The Mary-El tarot deck is famous in the tarot community for its intense spiritual power and esoteric imagery. By analyzing its major arcana and investigating the symbology featured therein, for purposes of making the deck accessible to others, I discover a rich world of flowing energies and underlying transcendence. I've used writing to document my journey and discoveries of the internal self. I present these writings as my thesis, and I demonstrate my understanding of the cards through tarot readings.

For my Barrett Thesis Project, I completed a total rewrite of the feature-length screenplay I wrote for my Herberger Senior Project. This process constituted completing a full analysis of my original work with my Thesis Director and Second Reader, discussing character motivation, thematic throughlines, story logic, and realism in dialogue. This initial analysis caused me to almost entirely rewrite the original script, adjusting dialogue, sequences of events, pacing and character work.
The majority of this rewrite was spent on fine-tuning character and motivation, strengthening them in some cases and changing them entirely in others. I really strove to emphasize the relationships they had with each other and how the situations and connections affected the state of mind, therefore leading to the chain of events that happened in the script in a much more natural way. I also worked to emphasize certain story elements that benefited the characters and thematic content, specifically my protagonist’s struggle with schizophrenia. In this draft, I turned that character trait into a visual element, which I believe further heightened the visual and emotional stakes of the story and gave the characters an increased sense of motivation and struggle. In this draft I also worked to break down the stereotype connected with my secondary protagonist, a sex worker. Instead of emphasizing her strength and beauty, as many action films with a strong/sexualized woman in a supporting role do, I adjusted her story arc to break her stereotype (and her character) down throughout the story. I wanted to depict her as a person with flaws that extend beyond her choice of profession, though the latter certainly did not help. I believe that the final product succeeds in both main goals.
While working on this rewrite, I also completed a script edit journal that detailed the significant changes in action, pacing or dialogue I made and what my reasoning was behind them.

The Vietnam War had a lasting effect on both the men and the women who served. While there appears to be plenty of research on how the war impacted the lives of the men, there is very little publicity given to how the war impacted the women, despite the extensive documentation in the forms of oral histories and studies. By looking at oral histories and various studies on different aspects of service, such as PTSD, experience, combat exposure, and gender in the conflict, this study recognizes the gaps in the examination of the nurse's experiences in Vietnam. It strives to contribute to the process of forming a more comprehensive study of how the war impacted the women who served. This study will answer the following questions: How did the experiences of the Vietnam War change the lives of the women who served as nurses? What struggles did they face while in service and when they returned home? How did the war impact them psychologically and, thus, change their behavior? Since the majority of the women who served were Army medical personnel, this study will focus on that population. This study begins with an investigation of their prewar lives, their reasons for joining the Army Nurse Corps, and their experiences in basic training. It analyzes their services in Vietnam by examining their experiences, gender roles, and working conditions. Finally, it explores the impact of the war on their lives, through an analysis of their homecoming, the controversy of Agent Orange, and PTSD. It shows how many of these factors would overlap with their experiences, causing trauma and a change in the behavior of these women. In many cases, the nurses changed from innocent and sheltered to depressed, angry, and struggling with their memories. Their experiences before, during, and after the war changed their perceptions of the world and themselves, resulting in increased anxiety, the need for adrenaline, and isolationist behaviors. The war was indiscriminate, and therefore, had a similar impact on both the men and women involved.

Over the course of my undergraduate experience, I have grown significantly as an artist - developing an assortment of strengths in a variety of cinematic disciplines ranging from screenwriting and producing to post-production and cinematography. All the while, I have been giving back to the Sun Devil community by serving in a number of leadership positions around campus which exposed me to a plethora of communities differ from my own. The combination of these experiences allows me to continuously explore new passions in synergy with my art. Two of these standing as the concept of live performance and the work of William Shakespeare. Through this exploration of artistic synergy, I have experimented with integrating the works of the Bard of Avon into the realm of cinema. From the beginning of 2105, I have been drafting a feature-length screenplay which serves as a quasi-prequel to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Under the title of A Kingdom or a Cure, it tells the story of the revolutionary war-hero Miguel Prosperiti as he struggles to save his daughter form a mysterious disease which has baffled the best medical minds while the country he has rebuilt comes crumbling down in post-apocalyptic Italy. Deposed and left to die at the hands of his brother, Miguel must defend his child from the evil witch Sycorax who attempts to kill the pair in order to feed off of their suffering and prolong her own life. Serving to fill the requirements for the Film and Media Production Capstone, A Kingdom or a Cure reimagines the world of Shakespeare's play and creates a new context for the words and actions of its leading characters. Such stands as the foundation of what I have created for what I have created as my applied project - a stylistic re-imagining of William Shakespeare's The Tempest which draws from multiple interpretations of the narrative to be performed as a piece within a larger theatrical presentation staged with only the classical techniques which stand contemporary to the Bard of Avon. The remainder of this document shall lie in six primary sections. The first two establish the project and detail its evolution over the course of the thesis process. Next stands as the production log which chronicles my journey over the Classical and Poetic Drama course as well as the rehearsal process for Mythfest and the Chaucer Festival. Fourth shall consist of a bibliography of all the texts which I have worked with over the course of this thesis experience. Fifth rests A Kingdom or a Cure - the screenplay which inspired me to embark on the grand journey which this thesis has taken me. Sixth shall assume the form of the PowerPoint Presentation which I presented at my thesis defense which contains a collection of images which have provided me with artistic inspiration throughout the thesis process. In conjunction with one another, these pieces serve as the written elements of my applied project.

