Jacqueline Ghosh - American Art and Culture
After graduating from UC Berkeley in Spring 2023, Jacqueline began work in Seoul and Tokyo as a freelance art director, collaborating on creative projects across design and fashion. Returning to the U.S. in 2024, she joined Vanguard Culture, a Southern California arts non-profit, where she writes on cultural events. By 2025, Jacqueline had established herself as a professional painter, producing intricate figurative and surrealist works that explore themes of racial and gender identity. Alongside her art practice, she is applying to Master of Architecture programs, with the goal of matriculating in Fall 2026, where she plans to expand her creative work into three-dimensional and architectural spaces.
Area of Concentration Courses
History of Art 185 - The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents
History of Art H110 - One American Life: Historical Facts-Artistic Fiction
English 174 - The 1970's
English C136 - American Culture in the Age of Obama
English 177 - Cults in Popular Culture
Thesis
Daphne and Apollo Revisited: Colonization, Rape, and the Brotherhood of White Supremacy
This thesis, Daphne and Apollo Revisited: Colonization, Rape, & The Brotherhood of White Supremacy, interrogates the enduring legacy of rape culture in America through the intertwined lenses of mythology, settler colonialism, and contemporary fraternity life. Drawing upon Ovid’s myth of Daphne and Apollo, I reinterpret the narrative as an allegory for sexual violence in the modern world. Ultimately I define the “Brotherhood of White Supremacy” as “powerful institutions, individuals, and social bodies that sustain the racial and gender hierarchy,” and argue that Greek Life is its chief manifestation.
The project is both scholarly and artistic: a 5’x4’ acrylic painting of Daphne’s metamorphosis, accompanied by a work of short fiction, reframes the myth to foreground the victim’s perspective while critiquing the male gaze and institutional complicity. My creative process, informed by Indigenous visual traditions and contemporary feminist art, reflects an aesthetic resistance to white patriarchal conventions.
Ultimately, this thesis asserts that rape is not an isolated act but a structural phenomenon embedded in American cultural and political life since colonization. Through art and narrative, I aim to reclaim the voice of survivors, challenge institutional silence, and expose the continuity between myth, history, and present-day realities of gendered and racialized violence.
