New Haven, Connecticut

1st Year

H Alex—who planned to study photography at Sarah Lawrence—wasn’t able to take a photography class until second semester. In the meantime, however, courses in mathematics, philosophy and Chinese studies kept him more than stimulated. "Every semester since," he says, "I have taken a mathematics course and/or a philosophy course, which has greatly informed my artistic process in ways I never would have expected."

2nd Year

Alongside a fiction workshop and courses in photography and the history of mathematics, a philosophy course called The Greeks exposed H Alex to "the greatest Western minds and writers of the third and fourth centuries B.C.E." and introduced him to the ideas of public and private personae in Plato’s Republic—ideas that would later influence his photography.

"I truly believe that Sarah Lawrence offers the finest education in the country.
I have grown in ways I did not know were possible."

3rd Year

In Advanced Photography, H Alex applied concepts of spatial relations he had learned in a first-year course on discrete mathematics, in which he had studied the tessellation artwork of M. C. Escher. He also made studio portraits at the biannual Sarah Lawrence dances, "further exploring the duality of the public and private identities."

4th Year

An independent study project that involved "photographing architectural spaces where public settings appear as private places" led to a solo show at Sarah Lawrence’s Heimbold Visual Arts Center. The project, which drew on H Alex’s readings of Freud and Foucault in his First-Year Studies seminar Psychology of Sexuality, was "truly a culmination of my studies at Sarah Lawrence."

Sample Courses:

Chinese Cinemas Past and Present
History of Elementary Mathematics from Pythagoras to Newton
Advanced Photography
Chinese Philosophy and Social Practice
Googling the Telecosm: The Internet, the Web and the Future of Information
Photographing Tension: Private Spaces in Public Places

Extracurricular Involvement:

Residential adviser
Intern in graphic and Web design with a motion graphic agency, New York City
Event assistant and chairman, Programming Board
Teaching assistant, color and advanced photography classes
Founder, Games Night club