ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaynes explores how artistic and particularly surrealist expressions of oral histories can enhance empathic connections between oral historians, narrators, and readerships in ways that help narrators’ voices “travel” across time and space. Her approach prioritizes active collaboration with narrators who can offer a “peculiar” angle on popular histories, namely angles in which non-elite members of society reflect on invisible aspects of their environment.
Gaynes teaches undergraduate and graduate students in cross-cultural studies to write for academia, and also trains them to devise public-facing narratives that impact public knowledge. She finds across academic disciplines that scholars are hungry for creative tools for presenting their research. She would like to work with research facilitators, and potentially their participants, in strategizing the completion of creative projects that evoke cross-cultural understanding through mixed-media storytelling.
Gaynes hopes to facilitate adult trainings and continuing education courses that propel aspirations of people from all backgrounds. She firmly believes that everyone has a creative research-based project within them; sometimes we just need community support, and often the nudge of a deadline, to help those creative dreams become realities. As a life-long learner who finds purpose in a sense of wonder, she hopes to share that wonder is positively contagious and essential for personal growth. Her greatest passion is in helping adults realize creative and intellectual capacities they never thought possible and in building communities around the idea that our world's greatest gifts come through small creative acts.
SERVICE & COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
AWARdS
& GRANTS
2022 - present: Vounteer application advisor, proposal editor, academic writing instructor, editor and proofreader for Indonesian Scholars at activist think tank, Institute for Research, Governance, and Social Change (IRGSC) in Kupang, Indonesia
2022 - present: Volunteer Editor and Proofreader for Indonesian Scholars at High Seminary of
Ledalero (STFK) Maumere, Indonesia
2022: Volunteer Editor and Proofreader for Indonesian Scholars at Widya Mandira Catholic
University (UNWIRA) Kupang, Indonesia
2019- present: Volunteer Administrative and Studio Assistant at Fine Art Print Press (Josephine
Press and Christopher John Gallery) in Santa Monica, CA
2019: US fundraising representative for turtle-saving nonprofit (Sahabat Penyu Loang) in Lembata, ID
20224-2025 FLAS Dissertation Year Writing Grant, UCLA’s Center for SoutheastAsian Studies
2022-23 FLAS Dissertation Year Grant, UCLA’s Center for Southeast
Asian Studies
2021-22 Graduate Research Mentorship, UCLA Graduate Division
2021 Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA Graduate Division
2021 Dean’s General Fund Scholarship, School of Arts and Architecture, UCLA
2019-21 Summer Travel Grant for Research in Indonesia, UCLA’s Center for Southeast
Asian Studies
2019-20 Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award, UCLA’s Department of WAC/D
2013-15 Shansi Teaching Fellowship, Oberlin Shansi Memorial Foundation in partnership with
Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Decolonizing Academia
Gaynes's first dive into visual pictorials began upon receiving a fellowship to teach college in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta for two years between 2013-2015. During her first weeks living in Indonesia, she began sketching in response to prompts from the book Drawing on the Right side of the Brain. In addition to teaching Gaynes to communicate with images, the process of illustrating helped her see shape and shadow where they had previously been invisible.
While Gaynes primarily identifies herself as a writer, she explores the powers of mixed-media storytelling to try and help narrators in her cultural research travel across time and space. She is interested in how the craft of narrativizing human struggle, both monumental and mundane, can help people otherwise divided feel part of a shared visceral experience.
Gaynes' PhD dissertation, a 350 compendium of visual vignettes accompanying verbatim oral history transcriptions, addresses how indigenous islanders heal social crises after periods of violence, and how traumas linger in imaginations long after rituals of social reconciliation conclude. Drawing inspiration from James Clifford’s conception of “ethnographic Surrealism” (1981) as a tool for oral historians, and also from Miriam Hirsch’s call for visual renderings of “post-generational memory”, she employs comics—combining fine-art printmaking, photography, color illustration, and verbatim oral histories—to access visceral aspects of oral histories that cannot be filmed, photographed, or expressed in words. She proposes that artistic-symbolic expressions of oral histories enhance empathic connections between oral historians and narrators and can expose complex historical factors that enable violence. In platforming indigenous wisdoms alongside the assets of community-based justice systems, Gaynes crafts immersive narratives at the intersections of oral history, cultural studies, justice, and visual art.
