Arts Division Newsletter

Two busloads of Animation students and faculty in Art and FDM along with Dean Celine visit the Walt Disney Family Museum where a generous donor sponsored a panel on race and representation, lunch, and private tours of the permanent and special exhibits plus a special conversation with Pixar editor, Banana Slug and Arts Dean’s Advocacy Council member Kevin Nolting.



Message from the Dean of Arts

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, M.F.A., Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital Media



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March 20, 2023


Dear Arts Community,

 

As Spring approaches, so many wonderful events are happening right here on campus and in person! Our beautiful Music Center Recital Hall recently reopened and students are performing there again, with many of our musical ensemble groups playing to packed houses and appreciative audiences. Save the dates for the April in Santa Cruz Festival of New Music, our spectacular annual event held by the Music Department with outstanding performances throughout April, along with the upcoming performances by the Indian Student Association on April 22, and Bayanihan's "Pilipino Cultural Celebration" on April 28 and 29. These special experiences enrich our students and bring our community together.

 

Earlier this month, we gathered with fellow Arts Division alumni at ESMoA (the Experimentally Structured Museum of Art) in El Segundo, CA to explore TIME, an exhibit by alumnus and two-time Academy Award-winning film production designer and art director, Distinguished Arts Banana Slug 2022 Rick Carter. The exhibit featured iconography from his career interpreted by next generation BIPOC artists in true multigenerational conversations that we will bring to campus when Rick collaborates with our Art students next month. Celebrated painter Fritz Chesnut, 1995 Art alumnus and member of our Arts Advocacy Council; 2012 Film and Digital Media alumnus Matthew Prescott, lead editor of the show All American; and recent 2022 Art alumna and Irwin Scholar, the great sculptor Claire June Apana also gave superb presentations alongside me in inviting our alumni back into our fold.


Lastly, the most recent storms prevented us from welcoming the Black Students United of California conference to campus after a year of planning. Instead, our faculty and staff in the Arts and all across campus mobilized to conduct workshops and host a two-hour talk with Distinguished Professor Emerita Angela Y. Davis to 400 student leaders at their hotel conference room in San Jose. Deep heartfelt thanks to the great Angela Y. Davis and all our wonderful colleagues who made this event happen within severe constraints. We hope to welcome BSCU to campus in October 2023!


Keeping close connections with each other on campus, throughout the community and beyond is crucial to our students’ success. We have only a very short time with our students and my goal is to enable their strength and excellence so they are prepared to change creative industries known for their exclusion and inequality. Bolstering our alumni and community connections makes a difference in students’ lives and the life of our beloved UC Santa Cruz. Let us take care of each other across generations, dear Banana Slugs! 

 

Students, do not miss the Internships Scholarships application and the Arts Dean’s Fund for Equity and Inclusion, Dean and Chancellor Awards, plus scholarships including the Lakas Shimizu Memorial Scholarship Award and the Korduner Family Scholarship which are due in Spring! Alumni, friends, and families, please join me in community and collaboration by supporting our students and programs.


With gratitude, 

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email me: artsdean@ucsc.edu


Photo: Carolyn Lagattuta

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People in the Arts

Featured Undergraduate Student

Matthew Kim

Art/Film and Digital Media

As he gets ready to graduate this year with a B.A. in Art plus Film and Digital Media: Integrated Critical Practice Concentration, Matthew Kim is looking forward to traveling to Japan over the summer where he’ll participate in UCSC’s printmaking study abroad program.

Read More

Featured Graduate Student

Amy Reid

Film and Digital Media, PhD Student

Amy Reid's online program, ESSENTIAL WORK, was curated for UK-based artist streaming platform Cryptopfiction. It features Reid’s feature film Long Haulers, made with women long haul truckers. Reid is a filmmaker whose work examines the intersections between gender, national identities, and labor. By exploring observational approaches and expanding upon formal cinematic notions of time, structure, and narrative, Reid’s work questions how labor is constructed in the filmic form.

Read More

Featured Faculty

Charles Hamilton

Lecturer in Music

Low Brass/Big Band Director

Congratulations to Charles Hamilton! On February 16, 2023 he was inducted into the California Alliance for Jazz Hall of Fame (educator). He is currently directing the UC Santa Cruz Big Band Jazz Ensemble, and is only the second jazz educator ever to receive the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts “Distinguished Teacher in the Arts” Award.


