MFA Visual Narrative Program

We're excited to welcome to MFAVN faculty! India will be teaching Storytelling Through the Moving Image: Friday Film Series alongside Angelina Ding and Srobana Bhattacharya.

India Lombardi-Bello is an artist, podcaster, and educator from rural Upstate New York, currently based in Brooklyn. Her creative practice encompasses drawing, experimental animation, and writing to explore multispecies connectivity, her Italian-American heritage, healing modalities, and liminality. ��Her podcast THE ANIMATOR'S FRIEND creates a platform where animators get to talk about themselves outside the context of their work. A questionnaire format, inspired by the 24 frames per second of animation, allows for personal, lighthearted, and unexpected conversation.��As an educator, she offers a holistic approach to teaching writing, story/creative development, professional development, film, animation, and sound.��

We’re excited to welcome to MFAVN faculty! Angelina will be teaching Storytelling Through the Moving Image: Friday Film Series

Angelina Ding works in film, animation, and design to examine how we share, gather, and remember as we move through land and history.

You can find her credits in films, artwork, and digital content featured in Anthology Film Archives, The Criterion Channel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, FAR-NEAR Magazine, Behind the Blinds Magazine, and SSENSE.

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Over the course of the summer, students from the Class of ’27 developed one common narrative as a class. With a focus on how language and sound can be used as imagery to achieve narrative goals, the students worked in pairs to tell the entire story through multiple podcast segments. Each segment tells one part of the story—taking it through beginning, middle, and end. While these segments must link into one cohesive narrative, the groups could design their podcast segments in whatever style they chose.

Follow along at: https://mfavisualnarrative.sva.edu/blog/scouts-honor-a-narrative-writing-podcast-27-with-anna-eveslage-instructor/

Art by Drew Bullock '27 ( .hats )

We're excited to welcome .b to MFAVN faculty! Srobana will be teaching Power of Story.

Srobana Bhattacharya is an educator, oral historian and visual storyteller with a passion for graphic novels. She works on themes of memory, connection and belonging. Her stories and images explore relationships moving through time and space and finding and rediscovering the self in everchanging landscapes.��

We're excited to welcome to MFAVN faculty! Shelby will be teaching Storyteller as Brand.

Shelby Hipol is a VP, Graphic Designer at Lazard Asset Management, where she helps develop and implement the firm's branding across key product launches, events and campaigns. She started her career in advertising, designing activations and campaigns for consumer brands like General Mills and New Balance but has since evolved her practice to focus on co-creating impactful design solutions alongside other designers and stakeholders.� �Outside of Lazard Asset Management, Shelby also collaborates with various teams from the Research Foundation of CUNY with whom she works with teams of academic researchers, using design thinking to create public health interventions alongside care providers, local organizations and community members. She has a Master's in Food Studies from New York University, through which her focus is on food as a medium for telling stories and expressing one's history and identity.��

🎓 Congrats Class of 2026!! Our MFAVN third-years have one more summer intensive session ahead, but yesterday they walked the stage at Radio City Music Hall during SVA’s commencement ceremony. We’re so proud of you all! Hope everyone’s feeling pumped to be back on campus soon! 🎉

🎓 Congrats Class of 2026!! Our MFAVN third-years have one more summer intensive session ahead, but yesterday they walked the stage at Radio City Music Hall during SVA’s commencement ceremony. We’re so proud of you all! Hope everyone’s feeling pumped to be back on campus soon! 🎉

community storytelling storytellers gradschool

Every year we invite guest artists, editors, directors, and the like (based on the form, industry, and media of each student), to be guest thesis reviewers for the student’s final thesis review and critique. We are so grateful to these creative professionals for sharing their knowledge, time, and expertise with our community!

A huge thank you to !

“I am an artist, writer, and educator based out of Baltimore. I working primarily in alternative comics, and am the author of the graphic novel Testament, the collection series Solace County, and a lot of zines like Good Girl Laika. I like stormy weather but I don't like the leak in my roof.”
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Every year we invite guest artists, editors, directors, and the like (based on the form, industry, and media of each student), to be guest thesis reviewers for the student’s final thesis review and critique. We are so grateful to these creative professionals for sharing their knowledge, time, and expertise with our community!

A huge thank you to Clara Fernandez-Vara !

Clara Fernández-Vara is an Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. She is a media scholar as well as a game designer and writer. She has worked on commercial projects at an international level for organizations such as Warner Bros., the Spanish National Ballet, Big Fish Games, and Die Gute Fabrik among others. As an academic, her main research interests are the narrative design of detective games as well as videogame history/ Her book, Introduction to Game Analysis, now in its third edition, is one of the key textbooks in the field of game studies.
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🎉 Last week we were proud to host our new students in an online orientation session where they got to meet each other for the first time, put faces to names of Staff, and learn about the semester ahead! We can’t wait to see you all this summer and officially get things rolling in June. 💻📚💫