After a visit to the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery on a campus tour, Marian (Mari) Mafnas knew that UCSC was the place for her. She had been touring various colleges and happened to come across the annual Irwin Scholars exhibition. “I was blown away by the quality of work that was shown in that space,” she says. “I chose to join the Art program here because I was excited to start making work in the same caliber as the pieces I saw.”

On April 2 and 3, 2022, first-year D.M.A. student Ben Dorfan directed a Santa Cruz Chamber Players concert, featuring the world premiere of his Clarinet Sonata and works by Lili Boulanger, Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Titled The Hero’s Journey, the program focused on compo-sitions written in challenging circumstances such as war, exile, political repression, and chronic illness.

Kailani Polzak, Assistant Professor in HAVC, was awarded a 2022-2023 Getty Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral fellowship in the history of art. This fellowship will support the research and writing of her current book Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania. Per the ACLS press release, “The awards are designed to advance innovative scholarship in art history and welcome approaches to research that highlight voices, narratives, and regions of the world that have been historically excluded and under-studied in the academy.”

Louise Leong, the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery manager and museum preparator, has recently experienced what she calls her “World Series” of exhibitions on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Supervising the delivery of 44 crates filled with priceless artworks that came to her via two, 53-foot tractor trailers, was no small feat.

Film and Digital Media, SocDoc M.F.A. alumnus Jackson Kroopf was selected as a Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow for the new hybrid feature doc The Unbelievably Difficult and Worthy Art of Survival, about a 94-year-old Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught acting and dance for decades and is creating a performance manifesto on her approach to the art of survival. Jackson is the second SocDoc M.F.A. alumnus to receive such funding, as Brian Meyers received NEH pass through funding from ITVS.

Lakas Shimizu was a gentle warrior, a deeply caring, generous, and empathetic young man who had a gift for drawing people together. Lakas unexpectedly passed away at the tender age of eight. In his memory, his family—parents Dan Shimizu and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, brother Bayan Shimizu, and grandfather Robert Shimizu—established a scholarship at UC Santa Cruz.

Yasmine Benabdallah, first-year Ph.D. student in Film & Digital Media, was published on Screen Worlds, a European Research Council-funded project based at SOAS University of London, the podcast Decolonising The Moroccan Archive by Yasmine Benabdallah and Rim Mejdi is an intimate account of the conditions of history/ies’s erasure and dispossession perpetuated by the ongoing fabrication of a missing or inaccessible archive.

Soprano Lauren Bumgarner (B.A. Music 2018), who is now working on her master’s of music in vocal performance at Colorado State University, won first place in the Denver Lyric Opera Guild’s 2022 competition and was given the Ada Belle Spencer Foundation Award of $10,000.

Professor micha cárdenas is doing a series of talks about her new book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, published by Duke University Press in March 2022, as well as her new work on the poetics of trans ecologies. Her next talk is April 29-30 at Errant Voices Conference, University of Chicago.

Haoran Chang, Digital Arts and New Media (DANM 2021), recently published the essay, Emersive VR: An expanded immersive VR practice based on his MFA thesis. It appears in Virtual Creativity, Volume 11, Number 2, 1 October 2021, pp. 207-222(16).

Raed El Rafei. 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media had an essay Pasolini and the Queer Revolution in Beirut was published in the 2022 April issue of e-flux journal. Launched in 2008, e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring writings by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. El Rafei’s short essay film Al-Atlal (The Ruins) received an honorable mention at the closing ceremony of this year's 32nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival in Chicago on April 3rd. 

Avital Meshi, Digital Arts and New Media (DANM 2020), mounted an online solo exhibition, Subverting the Algorithmic Gaze curated by Goldie Gross, Alejandra López-Oliveros, and Janelle Miniter at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. The show includes four of Meshi’s recent projects that invite audience members to think critically about their relationship with technology and how it can play a role in constructing identity.

On April 9, 2022, the Watsonville is in the Heart research initiative, in partnership with the local grassroots organization The Tobera Project, launched a novel digital archive featuring oral history recordings, photographs, and family artifacts that capture the rich history of Filipino life and labor in California’s Pajaro Valley. The digital archive is directed by UCSC graduate students Christina Ayson Plank, 4th-year Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Culture History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) and Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. The launch event was hosted at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and included a presentation of the archive and panel with contributors of the archive.

Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu is quoted in the latest issue of The Nation in the cover article by Panthea Lee Sex, Death, and Empire: The Roots of Violence Against Asian Women.

Last month, Maggie Wander, Ph.D. candidate, Visual Studies/HAVC, and Stacy Kamehiro, associate professor, History of Art and Visual Culture co-edited a special issue of Pacific Arts (The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association). It’s focused on the theme Pacific Island Worlds: Oceanic Dis/Positions and explores past and present visual art forms and practices related to place-making and identity formations in Oceania.

Zoe Weldon-Yochim, a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies, was recently awarded Smithsonian and Luce/ ACLS Predoctoral Fellowships. She will hold the 2022-23 Douglass Foundation Fellowship in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), and is the first UCSC Visual Studies student to hold a SAAM fellowship. Weldon-Yochim also received the Luce/ ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation, which she will use during the 2023-24 academic year.

Experience 51: TIME will offer a backstage pass into one of Hollywood’s most imaginative artists, the man who gave us a feel for Time from the worlds of Jurassic Park, to the time traveling roller-coaster-sequels of Back To The Future, the epic story of Forrest Gump or the historic dramas of Lincoln

and Amistad, all the way up to the imaginary future of A.I., Star Wars and Avatar. TIME will try to condense Rick Carter’s ability to make Time come alive and will track down his ‘source code’ in the attempt to let it boost and inspire a younger generation of artists.

Fires Next Time, led by Joshua Harrison, co-director of one of the Arts Division’s research centers, Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, in collaboration with Kai Zhu, associate professor of environmental studies, and Katia Obraszka, professor of computer science and engineering, was awarded a seed grant from UCSC for development. Monies are to support an initial workshop with all the stakeholders in Lake County, including Robinson Rancheria, Lake County High School and other community members.