Ph.D in Film and Digital Media, Fall 2018 Newsletter
University of California Santa Cruz


Greetings from the PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz! The fall quarter is in full swing as we begin the ninth year of our groundbreaking PhD program. Under the term “critical practice,” our students work across the borders of theory and practice, transforming the ways that we think, write, and create with film and digital media. Our admissions cycle is now open for the 2019-20 year, and we welcome applications until December 10, 2018 . Whether your background is in theory, criticism, artistic practice, or a combination, our world-renowned faculty are eager to work with you. We have new opportunities for support for students working in the area of feminist media histories, thanks to Prof. Shelley Stamp’s prestigious UC Presidential Chair, and the campus has recently added new faculty whose work will be of interest to many of our students, like Prof. Micha Cadeñas in Art & Design: Games + Playable Media.

In the past year, our graduates have had enormous success with jobs, grants, fellowships, awards, and exhibitions. Alex Johnston (Ph.D 2017) and Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (Ph.D 2018) both moved straight from graduation to assistant professorships at Seattle University . The new jobs capped an exciting year for each: Alex’s film Evidence of the Evidence (about the 1971 Attica prison uprising) was selected for the 2018 Berlinale Film Festival. Ben won the 2018 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Prize--one of the most prestigious writing prizes in the field--for his essay “B.F. Skinner’s Project Pigeon: Rendering the War Animal Through Optical Technology.” Ben talks with an SCMS interviewer about his project here .

Ben’s award comes hot on the heels of another alumnus’s prestigious writing award. Marc Francis (Ph.D, 2018) won the Screen Annette Kuhn Essay award in 2017 for an essay published in the storied feminist film and media journal, Camera Obscura . Francis is now the Assistant Editor at Film Quarterly and Lecturer in the School of Film and Media at Loyola Marymount University.

Brian W. Rogers (Ph.D 2017) also graduated last year and has gone on to found a Paris-based business creating soundtracks for film and dance. Anita Chang (Ph.D. ‘16) is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at CSU East Bay, Elaine Gan (Ph.D. ‘16) is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Experimental Humanities at New York University, and Ian Alan Paul (Ph.D. ‘16) completed his first year as assistant professor in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University in New York. We’re very proud of the incredible track record of our graduates in securing tenure-track jobs and fellowships.
Some of our current students are landing prestigious positions, awards and fellowships even before graduating! Arturo Delgado Pereira just secured a five-year position as Professor of Practice in Documentary Film at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, where he will be the principal teaching person in the Masters Program in Film and Television-Documentary Film. S. Topiary Landberg is a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Oakland Museum of California , where she will have the chance to develop her own curatorial projects while conducting research projects with the museum’s archives.  Isabelle Carbonell’s documentary, The River Runs Red, won the Best Interactive Documentary Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.  Dorothy Santos has a residency at the Centre for Emotional Materiality where she is hosting a class on "Building Emotional Intelligence in a Digital Age." A profile of Erick Msumanje was featured in LAVoyage magazine.
Our students’ research is widely international. This past summer, Raed el-Rafei worked on a filmmaking project in Tripoli, Lebanon, funded by a Human Rights Center Fellowship, while Kara Stone received three very significant art grants in 2018. A Canada Council for the Arts grant allowed her to conduct a 2-month residency in Tokyo, Japan, where she created “ the earth is a better person than me ”--a visual, interactive novel which began as part of her coursework in 2017. The other two grants, from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, will allow her to collaborate with artists Rekha Ramachandran and Julia Gingrich on an installation combining video and ice sculpture about the anthropocene and decomposition. As part of the Different Games Collective, Kara also helped organize the Different Games conference in Worcester, MA, Oct 12-14. Second-year student Chris Kerich gave a paper there entitled "Making Games out of Art." Fourth-year student Elia Vargas is currently exhibiting "Oil Rituals for the Future #6" in Los Angeles as part of a group show entitled The Anatomy of Oil at Gas Gallery and presented his research this past summer at the 2018 Petrocultures Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.  Rana al-Jarbou was just awarded a grant from the The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) for a creative research and sound project utilizing the film archives of the Saudi Aramco oil company. She will present related research at the Middle East Studies Association in Texas in November, on a panel with Ph.D program director Peter Limbrick and Sintia Issa, a student in the nearby Visual Studies Ph.D at UCSC.
Other students have had their work supported by a international and local funders. Daniel Rudin received a Fulbright US Student Grant for work on labor in the Philippines. Casondra Sobieralski took part in the UCSC Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development program for 2018, which included workshops at UC Santa Cruz and exploratory research over the summer. And Fabiola Hanna and Aphid Stern were chosen as two of the four “Public Humanities Graduate Student Instructors” to teach a new “Data and Democracy” course on campus.
We are excited for the rest of this academic year and for the continued success of our stellar students.
For More Information

Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D., Prof. Peter Limbrick ( limbrick@ucsc.edu ), or the Graduate Coordinator, Melanie Godinho ( mgodinho@ucsc.edu ), for more information about our program or our admissions cycle, which closes on December 10 .


Best wishes,

Peter Limbrick
Associate Professor of Film + Digital Media
Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D)