Breanna Bruner, Art History’s Renaissance Woman

Art History undergraduate Breanna Bruner brings a unique set of artistic skills to her academic life and her employment in the Media Center, and she has put those skills to work in a remarkably productive year. Bruner entered FSU in the spring of 2015 with a background in fine arts, music, and art history, and a special talent for filmmaking.  Her fascination with digital media led to an impressive self-taught expertise. Over the past year, she has produced five videos for the Departments of Art History and Art, including documentaries of student exhibition installations, a promotional ad for a new e-series course, and a short film about the annual Art History Graduate Symposium.  At the same time, she has been developing individual films and art projects for her own coursework, writing a succesful grant for a summer film project in Italy, and applying to the Digital Media program, which she will enter in the fall of 2016 as a double major in Art History and Digital Media Production.

Breanna will spend most of the summer of 2016 at the FSU Study Center in Florence, Italy participating in both summer sessions of the FSU IP Florence Program.  She will also be working on an individual research project for which she received an IDEA Grant from the FSU Center for Undergraduate Research: a documentary film about the students and faculty of the inaugural FSU Study Abroad program in Florence fifty years ago, who participated in the cleanup of the great Florence flood of 1966.  In her proposed film, Mud Angels Recovered: FSU’s First Year in Florence, Bruner plans to relate the unique and often difficult experiences of that first dedicated group of FSU Florence study students with the experiences of a new generation of students studying abroad.

Bruner was also nominated for the FSU Student Employee of the Year Award, thanks to her tireless dedication to her work in the Art History Media Center.  She joined the department in the summer of 2015 as the only undergraduate employee, taking on a variety of projects from rearranging shelves in the Art & Design Library to preparing images and articles for instructional databases.  In her primary job as photographer and videographer of department events, Breanna has gone above & beyond, participating behind the scenes in every occasion and providing outstanding documentation and promotion of Art History’s programs, social events, lectures, and exhibitions.

Below, a sample of Bruner’s films:

A documentary of the Art History fall 2015 Museum Object class exhibition This is How it Happened:

ExtraStateCraft, compiled for a class exhibition developed in the Department of Art’s Print+Media course taught by Joelle Dietrich:

Apocalypse, The End of the World in Art, a promotional video for a new e-series course taught by Rick Emmerson:

And Red Hills Horse Trials 2015, a personal creative project: