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Thurston attends Woodcrest University, not by choice but by necessity -- Smith still won’t admit anyone bearing the Killgore name, thanks to her grandfather’s unfortunate incident involving a sabotaged weather satellite and an ill-timed alumni gala. It’s just as well. Woodcrest has fewer gowns and more teeth.

At Woodcrest, Thurston is deep into a PhD in Indigenous Latin American Art History, focused on ceremonial textiles and cosmologies along the northern coast of South America. Her research blends fieldwork with quiet defiance: journals inked in three languages, interviews recorded in the shade of ceibas, and notes scribbled in a sharp, impatient hand. She is less interested in museum curation than in what institutions overlook, the living knowledge carried in thread and pigment. Faculty admire her tenacity, though few ask how she funds her travel or why her contacts in border towns always seem to know her by name.