What is NYU Gallatin?
“Guided by a commitment to self-directed learning, the Gallatin faculty cultivate an environment of intellectual exploration and experiential learning. At Gallatin, breadth and depth go hand in hand. Students draw from the full range of NYU’s courses and resources, combining insights from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and beyond. This interdisciplinary approach builds adaptability, critical thinking, and strong communication skills—qualities that enable Gallatin graduates to bring creativity, empathy, and fresh perspective to everything they do.”
Learn more about the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
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I wanted to explore how culture impacts the stories we tell and how the stories we tell impact culture. I describe it as 50% media studies and 50% Creative Writing MFA. Through my coursework (see the othertabs below), I have gotten to interrogate why we tell the stories we do and why medium matters, how the stories we tell shape the world around us, and how stories and the ways we tell them change over time. Also, for myself, I wanted to study craft to supercharge the stories I want to put into the world.
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Writing The Scene
The Story You Can’t Let Go Of
What Do You Make, Why Do You Make It, How Do You Make It Better?
Novel Research & Revision I and II (Independent Study)
Story in Gaming
Choice-based Storytelling in Game Design
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Abnormal Psychology
Positive Psychology
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Indigenous Research
Food in the Arts: Media
Italian Cuisine and the Mediterranean Diet
Disinformation and Narrative Warfare
graduate Thesis
My Roman Empire is olive trees that remember the Roman Empire. Check out this 2500-year-old diva I met in Puglia! And yes, she still produces olives!
For Everything, A Season
For Everything, A Season is a 107,000-word magical realist-romance novel set in the 19th century Amalfi Coast, titled For Everything, A Season. Livia Carrera is an Afro-Italian landscape painter who hasn’t touched a canvas since her father’s death, is overwhelmed by debt, and is desperate to escape her claustrophobic village. However, her most pressing concern is she spends all but one week a month cursed to live in her garden as a sentient olive tree.
During her rare weeks of humanity, she struggles to keep her double life a secret from a new romance with a Neapolitan writer while persuading her sorcerer ex-lover to undo his spell. The story explores belonging and community, how we are tied to the lands we call home, and what it means to build a fulfilling life in spite of (and in some ways, because of) a limiting condition.
For Everything, A Season is being revised as I seek representation and traditional publication. However, if you would like to read the companion artistic statement and research essay, it is available here. My artistic statement traces how my novel has evolved over the years, the site-based research I conducted in Ravello, Italy, and the intended themes my novel explores. The research essay was inspired by my Indigenous Research coursework and takes the form of a reflective research essay about the wendigo in popular culture as well as Indigenous stories, past and present. I got to channel my love of female transformation narratives and examine Indigenous approaches to stories as knowledge production.
Bernini’s sculpture of Apollo & Daphne
Honors & Grants
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This award is given by the faculty to graduate students who have done exceptional interdisciplinary work while at Gallatin. I got a gold stole during my hooding!
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“The Horn Family Fund for Environmental Research supports projects related to environmentalism, environmental studies, environmental activism.“ I had the great fortune to receive $3000 from the Horn Fund to visit two working olive tree farms in Sorrento and Ostuni. I got to ask dozens of pointed and unusual questions of Italian olive farmers to learn more about my protagonist. Learn more about this grant here.
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This grant awarded me $2500 to research For Everything, A Season. I traveled to Ravello on the Amalfi Coast, which serves as the model for the fictional setting of Santa Maddalena to do observational and experiential research, which was crucial to the worldbuilding of my novel. Learn more about this competitive grant here.
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Awarded to attend MCM Comic Con in 2023 and NYC Comic Con in 2025. Comic Con is a valuable resource for storytellers and creative professionals. This grant allowed me to travel to the conventions and follow the latest trends across the publishing, film & TV, and video gaming–all of which align well with my concentration. Plus, in 2025, I attended a 4-part continuing education session for legal professionals around AI and the publishing landscape.
Favorite projects
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Apart from my thesis, this is the work I am most proud of from my time at NYU Gallatin. As someone diagnosed with OCD, I was excited to share a presentation about one of the most accurate and heartfelt representations of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in media. The Channel 4 British dramedy “Pure,” based on Rose Cartwright’s memoir of the same name, follows a young woman with a little-known manifestation of OCD. I presented this analysis in an Abnormal Psychology Class to a room full of mental health counselling students in hopes of familiarizing them with the ways OCD can manifest. Check out the presentation (with clips) here and for the full essay analysis, click here.
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My first course as a graduate student was Nina Katchoudourian’s “What Do You Make, Why Do You Make It?” and it changed my relationship to my creativity for the better. For one assignment, I created a Dungeons and Dragons-esque version of my morning commute and had my class collectively play through it with the goal of getting me to work on time. Check out the character sheet for “Terri Pearse” and feel free to play along at home!
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I love games. I love games so much that I took two courses about narrative structure in video and computer games. My final project for my course was this playable, choice-based Twine game that may or may not have some basis in personal experience.
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To cap off the incredible graduate study abroad experience I had at NYU Florence, I used my final assignment in my Italian Cuisine and the Mediterranean Diet to make a podcast about one of my favorite genres of film: women going to Italy to find themselves. This 40-minute podcast explores how Eat Pray Love (2010), Love & Gelato (2022), and Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) use Italian cuisine in their storytelling and evaluates the accuracy of the representation of Italian food and cultural norms. Listen here or read the transcript!
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My first and final works for my class “Food in the Arts: Media” create a stark and strange conversation with each other. The first paper focuses on Emily in Paris the over-the-top Netflix TV series centering on a young American marketer’s fish-out-of-water adventures adjusting to life in Paris and her Sisyphean romance with a handsome French chef. I examine how the show portrays class and privilege, gender, and cultural divides through its use of food and wine. Read it here.
My final paper analyzed the real social media account of @renadfromgaza, a young Palestinian girl named Renad Attallah who documents her experiences and love of cooking despite the Gaza genocide. In this paper, I explore her use of semiotics and her impressive understanding of the political power of food as a means of identity expression and storytelling as an act of resistance. Read more here.
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We are in a golden age of narrative video gaming and for the better part of a year I was hooked on Bardur’s Gate 3. I would log off from work and play this game for 8 hours like it was a second full-time job, I loved it so much. I wrote this deep-dive exploration of how the game works through MDA aesthetic lenses.