Hillary Cleary is a student in the departments of Design Media Arts, History and Digital Humanities at UCLA. Her research interests center primarily around the examination of visual and material culture, games, and theory of media. She has spent time living and working in Washington D.C., as a digital archives intern at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, as well as in Aspen, Colorado, as a teaching assistant in the department of photography and new media at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. In her free time she enjoys making comics and sewing. She is originally from Santa Cruz, California. Her research with the Undergraduate Scholarship Center focuses on exploring aesthetic trends in video games that involve the insertion of “the handmade” assets in digital art. Her research will explore questions of the authenticity of materiality, and how the insertion of things that actually look handmade or were made by hand but are not necessarily figuratively accurate reflect changing definitions of art in video games. After graduation, Hillary hopes to attend graduate school to study media further. She is particularly interested in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program.