Shayla Brown

Historical dramas may be nothing new to the theater, but an original opera based on a landmark Supreme Court Civil Rights case? Rick Davis knew this was something different. After learning that Virginia Opera was planning to stage their new opera, Loving v. Virgina—based on the historic Supreme Court case striking down a Virginia law that banned interracial marriage—Davis seized the unique opportunity for his students. 

At the 2024 Best of Film at George Mason showcase, film and video studies major James Bah screened his music video, The Show, which he directed for rapper Bobby Feeno, also known as former NFL running back Arian Foster.

Only five years after graduating from George Mason University, alumna Rhyan Elliott, Film and Video Studies ’20, was recently a production supervisor for the five-time Oscar-winning film Anora (2024), directed by Sean Baker.

Growing up, George Mason University senior Haila Salaheddine was not a big fan of going to the dentist. “I was initially very fearful of the dentist. When I was living in Lebanon, there wasn’t really preventative care for oral hygiene,” said Salaheddine, a community health major.

When George Mason University junior Megan Miller toured the Prince William-Manassas Regional Adult Detention Center, she didn’t realize she was being interviewed for an internship position. 

Based on their years of research studying how student-athletes move, George Mason University bioengineering professors Parag Chitnis and Siddhartha Sikdar have created a start-up called Myokinetics LLC with the goal of providing personalized rehabilitation programs for injured athletes.

This spring, George Mason University Professor Al Fuertes traveled to Rwanda to facilitate workshops for former victims and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan mass genocide.

The new College of Visual and Performing Arts special topics course AVT 496 focuses on furniture design and is offered through the university’s School of Art. As a part of the course, the students will tour the National Gallery of Art and put what they’ve learned to practice by identifying and recommending ways to create a more welcoming environment for people to experience the art.

George Mason University alumna Rebecca Wahls’ directorial debut film Him centers on the last five contestants of a reality dating show, who discover that their potential “soulmate” isn’t what he seems to be.

George Mason professor Sungsoo Ray Hong has always been a huge fan of cartoons, comics, and animations. By combining his passion with his research area of human-computer interaction, he has created a new tool for cartoonists, ShadowMagic.

Hong, his colleague Yotam Gingold, and their PhD students published a paper, “ShadowMagic: Designing Human-AI Collaborative Support for Comic Professionals’ Shadowing,” elucidating the need for the tool, which aims to boost product quality and designer productivity through study-informed human-AI interaction.