2021 Graduate Achievement Award recipient
As a student on the documentary track, Leus studies film and culture in the South. Her MA thesis, “What Remains: Telling the Story of Irene Taylor’s Murder,” is a six-part podcast accompanying a written paper examining a 1939 murder in her hometown of Altheimer, Arkansas. The project combines analysis of Southern landscapes, racial ideologies, mental health, and violence using rich description and thorough research.
“One of the most impactful things i’ve learned in this program is the idea of looking at landscape and region as a text that can be read—whether that’s through learning about the environmental history of a place or by contextualizing it through documentary or other research. Everything has a history and a context, even if that history and context have been erased or obscured.”