Realize your future with TMU Graduate Studies
![South Asian man with long black hair, glasses and orange vest with embroidered flowers standing with arms crossed in front of steel Ring sculpture on TMU campus](/content/dam/graduate/future-students/our-people/cyrus-sundar-singh-ring-310.jpg)
‘The journey continues to be amazing’
Cyrus Sundar Singh
Documentary Media MFA alumnus
Communication and Culture PhD student
A Gemini Award-winning filmmaker, musician, storyteller and scholar, Cyrus Sundar Singh routinely transcends the boundaries of research, film and music. An alumnus of the Documentary Media MFA program, Sundar Singh’s acclaimed works include “Film Club” and the site-specific live-documentary world premieres “Brothers in the Kitchen” (2016) and “Africville in Black and White” (2017/18).
As a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration research fellow, Sundar Singh produced the following two projects with graduate students from across Canada: i am … (2021) exploring identity and belonging that resulted in 28 three-minute films; and Under the Tent (external link) (2022), a multimedia storytelling project exploring multiculturalism and belonging that resulted in 17 creative outputs; and WhereWeStand (spring 2023).
Sundar Singh is presently a PhD (ABD) student in the joint Communication and Culture graduate program. His thesis, “Performing the Documentary: Expanding the Cinematic Frame,” explores ephemeral live performance, site-specificity and co-creation in the presence of the audience, storytellers, musicians and narrators as a viable and successful documentary methodology.
How has your TMU graduate experience been?
The [Documentary Media MFA] cohort became the community. In this particular MFA, there's a range of ages, people, locations, generations, talents: photographers, writers, editors, filmmakers, musicians. It's all this great stuff to stand on. So you can pull a lot of energy from those things and from those different people.
The journey continues to be amazing and I feel totally privileged to be afforded this opportunity, in a place like TMU that has supported me all the way through it. So I'm just pinching myself every day.
How did TMU Graduate Studies help prepare you to be career-ready?
We have great access to faculty that have a range of skills. So it continues to build that confidence. And that's part of what has given me the confidence to continue through
and to stay in the game.
What advice do you have for graduate students?
Be open to possibilities, embrace change and have fun. Those things allowed me to engage with everything that came my way. And don’t be afraid of changing your thesis at any time. That’s part of why we do research—to dig and discover.
Photo: Ben Bonsu
“I feel totally privileged to be afforded this opportunity, in a place like TMU that has supported me all the way.”
![South Asian man with long black hair, glasses and orange vest with embroidered flowers standing with arms crossed in front of steel Ring sculpture on TMU campus](/content/dam/graduate/future-students/our-people/cyrus-sundar-singh-ring-310.jpg)
‘The journey continues to be amazing’
Cyrus Sundar Singh, Communication and Culture PhD student and Documentary Media MFA alumnus
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