Breanna (she/her) is a senior double-majoring in Human Rights and Individualized: Media, Policy, and Social Movements. Her research interests center around social movement strategies for creating social change, specifically in marginalized communities. She is especially interested in the ways that digital media, art, and journalism influence these strategies for contemporary movements.

During her sophomore year at UConn, she became an Undergraduate Research Fellow for the Humanities Institute. Her year-long project consisted of exploring intersectional invisibility relating to Black Women in social movements. She created an interactive website under the supervisor of Dr. Evelyn Simien as her dissemination.

Her junior year, she was accepted into the BOLD Scholars program, in which she studies art and policy-based interventions to gun violence in the United States. Under the supervision of Dr. Jose Falconi, she researched art-based processing curriculums for social change as well as community-based interventions to gun violence. During her junior year summer, she interviewed top scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and community organizations to create an art-based retreat for survivors of gun violence. She led this retreat in Kansas City and Boston, as well as visiting Chicago to work with organizations.

This fall, she will be working on her BOLD project dissemination by curating exhibits of the artwork created by gun violence survivors. She also intends to complete her senior thesis in partnership with UnCornered and the Well-being Access and Belonging Lab (WeLab) to explore community perceptions of public safety and gun violence.

After completing her undergraduate degree, she intends to pursue graduate education researching public safety and social movement research methodology, or to work for a non-profit organization doing community participatory action research (PAR).