victim. This is all exemplified through Digital Girl World’s main character Naami. A smiley and sweet feminine girl, with an ‘off-side’. The goal for the future is to create more episodes where Naami’s true nature gets revealed before it is too late for the viewer to do anything about it. Therefore, crowning the girly Naami as undefeated, forever more. In the plot of the teaser, after the viewer. Link to Digital Girl World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnUi2lI2H44
Alyssa Morris-Hatch 2025
(2025-04-23) Morris-Hatch, Alyssa
Aloma, who comes from the waves of sound and fabrics of space, ensures all souls arrive safely, but will theirs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41zdtUznfWU
Annika Rausch 2025
(2025) Rausch, Annika
With my series of intaglio prints, I explore themes relating to identity construction and place, arguing that those residents who think of themselves as “Portlanders” should instead shift their primary allegiance to the Willamette River. My thesis work contributes to this project of identity reformation by building an affective-aesthetic matrix of imagery, recalling viewers back to local land and water forms, the reality of political violence, and the larger cosmos. My work includes references to the often-suppressed Indigenous materiality of this place, recognized as a fact of the social environment that demands reckoning, plus imagery from the distant past of my own European ancestry, as well as “composted” charts and diagrams from scientific research. By “composting,” I mean erasing the legibility of a graphic or making it esoteric, in order to remove it from rigidly emotionless systems of information-and-control. The main text of my thesis takes the form of a glossary, meant to aid in “reading” the visual work.
Audrey Shuman 2025
(2025-04-14) Shuman, Audrey
For my thesis project I created a 48 page self-ended picture book dummy about a shepherdess who turns into a werewolf, as a metaphor for medical trauma. Her journey is about self-acceptance and about the difficult emotions that arise from developing a chronic illness at a young age. The story talks about a lot of difficult emotions, but the overall message is about leaning on friends and family for support and that even if you have a chronic illness, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. The core idea of my project is to tell the story of a girl who is a shepherdess in a fantasy world. She spends her days tending to her flock and is very dedicated to her task. But one night she starts hearing howling and it keeps happening night after night. On the third night she goes out to investigate because it keeps scaring the sheep. She wanders into the night and is bitten by a werewolf, she is scared and confused and runs home to her parents. Her parents are upset but they accept her and comfort her, but she is in denial about it and acts like everything is normal. But her body starts changing and it makes it harder to do her job, eventually she reaches a breaking point and runs away from home. Her family chase after her, when they find her, she tells them to go away but they stay and talk through things with her. They talk to her about how things won’t be easy but that she can work through them and still achieve her goals. And that things are harder, but she is not broken or wrong, just different. In this way my story will be a metaphor for what it’s like to have a chronic illness.
Beth Starkey 2024
(2024-11-19) Starkey, Beth
Monsters of Aslamere is a 36-page concept art book, detailing an early civilization fantasy world, with the intention of using it to pitch a video game. The first part of the book details the cast of characters. Part two shows several of the original monster designs created to fill Aslamere’s world. Part three is several finished illustrations used as key art for the feeling of the game. Aslamere is filled with fantastical monsters that still control most of its territories. The people struggle to survive each day, hunting monsters that are just as likely to turn around and return the favor by hunting them. All of this starts to change when a young hunter and aspiring researcher named Kai sets out from their village, along with their small winged familiar, Vanati, determined to create this world’s first monster book. Kai grew up fascinated by monsters rather than fearing them, and so explores every corner of Aslamere to hunt down every monster, gathering information about each of them in different ways. With some luck, food, and a gentle hand, Kai is even able to tame some monsters to bring back to their village. Doing so helps their people expand and open up greater possibilities for farming, crafting, hunting, and traveling for Aslamere, setting the trail for animal domestication in this world.
