The impacts of climate change in the form of more frequent and severe disasters around the world have finally begun to take the spotlight, and we are being forced to think critically about how we prepare ourselves and our communities for more sustainable futures. Everyone has a role to play in mitigating the impacts of climate change. This workshop is designed to introduce students to the avenues by which they can make an impact in combating the climate crisis, both personally in their communities and professionally in the future.
We take a system approach in evaluating climate change, past disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and preparedness for future events. Students work in groups to create preparedness plans for live case studies to be presented virtually to Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. They also participate in an exercise in which they adopt stakeholder profiles of their choosing in a simulation of disaster response and recovery.
The Athena Summer Innovation Institute is an intensive, 3-week boot camp that provides young women with the practical skills and knowledge they need to develop ideas that will make a difference in the world. Students will work in teams to create a new venture — start-up businesses, non-profit organizations, or advocacy campaigns — that have the power to disrupt traditional ways of doing things and create lasting change.
This course will give you the empowering tools to recognize a creative idea in your imagination, and use the medium of screenwriting to make it come to life. You will write, workshop, or refine your voice as a screenwriter, while watching films that will inspire and challenge you. We will explore the foundations of three-act structure, beat sheets, and the Young Hero’s Journey, before interrogating how to best tell stories in our own way. Throughout this course, we will explore questions like: What makes a great opening scene you can’t turn off? How can genres like science fiction or horror enhance a story about the human experience? How do we uplift our personal experiences through memoir writing? We will study almost a dozen films, widely varied in style and approach, but almost all of them exclusively made by and starring women. In addition to classroom screenings, we will make use of incredible opportunities across New York City; past field trips have included the Museum of Modern Art and the Metrograph Theater. By the end of the course, you will have written 3-4 short screenplays. Between watching, discussing, and writing, this course is an all-encompassing love letter to film and women’s place in it.