The Seventh Annual CUNY BA Student Showcase

The CUNY Graduate Center

May 5, 2026 at 5PM

William P. Kelly Skylight Room

If you can't join us in person, please join us virtually on Zoom.

Order of Events

Opening Remarks, 5 PM

Jody Clark Vaisman, Academic Director of CUNY BA

Andrew Acevedo (John Jay College), CUNY BA student and Master of Ceremony
Area of Concentration: Multimedia Storytelling
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Ashley Velez, English, John Jay College

Presentations, 5:10 PM

“Better Safe than Sorry”: Racialized and Queer Family Policing through Mandatory Reporting

Kilhah St Fort (Lehman College)
Area of Concentration: Science, Technology, and Society
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Larry Au, Sociology, City College

Burdens of Latina Dementia Caregiving

Karina Fernandez-Saito (Brooklyn College)
Area of Concentration: Ethics in Health and Culture
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Patricia Antoniello, Anthropology, Brooklyn College

Helldivers 2 and the Unity of an Online Community

Du Lam (Hunter College)
Area of Concentration: Game Narrative
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Nicholas Fortugno, Gaming Pathways, City College

Break Bread

Leah Aguirre (Baruch College)
Area of Concentration 1: Emerging Technology and Storytelling in Design
Area of Concentration 2: Music Production and Performance
Faculty Mentor:

INTERMISSION

Please explore the work of our gallerists, listed below, during intermission:

InsightFlow AI: Transforming Fragmented Business Data into Decision-Ready Systems

Raneem Abdelghafar (John Jay College)
Area of Concentration: Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Myles Bassell, Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship, Brooklyn College

Exquisite Humans

Glenn De La Cruz (Hunter College)
Area of Concentration: Art, Religion and Cultural Narratives
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Wendy Raver, Religion, Hunter College

Shrike: Performance turned Exploitation turned Rebellion

Cherry Leung (Baruch College)
Area of Concentration 1: Asian-American, LGBTQIA:
Mentor: Prof. Ramdass, English, Baruch College.
Area of Concentration 2: Psychopathology and Neuro
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Sitt, Psychology, Baruch College

Quantitative approach to martial arts: Combining pose estimation with behavioral annotations to analyze size mismatch effects in judo matches

Ken Pardo Torrijos (City College)
Area of Concentration: Neuroscience
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Jon Horvitz, Psychology, City College

Presentations and Q&A (continued)

Just Jesting: Women Aren't Funny (But Their Doctors Are)

Madeline Scrace (Hunter College)
Area of Concentration: Being Bodied: Faith, Sex, and Narrative Agency
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Wendy Raver, Religion, Hunter College

Education as Ideological Outreach: Soviet Influence in Guyana

Ronique Prince-Adams (Brooklyn College)
Area of Concentration 1: Political Philosophy
Area of Concentration 2: Africana Studies
Faculty Mentor:

Reticulum and the World of Mesh Networking

Mati Wysocki (Hunter College)
Area of Concentration: Liberation-Centered Cybersecurity
Faculty Mentor: Prof. David Arnow, Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College

Black Art Is Enhancing Black Student Morale, Visibility and Community Through Student-Led Arts Initiatives

Zara Ali Cimone Scott (Hunter College)
Area of Concentration 1: Integrative Nutritional Planning
Area of Concentration 2: Studio Art: Mixed Media
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Nicole Kras, Human Services, Guttman Community College

Closing Remarks, 6:45 PM

2026 Presenters

A woman in a beige coat and green sweater standing in dappled sunlight in front of a glass door.

Raneem Abdelghafar

Raneem Abdelghafar is a student specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing, with a strong focus on leveraging data-driven systems to improve business performance and decision-making. Through hands-on experience across marketing, sales, and operations, she has worked with performance metrics, analytics, and cross-functional workflows to support growth and execution. Her featured project, InsightFlow AI, was developed to address a common challenge in organizations: fragmented and inconsistent data. The system is designed to clean, standardize, and structure raw Excel data into reliable, dashboard-ready outputs for tools such as Microsoft Power BI, enabling clearer insights and more effective decision-making. Raneem is particularly interested in the intersection of AI, data analytics, and digital strategy, and is focused on building systems that transform raw data into actionable business intelligence.

A man in a bowler hat and a black short sleeve t shirt standing with his arms crossed in front of a white background.

