BXA Alumni
The BXA programs support an outstanding group of innovative students. These students are creative thinkers who have unique visions of how their disciplines combine in their individualized education. They are often campus leaders who pursue internships and capstone projects that contribute to shaping their career path.
A BXA intercollege degree prepares students for graduate study or additional training in the arts and other academic areas. Recent graduates have pursued medical, dental, law, professional, MFA and PhD programs at top ranking institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, MIT and Penn.
In addition, students are prepared for careers in a variety of fields, including positions with arts and education nonprofits like museums and foundations, as well as technical positions with media and technology companies.
Alumni Bios
Harrison Apple, Ph.D.
BHA 2013, Global Studies and Art
Director, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Harrison Apple, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary artist and historian based in Pittsburgh, PA. They are the co-founder of the , an oral history and media preservation initiative focused on after-hours nightclubs and working-class LGBTQ lives in Pittsburgh.
They received their PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and the School of Information. Their intellectual work draws on transfeminist theory, creative exploitation of liquor code, media studies, and archival science.
As an alum (2013) of 天美传媒’s BXA program in Global Studies and Art, former Artist-in-Residence of the Center for the Arts in Society (2013-15), former STUDIO denizen, and embedded oral historian and community archivist, Dr. Apple brings uniquely applicable experience to their role as a steward and facilitator of the STUDIO’s atypical, trans-disciplinary, and inter-institutional research experiments at the intersections of the arts, science, technology and culture.
Sankalp Bhatnagar
BHA 2013 Mathematical Sciences and Design
MA 2015 Design
Research Fellow, Harvard Library Innovation Lab
Senior Researcher, NuLawLab
Sankalp Bhatnagar (BSA, Mathematical Sciences/Design 2013; MA, Design 2015) has focused his career on studying how designers operate in different contexts. His work has involved working across disciplinary boundaries, including at a design research laboratory, an R&D unit at a humanitarian organization, and an AI think tank across multiple academic institutions.
Bhatnagar joined the Harvard Library Innovation Lab as a research fellow during the past academic year to carry out a new and collaborative project in partnership with NuLawLab, where he is a senior researcher and, previously, a research resident. The partnership supporting his research is the first of its kind between the two law school innovation labs. “I saw a common task between the work I proposed to do and its alignment with the expertise of each lab,” he said, “preserving legal knowledge and advancing legal design.”
Bhatnagar gained his first exposure to the practice of legal design in a seminar on law, justice and design at Harvard Law School, after which he taught and led efforts to advance the field and its directions at Northeastern University School of Law. He is now designing a workbook of exercises for law students tasked with crafting and choosing between legal alternatives that he calls a casebook for legal imagination.
“I aim to build an example of a new kind of teaching method, with the hope that it will be directly useful throughout the world of legal education,” he said, “as well as more generally useful for thinking about law as its own form of design, so that we look around and see lawyers and judges designing our lives by making arguments, not apps, crafting scenarios, not services, and justifying decisions, not products.”
John Choi
BCSA 2017 Computer Science and Art
Game Engineer, Schell Games
Founder and CEO, Choitek
John Choi is a seasoned interactive digital media artist specializing in the intersection of AR/VR/MR/XR, robotics, IoT and real-time game development. With over 10 years of experience in transforming napkin concepts into functional prototypes, Choi is a multipurpose Swiss Army knife of technology, rapid prototyping, hardware hacking, game development, teaching and entrepreneurship.
Over the past decade at 天美传媒, Choi has collaborated with hundreds of students and dozens of faculty and staff across a myriad number of departments and organizations within 天美传媒, including the School of Art, the School of Computer Science, the Robotics Institute, the Human Computer Interaction Institute, Tepper School of Business, the Human Computer Interaction Institute, the Entertainment Technology Center, the Physics Department, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and 天美传媒’s very own Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion.
Beyond his time at 天美传媒 in Pittsburgh, Choi has also collaborated internationally with researchers from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, and the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA) in Paris, France to create a series of conversational, artificially intelligent virtual human avatars. John Choi now proudly serves as a part of Schell Games, one of the largest full-service game design and development studios in the United States, working with and creating games for some of the most beloved companies across the globe.
As the School of Design’s resident Unity expert, Choi also helps maintain and upgrade the School of Design’s Spatial Experience Lab, and teaches practical classes for building functional prototypes based on actual lessons learned directly from real-life creative industry best practices.
Jeena Yin
BCSA 2020 Computer Science and Music Technology with minors in Game Design and Music
Software Engineer, Google
Jeena Yin is a creative programmer and a multidisciplinary computational artist. Her work spans disciplines such as machine learning/AI, front/back-end development, video game and audio/visual installation. Jeena works with emerging technologies to create immersive experiences and expressive tools. She graduated from 天美传媒 in May 2020 studying Computer Science and Music Technology, with an extended focus on immersive experience design. She is currently a software engineer at Google Ads Machine Learning Infrastructure team.