Blue Corvidae 2025
(2025-05) Corvidae Blue
PRISMATIC MELANCHOLY was constructed with anti-capitalist collective care in mind and an understanding that collective work must start with the self. This research originated with a desire to find a way for my spiritual-artistic practice to live in accordance with collective care praxes. With this in mind I adopt an autoethnographic exploration of my early experiences with religion and trauma– specifically the fragmenting effect they had on my developing queer-trans sense of self and how I might reapproach spirituality as a survival pathway through apostatic faith practices. As a mad, disabled, queer-trans multiplicity I was born into a series of tragedies that assured my bodymindspirit would never truly feel there was space enough for me. Strung from one ill-fitting home/label/town to the next, I began to crack, we began to splinter. Before long, compacted within the contours of societal expectation, our consciousness had shattered into multiplicity, pushing us to think multivalently despite our melancholy. In this project we were called to ask: what kind of relationship with divinity could support us in bearing the emotional distress of ongoing global catastrophe? And, more importantly, what kind of space could hold us, in all our multiplicity, such that we might be able to approach divinity?
Brady Wolchansky 2024
(2024-06-24) Wolchansky, Brady
MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL SYNDROME, A Micro-Cinematic Experience features the premier of an experimental short film I wrote, co-directed, and starred in called, Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome, an adaptation from a comedic monologue of the same name I performed at an all-female group art show in 2023. This tangential monologue begins with, “you guys ever hear of the expression ‘all beautiful women are crazy’?” The 5-minute short screens at looped intervals in a makeshift microcinema constructed alongside a pop-up museum of “artifacts”; a behind-the-scenes look of the filmmaking process, including but not limited to props, costumes and images from the film’s set. The complete installation revolves around my investigations of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG) character archetype, as seen in popular romantic films such as, Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and 500 Days of Summer with Zooey Deschanel. In cinema, the MPDG is portrayed as an artsy independent woman who often rejects societal expectations of classic womanhood and domesticity. While the MPDG is presumed to be free-spirited and independent, she is still defined by the expectations of a predominantly male protagonist and is mostly restricted within the confines of said male protagonist’s own personal goals and growth, and rarely displays any self-actualization or true personhood. This exhibition aims to recreate my own version of the MPDG, examined from a modern, feminist lens. Through the aesthetics of filmmaking, stand-up comedy and intermedia installation my hope is to show empathy with those who can relate and rouse awareness of the MPDG trope’s negative effects in others.
Caroline MacLean 2025
(2025-04-16) MacLean, Caroline
Roots and Tides is a love letter to the people who ground me. It explores relationships, identity, and the ways we express care, specifically through music and design. I’ve always made playlists for people I love. It’s one of the ways I show up. This project is a larger, more intentional extension of that. Each album cover is inspired by a person in my life. Some are family, some friends, and some chosen family. I interviewed each of them, curated a short playlist based on our conversations and our connection, and created a visual language around their energy and aura. Each cover is unique to the individual but designed to exist as part of a collective whole, like a record collection. The name Roots and Tides reflects how these people shape me. Roots keep me steady; tides represent change, movement, and emotional currents. Both are necessary. This project was originally going to include a bound book and custom record case, but I scaled back due to time and resources. Still, I’m proud of what I completed: seven album covers and a gallery space that feels like an extension of my world. Many of the objects in the space are from my own home or my family’s. This process pushed me to play multiple roles: designer, art director, curator, and collaborator. It challenged my time management, decision-making, and ability to synthesize personal and visual storytelling. Ultimately, it’s about the people I love and the language I use to say so.
Christopher Hildreth 2025
(2025-04-15) Hildreth, Christopher
This project is a collection of three 3D models, created, textured, rigged, and animated from scratch in Blender. The characters depicted are all from an urban fantasy universe I've been making for a long time. There is Nid, the black scaled dragon girl, Amari, the mint haired fox boy, and Imu, the pink cat boy. I first made the character designs with an eye for unique gender expression through the character’s outfits and body build, but other than the animation of them, I didn't have much reason to focus more attention on those themes. My focus was the end product, and the skills I would develop to get there. Each character has their own backstory, and personality that I wished to bring alive in this animated showcase. In how they move, hold themselves, and perform. As someone with a background in 2D animation, this was a long journey of learned skills.
