Originally posted on FashionSchoolDaily.com

The Metropolitan Museum’s Manus x Machina – Fashion in an Age of Technology exhibition has been the blockbuster hit of the season. Sponsored by the Met’s Costume Institute, and curated by Andrew Bolton, it has demonstrated the rare ability to unite the two diverse fields of fashion and tech in a way that does justice to both.

So imagine the surprise of B.F.A. fashion design student Alyssa Watson when she found out that the project she had created had been selected for an exhibition of student work in conjunction with the show.

“Every semester in design, there’s a final project that’s a face off for a competition,’’ Watson explained.

“The Met project was on the idea of taking fashion and infusing it with technology. For the last couple of years, I’ve been extremely interested in 3-D printing, and fiber optics, as part of my designs. My project was inspired by the Arctic ice melting, black ice and the shapes created when ice melts.’’

After going through a laborious submission project, in which her work was evaluated by Simon Ungless, executive director of the School of Fashion and Gary Miller, director of Fashion Design, it was selected to be sent in to the Met student competition.

By Celeste Sunderland

What do Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen and Hollywood makeup artist Ve Neill have in common? They’re both strong women who know exactly what they want and won’t give up until they’ve got it—even when the odds aren’t in their favor. 

Back in the 1970s there wasn’t room for women in the film industry’s male dominated makeup department, but Neill wasn’t going to let that stop her. The Academy Award-winning trailblazer whose film credits include Pirates of the Caribbean, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, as well as The Hunger Games series, forged a career for herself on her own terms. With no mentors and no schools for makeup artists she took the logical next step and headed to a sci-fi convention where she met some guys dressed up as characters from Planet of the Apes.

By Dorothy O’Donnell

In just a few years, Academy of Art University’s Urban Knights Radio has grown from a little box in a room that no one knew about into a full-fledged station with an eclectic mix of shows and thousands of listeners. When School of Multimedia Communications instructor Matty Staudt joined the Academy to expand its radio program, he envisioned training students how to build and run a real station. With the help of a core group of freshman students who worked with him from the earliest days of the project, he achieved that goal. Staudt couldn’t be prouder of the five students who graduated last month and the legacy they’ve left the Academy: Casey Franco, Torina Giannetto, Lorena King, Kevin Rosenbaum and Elizabeth Sweeney. 

“Radio is now the cool spot where people want to be, because these students worked hard to create that kind of culture,” said Staudt. “Even after they completed around to produce shows and content. They didn’t have to do that—the classes were electives. They wanted to. This was their station and they cared about it. I helped launch it and mentored them, but the students ran Urban Knights Radio, which was always my goal.”