Andrew Acevedo

Andrew Acevedo is a sexagenarian alum of Prison-to-College Pathways, a graduating CUNY BA student with Bachelor of Science degrees in Multimedia Storytelling and Journalism, a Thomas W. Smith Fellow and a member of Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society. He appeared in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice stage productions of Antigone-in-Progress and The Lysistrata Project. The Music, Multimedia, Theatre and Dance Department of Lehman College recently selected his short screenplay, Time for Sage Advice? as a film project, and his videography of a formerly incarcerated student, “Capers in Community Justice” can be found on the website of The John Jay Sentinel.

Portrait photo of a woman with round eyeglasses and long hair against a yellow background

Leah Aguirre

Leah Aguirre is a multi-business founder who worked with companies including Rolls-Royce, the NYPD, and Jameson. She returned to school to learn the skills to start a socially impactful business and is currently studying Business & Behavioral Science and Virtual Reality Development She was selected for a Change Makers student leadership grant of $3K to organize a cross-cultural event and elected as a CUNY BA University Committee Student Board Member. She’s also the co-founder and President of KOL club. This summer, she’ll be working as a Strategy Consultant at Monitor Deloitte.

Photo of a woman with a white button down shirt with blue vertical stripes against a grey background.

Glenn De La Cruz

Glenn De La Cruz is a CUNY BA student, studying art, religion, and cultural narratives. With a concentration in ceramics, their work explores how material practices reflect belief systems and storytelling.

Portrait photo of a woman with a white flower in her hair, leaning on her left elbow with her hand resting on her neck, against a brown brick background.

Karina Fernandez-Saito

Karina Fernandez-Saito (she/her) is a student of the 2026 class in the CUNY BA program, with her home campus being Brooklyn College. Through the CUNY BA program Karina was able to create an interdisciplinary degree, combining the sciences and humanities to design her major, Ethics in Culture and Health. The field of cognitive science influenced the trajectory of her major. Then branched into analyzing how cultural values and societal structures contribute to a person’s health and mind. Alongside building her major, Karina has conducted research examining the disproportionate responsibility of caregiving Latina women take on, and the burdens that result from assuming the role of dementia caregiving. Karina continues to broaden her knowledge about social injustices occurring throughout the world and hopes to devote her life to the well-being of marginalized groups.

Photo of a man with glasses, wearing a button-down shirt, in front of a blue background.

Du Lam

Du Lam is a Brooklyn-based game designer. He’s a soon-to-be Bachelor’s in Game Narrative in Hunter College under the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. He is also currently a part time SEEK peer mentor for 3 mentees in the SEEK program. Du has worked as a level designer, art project manager, and game designer on several game projects alongside his academic work. His showcase focuses on a game he frequently plays called Helldivers 2. In this, he’ll go over how Helldivers 2 impacts real world community and Unity.

Photo of a woman in a pink kimono posing with her open palms next to her face against a black background.

Cherry Leung

Cherry Leung is a senior at Macaulay Honors College, Baruch, with areas of concentration in Psychopathology and Neurodiversity, and “Queering Asians: Texts and Textures of othered identities,” the latter concerning intersections of Asian Studies, Gender Theory, and Literature. As a 2025 Critical Language Scholarship alumna for Japan and former environmental psychology researcher, she seeks not only to build connections through language and literature, but also to investigate how art is used to connect communities and rebuild post-environmental crises in East Asia. She hopes to explore how mental health strides have been made in East Asian countries and diaspora communities alike. Newly anointed as an opera enthusiast and student, her upcoming novel extracts from Breton folklore, the history of the Ballet and Opera, queer theory, psychoanalysis, theories of Orientalism, and the politics of performance. In the future, she plans to become a very good lyric soprano and attain a PhD in English Literature.

Photo of a woman in a blue dress with a black, green and orange academic stole on her shoulders, standing among pink flowers.

Ronique Prince-Adams

Ronique Prince-Adams is a junior at Brooklyn College in the CUNY BA program and the SEEK program studying Law & Government and Africana studies. Her interests includes exploring African diasporic communities and their presence and involvement in international spaces. Currently, Ronique is conducting research on education as ideological outreach as a method to strengthen and spread communism in Guyana. After studying abroad in Ghana, she became increasingly interested in relearning the histories of exchanges among the African diaspora and the rest of the world.

Photo of a woman with a black wide brim hat and a green jumpsuit, posing with two paintbrushes in her upturned right hand.