Claire Frances Spaulding 2025
(2025-05-15) Spaulding, Claire
How do I face the material reality of a studio practice balanced against a theoretical framework centered upon environmental criticism and affect theory? What does it mean to coexist in an ecology of plastic as contributor, as collaborator? A combination of found and new material, Doing Despite explores material flirtation to utilize kitsch and fem aesthetics as a hyper visual language. The compositional elements are inspired by oceanography, topographical striations, and geometric patterns – a blue wave recedes and ascends from sandy, scalloped edge’s reminiscent of Americana pomp and circumstance. An amalgamation of synthetic and natural fibers, the work represents a convergence of ecology and new materialism: “ecodread”. “Ecodread” is a sensitizing concept of cognitive dissonance and ecological affect. It is the tension between social expectations of sustainability and subjective material engagements: the discomfort between a desire to exist in the world as eco-conscious as possible against a reality where the expense of those decisions is not attainable. Working through the dissonance and dread, the climate crisis is faced with a “doing despite” mentality rather than anxious paralysis. Polyethylene terephthalate – it’s what persists long after objects are discarded, disintegrated into microplastics, or smashed together as a conglomerate of mineral, media, and matter. Plastic was a promise of infinite potentiality, of endless supply for a demand of clear, synthetic, reflective, durable objects meant to last a lifetime. But whose lifetime? Ours or polymers? Material or mineral? Doing Despite works through the dissonance to consider an ecological futurity where matter and audience embrace the entanglement of vibrant plasticity. Doing Despite is a visual compliment to the theoretical framework and qualitative research undertaken in my MA Critical Studies Thesis: “Ecodread: Dissonance, Material, and Ecology within Creative Practice.” This project positions ecodread into the fields of new materialism and environmental criticism as an offering and proposal that the personal, the self is able to reenter the rhetoric on impact and futurity.
Cynthia Souder, 2025
(2025-05-16) Souder, Cynthia
This thesis explores the cultural and symbolic dimensions of the "crone" through a series of five original sculptures, each embodying a distinct trope of older womanhood. Installed in the shape of a physic garden, the sculptures form a circle—an invitation for the viewer to enter, explore, and witness their differences. This immersive arrangement at Building Five creates a space not only for contemplation but also for connection and participation. I invite you to become part of the circle of crones in the garden. My research draws on feminist theory, histories, and contemporary art discourse, challenging the ageist and misogynistic connotations historically attached to the term "crone." Instead, I reclaim the crone as an archetype of wisdom, resilience, and transformation. Historically, women labeled as crones were often persecuted not for any wrongdoing, but for stepping outside patriarchal expectations—retreating from societal norms, decentering men, and living mature, independent, and wise lives. Through this research and sculptural practice, I trace the figure of the crone across history and popular culture, examining how these representations shape and are shaped by the roles, behaviors, and perceptions of women in contemporary Western American society.
Daisey Pastrana 2024
(2024-11-16) Pastrana, Daisey
Pitch for a 2D animated show in Spanish of 5-7 minute episodes and a teaser of Las Aventuras de Puff y Fluff. As Puff and Fluff are learning the young audience is also learning math, science, and school of life. This shows target audience is children of 4-10 years old. Puff and Fluff are anthropomorphic rabbits whose world takes place in Oaxaca, Mixteco, Mexico. They live in La Loma de Conejo, a small town in the forest near a rancho They have a large family consisting of Mom, Dad, two sisters, and an older brother. With the help of their family, they are learning to navigate the world around them and the importance of community, friends, culture, traditions, and habitat. With their curiosity about the world around them, they are constantly learning about their ecosystem and their place in the world.
Danielle Van Dam 2025
(2025) Van Dam, Danielle
The Clown is a formal investigation of iteration, technique, and endurance in my artistic process underpinned by an exploration of interpretation and meaning in painting. I have created seven smaller-scale paintings all representing the same subject that read together as one body of work. I made a conscious choice to refrain from prescribing a narrative to the work, allowing my viewer to reach their own conclusion, rather than preemptively assign it for them and follow with a supplemental written explanation. With The Clown series, I attempted to invoke an atmosphere of irresolution through representational oil painting, in this case, using a small porcelain clown figurine as my only reference. My motivation to disrupt some logical function or compulsive intellectualization in the process of viewing paintings is a reflection of my studio practice as well as my reverence for the enigmatic. This paper will explore how I’ve chosen to approach my time in this program, as well as for my thesis project—with a self-designed curriculum centered on a technically focused material study in oil painting.

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