Fran Forman '67 still recalls joining a demonstration against parietal hours within the first two months of her first year at Brandeis. Students were protesting against the University policy that prohibited anyone from hosting a member of the opposite sex in their dormitory room with the doors closed."It was my first demonstration," she remembers. "It seems so ridiculous and silly now."

Now a Visiting Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Forman focuses primarily on artistic expression. Her career since graduation, however, has been a combination of diverse experiences connected by the political activist spirit she adopted while a Brandeis student.

Although Forman is currently a graphic design artist, she graduated from Brandeis with a bachelor's degree in sociology. Coming out of the politically active sociology department, Forman says there was pressure to have a social good attached to one's potential job or career.

Immediately after graduation, Forman took her first job at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis, where she was involved in the first epidemiological study of child abuse in Massachusetts. The study focused on obtaining accurate data on the occurrence of abuse; Forman helped tally instances of child abuse recorded in all Massachusetts social services and police departments.

Forman began searching for new job opportunities after working on the study for a year but found that it was difficult to find work as a young woman. Ultimately, she found employment as a secretary for the director of psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in downtown Boston, where she was responsible for tasks like typing notes and making tea.

Yet secretarial work proved to be insufficient to satisfy Forman's feeling that she had some greater responsibility toward society.

"I was very limited in the work I could do," she says. "I was a woman, and I had few skills, so I worked as a secretary . where I had to make the perfect cup of tea for my boss."

Three years after graduating from Brandeis, Forman enrolled at Simmons College, where she recieved a master's degree in social work. She then spent two years working alongside a social worker in a methadone treatment center at a Cambridge hospital.

Though she had a job that seemed to fit the Brandeis social activist model, Forman couldn't deny that her dabbling in different forms of art had become more than just a hobby. She'd never before thought that she could participate in social activism as an artist, but it was then that Forman recognized that artists did have the potential to enact social change.

"It was the mid-70s, and I realized that it was possible to move into the arts and not feel like I was betraying the larger community," Forman says.

Eager to develop her artistic talent into a professional career, Forman enrolled in different types of art classes to narrow her focus, eventually coming across "commercial art," now known as graphic design. Commercial art involves using art as a way to communicate new ideas or advertise a product.

"I'd always been interested in the larger picture of communication and psychology and sociology," Forman explains. "And [commercial art] involved art, so it was the perfect melding of everything I'd been interested in as a discipline."

After submitting a portfolio of her work, Forman was accepted to the Boston University School of Fine Arts, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in photography and graphic design in 1977. Jokingly, Forman says that "they took me not because I had a great portfolio, which I didn't, but because I had an interesting background."

Forman has held many full-time and freelance graphic design positions since then. Up until her arrival at Brandeis, Forman served as senior designer with AOL Time Warner, working specifically on Africana.com, a Web site centered on African American culture.

In 2006, Forman attended a lecture co-sponsored by the WSRC, where she met WSRC director Shulamit Reinharz and several other researchers who encouraged her to continue her work at Brandeis.

"Things fell into place," Forman says of her return to Brandeis. "Life is just serendipitous."

Forman's art style is a novel combination of old-fashioned artwork and cutting-edge technology that proposes new ways of viewing the environments created in antique art.

Drawing inspiration from 19th-century tin types-small portrait photographs made on a sheet or iron that she often finds at junk shops-Forman scans the small portraits and uses modern technology to create dreamy-looking landscapes for the 19th-century figures in the portraits.

"I try to create, for myself anyways, a different way of viewing," Forman explains, adding that her computer tablet acts like her canvas and her stylus acts like her brush.

Forman's art has been displayed in many galleries in the Greater Boston area. Earlier this year, she had a solo exhibition at the Griffin Photography Museum in Winchester. Some of her work has also been displayed in the Iris Gallery in Boston and the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet.

Forman's work recently hit the national art scene; in June, she had a solo exhibition at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Ore. Her artwork is currently on temporary display at the James Pierce Gallery in her hometown of Baltimore, Md.

Forman also teaches private workshops in digital images and Photoshop, teaching students from a wide range of levels.

Even in her current artwork, Forman explains that she utilizes the worldly perspective she adopted while a student at Brandeis. A student during the radical and politically charged 1960s, Forman says she "did not have the typical college experience."

She emphasized the significance of being at Brandeis during the beginning of the feminist movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Throughout her college stint, Forman witnessed the campus becoming more diverse and more aware of social issues that had hardly existed on campus in the past.

Her worldview altered drastically based on her experiences in sociology and anthropology classes led by professors who had survived World War II and the Holocaust. Forman says she realized that it is the "responsibility of everybody . to take a stand politically, no matter how insignificant or how tiny."

Today, Forman says she enjoys finding the nuances in life and continually discovering how the world "is not linear [or] black and white."

Though she says "it was not on [her] radar" to return to Brandeis after college graduation, she says it's exciting for her to come back and witness the impact of a historic presidential election on campus.

She stresses how important it is for the youngest generation of American voters to voice their opinion and get involved in the discussions about main issues in the upcoming election. Now is a "great time to be a student," she says.

"I find [this time] so exciting and so vital," she says. "This generation could make a huge difference if they would just get out and vote.