Insect Girls is a chapbook-length collection of poems exploring the human inclination toward, and desire for, violence. Using insects and other bugs as motifs to show how people can often be treated like insects, these 25 poems complicate the relationships between violent people and their victims. The collection specifically focuses on women's issues such as domestic violence and female sexuality. The speakers range from a prostitute waiting in the rain, to a submissive girl at a fetish party, to a housewife with a werewolf for a husband. Violence and sex are depicted as inherently intertwined. Because of this, many characters in the book show a connection between desire and violence, how cruelty can have a kind of sex appeal. This is explored in the collection with depictions of sadomasochism and BDSM, where power dynamics can be at certain times problematic, and at others, beautiful. In writing these poems, I was inspired by the fact that upon seeing a harmless bug, so many people's first instinct is to crush it, for no reason at all except because they can. Bug imagery appears throughout the collection, illustrating the dehumanizing aspect of cruelty. The capture of a butterfly serves as a metaphor for sexual assault, and elsewhere bee wings show a desire for escape. Imagery as a whole is important to the collection because it illustrates not only the physical scars that result from violent actions, but also the strength and loveliness within the survivors. In Insect Girls, I didn't want to hide away ugliness, but I didn't want to hide away beauty either.

As the Hispanic community is expanding, television networks need to find or create content that can be distributed successfully in Latin America and the United States. To discover what can be sold internationally, this study is divided into three parts: Content, Sale and Distribution. In Section II (Content), what is selling in both the United States and Latin America was analyzed. Since telenovelas have been the most popular form of television entertainment in Latin America, telenovelas from the 80s to the present were investigated. Telemundo (owned by NBC) and Univision (owned by Univision Communications and Televisa Entertainment from Mexico) are the two most established networks broadcasting in Spanish in the US. Factors in Telemundo's ratings success were studied to determine whether "series" in Spanish were becoming the new form of telenovelas. Produced format sells for telenovelas in Spanish that derive from television shows in English were analyzed based on their content and success. English television shows that derive from telenovelas in Spanish were evaluated based on their reception by the Hispanic community in the US. In Section III (What to Sell?), suggestions on a new content are made based on the previous analysis. Section IV (Distribution) examines the rise of internet streaming services such as Netflix. This section comments on whether networks should distribute their content in streaming services vs. traditional network outlets.

The Rider-Waite Tarot deck is arguably the most popular divinatory Tarot deck in use today. This is the deck most new readers learn with, myself included. I began reading the Tarot in late 2015 in an academic setting. I learned on the Rider-Waite deck and have yet to find another deck I would rather read with. The artwork by Pamela Colman Smith is both simple and complex, continuously revealing deeper meanings the more I study it. This is why I decided to research Smith and uncover what influenced her when illustrating these cards. Every image is picked with a purpose, some more obscure than others, especially to someone not well versed in mystic beliefs and history. I was not knowledgeable in any occult beliefs or teachings when I first saw the deck, aside from some Greek imagery. Details such as the T.A.R.O. on the Wheel of Fortune card or the Egyptian creatures on the World card made no sense to me. At first I thought they had little meaning beyond a creative flair by the artist. But these minute details reveal the ties her cards have to world history and the mystic universe. Pamela Colman Smith was a well-known and esteemed artist in the early nineteen-hundreds. However, she is hardly seen or recognized in modern texts. Her biggest legacy, the Rider-Waite Tarot deck hardly gives her any credit. The only evidence of Smith's work is her initials in the bottom right corner of every card. This makes Pamela Colman Smith quite the mysterious woman. Even in life, her colleagues found her an enigma, or a mystic pixie. She worked sporadically, with paints littered about her apartment. Smith was chosen by Waite to work on his new Tarot deck mostly because she was in the right place at the right time. She was a good artist, but not actively sought after for big projects like this. What impacted Smith in illustrating the Rider-Waite deck? Pamela Colman Smith was influenced by her personal art style/life, the Tarot's history, the teachings of the Golden Dawn, and important people in her life when illustrating the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.