Zara Ali Cimone Scott

Zara Cimone is a multifaceted painter and interdisciplinary based in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in Avondale, Arizona, Zara is a student leader and soon-to-be graduate from Hunter College where she will receive her CUNY BA degree in Studio Art: Mixed Media & Integrative Nutrition Psychology. Since moving to New York in late 2022, Zara has participated in over 60 gallery exhibitions, has sold several original and custom artworks, and has taught painting and crafting in a variety of professional environments. In addition, Zara has spent each February at Hunter College producing & curating student art showcases for Black History Month in order to amplify Black vitality, ingenuity and community. Zara approaches life with joy, curiosity and imagination, and she plans continue uplifting Black folk through her artistic practice and in future dynamic realms.

A woman wearing a white shirt, sitting on a couch and leaning her head on her left arm while holding her right hand to the side of her face.

Madeline Scrace

Madeline Scrace (aka Madge) is an Australian born, Brooklyn based interdisciplinary writer, artist, and filmmaker, currently studying to become a sex therapist. Her work primarily centers chronic vulvovaginal and pelvic pain; an arena that is grossly under-researched, underfunded, and under-represented in medicine, art, politics and beyond. She is the writer, creator, and lead actor of MASHED: an award-winning limited television series based on her personal experiences with vaginismus. Outside of film, Madge works in ceramics to create artistic and totemic representations of vaginal dilators, sex toys, and gynecological tools and continues to research and write both academically and personally about all things gynecology, kink, pelvic health, intimacy, and vaginal iconography in religion. Her most recent collection of personal essays explores her relationship to kink and psychotherapy through the embodied lens of vaginal pain, excerpts of which have been performed at Joe’s Pub in the Public Theater in New York City. 1 in 4 people with vaginas are affected by chronic vulvovaginal pain. By creating artistic and educational content, Madge cultivates shameless discourse about and advocacy for chronic pelvic pain and sexual liberation. Her hope is that her work appears when you or your friend are alone and googling: “sex is painful”, “my vagina is broken”, “tampons feel like hitting a brick wall”. Representation matters. Learning about our bodies matters. Better education and representation of our pain and shame is demanded.

Portrait photo of a woman in a black blazer with a white button-down shirt against a white background.

Kilhah St Fort

Kilhah St Fort (they/she) studies Data, Technology & Society, which is focused on examining the sociopolitical implications of big data and other emerging technologies. In addition to technology policy, other areas of interest include Black feminism, the criminal legal system, Caribbean history, and LGBTQ issues. For her senior capstone, she has been working on an analysis of how mandatory reporting functions as a surveillance apparatus for Black queer families. When they’re not working on their studies, Kilhah enjoys reading, crocheting, making jewelry, sketching, rewatching Bob’s Burgers, and doomscrolling on Twitter.

A men in a grey blazer wearing a white button-down shirt in front of a darker grey background.

Ken Pardo Torrijos

Ken Pardo Torrijos is a junior neuroscience student at The City College of New York, also enrolled at Queens College through CUNYBA. A South Bronx native and lifelong wrestler, he brings a credible relationship with combat sports to his research. His work uses behavioral coding software (BORIS), R studio, and several other computational methods to quantify strategic patterns in elite judo competition, analyzing behavioral transitions and movement sequences across several years for the All Men Japan Judo Championships. Ken is affiliated with CCNY’s URSIE, CCAPP program, supported by AMSNY, and serves as President of the CCNY Neuroscience Club.

Mati Wysocki

Mati Wysocki is finishing her degree in liberation centric cybersecurity. She wants to address the massive inequality of resources in who gets to be safe in our physical and digital landscape, and wants to challenge the militarization of the security field and collaborate with friends and neighbors on the margins to build a more private and equitable infrastructure while fighting for a world free of prisons, policing, and racial capitalism.

What is the CUNY BA Student Showcase?

This event allows current CUNY BA students to showcase their work to the CUNY community. CUNY BA students explore a wide range of research interests, and together, their works represent a mosaic rarely found at the undergraduate level.

This event is also an essential professional development experience. Student presenters receive helpful support and practice sessions in preparation for the Showcase. The Showcase is a platform for students to share their work and offers a greater sense of community across the CUNY BA program.

Check out the recordings from previous CUNY BA Student Showcases on the CUNY BA Youtube channel.