Mad Grad Scholarship

My name is Micheli Oliver and I am a photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer, writer and hobbyist painter and sketcher. Everything that I do in this life revolves around two things, art and story. I feel drawn to telling stories with art, my medium is motion picture and stills, but I find value in the sharing of the human experience with all forms of art. My personal story began as a little kid, feeling like many kids do, a complete misfit. I remember watching a Christmas movie and seeing the island of misfit toys and feeling akin to them in many ways. As a kid I began to read fantasy books, write stories and paint, it made me feel connected to a world I could imagine, a world where misfits fit in and where you can be anything you want to be. I wrote story after story of a magical world where a misfit kid found their way home. I painted with swirls and bright colors imagining a place that was bright and joyful. The art of creative writing and painting brought me closer to myself and soon I found that what I needed was an outlet for imagination. Imagining a better and more just future through story became my goal and a career soon began to unfold. I got the opportunity to tell stories through the imagery of people with bright imaginations and radical passions for a better world. I told stories with Indigenous leaders, Black activists, Queer spokespeople and everyone in between. As a queer person, myself, I began to feel a little less misfit in this world through my career and the stories and images I was given the privilege to create. With that old Christmas story in mind, my tagline for much of my professional works has been "misfit stories of truth and joy." I live by that sentence and the stories I work to create focus on just that the misfit stories that are not often told that highlight truth, whether it's ugly or not and the joy that we preserve to find. With my photography work, I've meshed together art and activism, story and beauty, technology and environment. Each photo I make and film I dream up, is designed to show the beauty of the human experience and our deep connection to the world around us. Through story and art, I want to bring people back to the land, disconnected kids to the mountains, and mentally ill folks to the ocean, I want to highlight how much people rely on place and the earth. With my design degree, I hope to step into the world of creative design and story producing for major motion pictures. I want to research the ways we have cultivated inherent bias through media and then change that bias through informed media and design choices. I want to work toward films that make misfit kids feel as if they fit and make artistic media that makes the world a better place. More specifically it is my dream to produce stories like the movie "Whale Rider" a story of Indigenous resistance and non-conformity. Currently, I'm working on a short documentary that is called "Selkie" which is the story of a mixed-ethnicity woman in Scotland who is a cold water surfer. This story is exactly the kinds of stories I want to tell, those that revolve around misfit people, with many intermixed identities connecting with the world around them.

My name is Aaron Mentzer, a cartoonist/illustrator and designer from Pennsylvania. From an early age, I've had the goal of working in the arts professionally, creating images, stories, and characters, taking concepts from my mind and making them real, and visual, something that can be absorbed and experienced by others. Writing, cartooning, designing, visual arts, these are things I can't live without, and want to share with others, creating stories and characters that can entertain others, tell tales that resonate with them and inspire their imaginations, to express what's in my mind to the world at large. A goal of mine is to create a studio, to partner with other artists and creatives like myself to make their ideas, their stories, and their art visible to the world to tell the tales they want to tell and to express visually interesting and compelling narratives. This can be anything from short gag strips to comic books on the stands full-blown graphic novels in the printed form, and animation and storyboards in the animated form. Fiction, however, is not all I have an interest in, as other commercial avenues of art interest me and that I've had past experience with, which I wish to continue pursuing. One such example would be morale patch designs, sticker designs, and general artwork created for and with the intent of supporting public services, like Emergency Medical Services and other such first responder groups, medical professionals, and humanitarian aid organizations. And on the small scale, teaching and instructing others, helping them along their artistic journies, is something that I've had a recent interest in, tutoring some of my peers to help them in their studies. Currently, I'm attending The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, a trade school focused on training students in commercial art, sequential art, painting, comic book production, and elements of graphic design and storytelling. I'm in my second year of the three-year curriculum, preparing to enter my third year in the fall. My third year will be my most important and is key to entering the creative field, preparing my portfolio, meeting with professionals in the field, and gearing up to enter the workforce. Part of maximizing my opportunities to expand my creative avenues and pursue the goals that I wish to accomplish includes having the financial liberty to explore riskier ventures, and not play it safe with my goals and aims. Accomplishments are built on risk, but the reward is always worth the gamble, and the potential of failure. Better to pursue a goal and falter than never try.