Mon Nov-16 @ 1pm via Zoom:

AINSLEE ALEM ROBSON_

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meeting password: generative

As part of the Fall 2020/Spring 2021 Building Sciences Lecture Series themed: “Generative Citizenship: Leveraging New Tools and Forms of Entrepreneurship in the City” we invite you to join us on Monday, November 16th from 1-2 pm. This virtual lecture will be open to the whole school and general public on Zoom.

This Monday’s lecture will take the form of a conversation with Ainslee Alem Robson, an Ethiopian-American director and writer who crafts immersive stories about tensions embedded within the intersectional layers of identity, perception, the digital, and nostalgia.

With a background in philosophy Robson focuses on narratives that deconstruct hierarchy and colonial legacies using emerging technologies in digital art and film.

Ainslee developed an experimental narrative and visual language for reconstructing “tezeta” (meaning nostalgia in Amharic) in Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR, her directorial debut. This afrosurrealist experience based on her personal experience of growing up as an Ethiopian-American in Cleveland, Ohio and later living in Addis Ababa, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival’s Cinema360 via Oculus as well as being officially selected by South by Southwest’s VR Cinema and the Cleveland International Film Festival’s Perspectives in 2020. She holds an M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a B.A. in Philosophy and French from The College of Wooster.