Lilian Mehrel'09 and the Art of Connection

This is a story about relationships.
And connection.
And building a future.

Lilian Mehrel's path through the opportunities, ideas, and revelations that filled her college years at Dartmouth led to a Senior Fellowship. That in turn led to her new feature film, a romantic comedy, "Honeyjoon," which was screened at Dartmouth in January 2026.

Not knowing exactly where she was headed, Lilian, Dartmouth class of 2009, took classes in Religion, Creative Writing, Sculpture, Painting, Theater, Acting, and…Earth Sciences! Along the way, Lilian discovered that connection is the beating heart of a liberal arts education. Faculty-student, student-mentor, peer-peer, colleague-colleague, friend-friend: these are the vital interstices, the integration of campus life, from classes, art studios and laboratories to meals with friends and walks in the woods. The guides Lilian encountered during her early years at Dartmouth shaped her senior project and her current career. Between a sophomore summer Studio Arts class with Professor John Kemp Lee and a memoir writing class with Professor Barbara Kreiger, an idea took shape. Lilian's vision transcended the boundaries of a traditional major, and on the recommendation of Professor Lee, she applied for and was accepted as a Senior Fellow.

Established in 1929, the Senior Fellowship enables selected students to design their own curriculum for their senior year, allowing them to push beyond coursework in the existing curriculum, stretch the imagination, apply the skills and realize the passions they have developed during their time at Dartmouth. The Senior Fellowship program is supported by an endowment established by Gerry Kaminsky '61, himself a Senior Fellow. A Senior Fellowship is offered only to a select few and is a culmination of courses, conversations, and relationships with professors, peers, and mentors. Often, it forms a bridge beyond college into a fulfilling career that the exuberant, overwhelmed first-year student could not possibly have imagined.

With Professor Lee's guidance and the freedom and resources of the Senior Fellowship program, Lilian developed a project that combined her artistic abilities, her academic background in Middle Eastern history and culture, and her own family history. The culmination was a graphic memoir, "Muchijoon: A Hybrid Story," for which she earned high honors. Over the ensuing years, the ideas and artistic vision from her Senior Fellowship continued to evolve and are evident in "Honeyjoon," Lilian's first feature-length film.

After graduating from Dartmouth, Lilian attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts—but not with the intention of pursuing a career in film. In fact, she admits, it wasn't until she saw Wes Anderson's movie "The Royal Tennenbaum's" that she even realized "there was such a thing as a director!" From that point on, she was determined to "make an impact," though she was still unsure what form it would take. How did that emerge? Through conversations. With step-by-step encouragement. Working with mentors like Lee and Kreiger, who thought her fears and doubts and ideas were worth exploring. Metaphors, poetic visuals, images, and symbols grew from page to screen. "The audience," she explains when asked about the project's evolution, "reflects your story back at you."

In 2024, Lilian won the AT&T Untold Stories Award, one million dollars to develop a full-length feature film to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her film "Honeyjoon" juxtaposes humor and grief as a Persian-Kurdish mother (Lela) and her American daughter (June) go on vacation in the Azores to process the death of June's father. Lilian returned to Dartmouth in January 2026 for the screening of "Honeyjoon" at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and when she arrived at Loew's Theater, the first people she saw in line were John Lee and Barbara Kreiger. Lilian was delighted. "They believed in me," she says emphatically. "In their classes, I learned how to trust myself and feel empowered. I learned how to connect to my audience. You discover your voice by doing," she says. "And they helped me do that."

"The creative path is so nebulous," she says, "so uncharted. You have to begin by believing in yourself." Can college help you do that? Lilian admits that in a high-achieving culture like Dartmouth, it's easy to fear failure. Professors, mentors, and peers must collaborate to form safe spaces, where there is value in risk and in exploring creative impulses. The journey from freshman to senior year can be, she recalls, an explosive evolution.

Lest this sound easy, John Lee notes that another critical pillar of a liberal arts education is hard work. In his sculpture class, students find that mastering the technical skills can be easier than developing ideas into tangible projects, creating the physical manifestations of thought. "You come here to be challenged," Lee, who taught at Dartmouth for 41 years, says. "Our responsibility as educators is to take a group of students close to an intellectual edge where they discover something difficult and profound. I don't answer questions, I help them formulate a better set of questions." He uses the word "perspicacity" often to describe Lilian, whose Senior Fellowship involved extensive research into generational trauma in her family. "I never found a limit to her willingness to work hard." "It never felt like work," Lilian says; "it just felt like a driving force."

As a vivid illustration of this point, in the discussion period following the HOP screening, a mother and daughter spoke about how much the film echoed aspects of their relationship. Hattie Hatton'27, an Engineering and Studio Art major, was also in the audience that day, along with fellow members of a class taught by Heidi Denzel, who teaches film studies and comparative literature and runs several workshops focused on healing and well-being. "The film was so light-hearted," Hattie says, "that it eased my stress." Hattie is also very close with her mother, and while their relationship is different, the "special bond" in the film echoed some of the stresses and joys of her own relationship. Between her courses in technical engineering and other expectations, Hattie is always looking for stress-relief and ways to improve her own well-being. "Going to a theatre to see a movie," says Denzel, "is an isolation-buster. It gets us out of our bubbles. We experience a film together." In 2023, Denzel began hosting highly successful workshops for students and faculty under the acronym FLOW (Foreign Language Offering Well Being).

Both Lee and Denzel emphasize the critical role of mentors in relieving stress and helping students develop their ideas and their unique voices. "One of the main things we know about artists is that they all spent time with an older mentor at some point," says Lee. "It's all about contact with someone who understands your efforts and has been through what you've been through." In the course of Lilian's Senior Fellowship, Lee and Lilian would meet once a week and talk. Just talk about her ideas and her project. Conversation. Connection. Mentors, T.A.s, and professors build a culture of what Denzel calls "willingness to help." Hattie says that the workshops she participated in with Denzel helped her to realize that "getting in touch, doing a reality check, was available to me whenever I needed to do it."

Naaz Valvani'26 led the discussion that followed the screening of "Honeyjoon" at the HOP. She's a film studies major, interested in the business of film development and distribution. For Naaz, seeing a woman of color, a Dartmouth grad in a successful and deeply meaningful career, was inspiring. "It's super refreshing," she says, having just returned from a trip with fellow film majors to the Sundance film festival. She's working on a senior thesis, a short narrative film about Sikhism, and dreaming around an idea for creating a business in service of artists.

From the moment first-year students arrive on campus, faculty mentors begin guiding them as they discover their passions and find their voices. In foundational courses like Writing 5 or Drawing 1, they learn, as Lee says, to "locate themselves in time and space." For Lilian, her academic journey led to a more in-depth consideration of her own family history but also pushed her to look beyond her own story. "There's a lot of emphasis now on origin stories, which is wonderful," Lee explains, "but the exploration shouldn't stop there. You have this experience, so what's its significance?" This exploration is often an ingredient, foreground or background, of the Senior Fellowship. Lilian agrees wholeheartedly.

"You find the emotional truth," she says, "and then you find your audience to share it with."