Ayesha Khan

Ayesha Khan is a Tisch student majoring in Performance Studies and Global Public Health/History at New York University. Originally from the great and small state of Rhode Island, her research interests include history, performance, public policy, and the occasional thoughts about art history. Ayesha enjoys exploring the strange and surprising intersections between her two areas of study. In the future she hopes to work alongside creatives in whatever field she finds herself in.

Title of Capstone Project

Jot it Down: Reflections on the Fragments of a Dispersed Notebook

Description of Capstone Project

Jot it Down is composed of four letters reflecting on Ayesha's studies in the Performance Studies department. Encompassing four years, her notebooks track fragmented thoughts through a time period before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These pieces of creative writing aim to both expand and redefine the terms found in her notes whilst providing new meanings to the ideas whose origins cannot be traced. Jot it Down explores the fragments of life during a pandemic and links these pieces of memories we choose not to remember with new experiences.

What Inspired Your Project?

Every semester when I take a new Performance Studies class, I find myself going through old notebooks, journals, and files online to connect the ideas I have written down in years previous with the theories I am currently learning. Yet, I found that these fragments in my notebooks cannot be traced, except for the dates I wrote them which were mostly during the height of the COVID pandemic. In wondering about the origins of these notes, I decided to give new backgrounds to the terms and associated them with a different time than when they were jotted down.