During Winter Quarter 2015, students took the concepts of struggle and passion to heart and focused on people who were facing serious challenges in their lives. Carina Linder Jimenez, Sayaka Iida and Daniella Beccaria trained their camera on a homeless man who struggles to get his own life in order while volunteering and advocating for others in the community who lack homes, jobs and security. Allie Holzman, Josiah Ubben and Stephanie Villiers spent time with John Keppelman, a Vietnam vet and retired Western Washington University art instructor, who struggles with his creative output now that he is retired and painting full-time. Marina Bankowski, Bailey Barnard and Katelyn Doggett focused on Sue Burke, a Bellingham woman who turned to art as a form of healing after her 20-year-old daughter committed suicide. Alex Bartick, Beatrice Harper, Brooklynn Johnson and Mariko Osterberg turned their cameras on Ralph Akers, who contemplates life and spirituality through his work on animal-skin drums. As a class, the above students produced a profile on Bellingham author and historian George Dyson, the son of a famous physicist who rejected the academic world of his parents as young man, dropped out of high school and lived in a tree, but who now has remade himself as a leading scholar on the history and future of the digital universe.
