About

My name is Lauren Sullivan. I'm a graduating senior majoring in Cinema and Media Studies and minoring in drawing at the University of Southern California. I have a wide variety of interests relating to art and storytelling, from comics to children's book illustration to character design and animation. In my free time I like to explore a number of artistic hobbies; beyond drawing and painting, I enjoy cake decoration and pastry art, embroidery, special effects makeup and drag makeup, face charts, production design, and set decoration.

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I'm from the Seattle area and grew up attending Catholic school. My paternal grandparents are Irish Catholic from the Bronx and Harlem and my maternal grandfather grew up in West Seattle. My project will focus primarily on the life of my maternal grandmother, who was born in Manila in 1938, and her life prior to coming to the United States at the age of sixteen. As a kid, I saw my maternal grandparents virtually every day. They lived with us for a short period during my young childhood before moving into a house a short walk up the street from mine. We would eat dinner at their house or they would eat at mine most days of the week. My grandma always worked to share the customs she believed were important for me to know, the most important being strong lumpia making skills, but she rarely voluntarily spoke of her childhood or her Filipino identity at length, except maybe when I prodded her with questions for a school project. Outside my family, I didn't know too many Filipinos and, paired with the total absence of Filipinos from any mainstream American media, this limited my understanding of Filipino America just to my grandma. For this project, I wanted to look more into my family history in a personal and creative way, learn more about Filipino history and Filipino America as a whole, and try to figure out exactly why Filipinos have always been so invisible in American media.