Read More

Featured Staff

Rachel Grad

Graduate Programs Coordinator

Film and Digital Media

Rachel grew up outside of Chicago with a hardworking family and attended the University of Washington, where she earned a B.A. in English. She also recently completed an M.S. in instructional science and technology from CSU Monterey Bay.

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Featured Alumnus

Tlaloc A. Rivas

Stevenson '95, Theater Arts

Tlaloc Rivas is a Mexican-American writer, producer, and theater director. He is one of the co-founders of the Latinx Theatre Commons, which works side by side with HowlRound to revolutionize American theater and to highlight and promote the contributions and presence of Latinos in theater.

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Arts Happenings and In the News

Dean Celine’s Film 80 YEARS LATER is Honored by San Francisco

Dean Celine and producer Dan Shimizu recently received a Certificate of Honor from the Board of Supervisors, City and County of San Francisco, for her film 80 YEARS LATER at the screening of Films of Remembrance at San Francisco Japantown’s Kabuki Theater, two blocks from her film subjects’ ancestral home before they were forcibly evacuated and incarcerated during World War II. The film features multigenerational conversations with survivors and their descendants. Last weekend, the film also won the We Generation Award at the great Disorient Film Festival in Oregon. The award celebrates the multigenerational conversations inside and outside the film.



Read More

Janet Chen’s Women’s Cut in

Film Festivals

Film and Digital Media Social Documentation MFA candidate, Janet Chen’s Women's Cut, made during the Fall 2021 quarter in FDM’s SocDoc MFA program, has had recent screenings in at the Tag! Queer Shorts Festival, Hollywood Theatre, Portland, OR and the 2023 Through Women's Eyes International Film Festival.


Read more

Anna Friz’s Work Featured at

ESC Medien Kunst Labor, Austria

A multi-channel video and sound installation by Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, Anna Friz, and sound and media artist Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, is currently featured at ESC Medien Kunst Labor in Graz, Austria. Titled Salar: Evaporation, it takes an experimental rather than purely documentary approach, challenging the deadly hubris of human exploitation in the desert by considering the forces characteristic of the desert itself, such as mirage, perceptual distortion, and the long duration of the geologic present.


Read more

SocDoc’s Meloddy Gao is Finalist in Grad Slam

The SocDoc program rocked the recent 2023 Grad Slam with two finalists, out of nine for the entire campus. Meloddy Gao presented her work, Swimming Lessons: Observing Grief Across Oceans.


Read more

Fourth Year FDM Major, Maya Gray, Makes God, is That You?

As a self-described marginalized woman, Film and Digital Media student Maya Gray has found it difficult to find a voice for themselves within society. A few years ago Gray decided to lean on art as their voice and two years ago decided to make God, is That You?, a film about a young Black man that is convinced he is talking to God through social media. The film about what it feels like to live on the margins and feel preyed upon by the concept of “hope.” It was screened at Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival (MVAAFF) alongside Honk, for Jesus Save Your Soul and Obama’s Descendant. Gray is currently developing a project that intersects the conversations of the “Me, too” movement and the recent overturning of Roe. V Wade.


Read more

John Jota Leaños’ Film Wins Best Documentary Short

Professor of Film and Digital Media John Jota Leaños’ documentary film, Ghostly Labor, screened at the 51st Annual Dance on Camera Festival at Film at Lincoln Center in NYC. The film won Best of Documentary Short at Dance Camera West Festival in Los Angeles and Best of Festival at the Third Coast Festival, Reno. The film highlights the power of collective work and resistance of migrant farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, CA. Leaños collaborated with La Mezcla dance company and Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS), a non-profit farmworker advocacy organization. The film has forthcoming screenings at the 23rd Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival and at Multiplié Festival in Trondheim, Norway.



Kiki Loveday, FDM PhD Graduation, Wins Top Film Honor

Recent PhD graduate in Film and Digital Media, Kiki Loveday, has won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award for her brilliant thesis, "Sapphic Cinemania! Female Authorship, Queer Desires and the Birth of Cinema.” This is the top honor in the field and richly-deserved.


Read more

Soraya Murray Joins the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Board

Soraya Murray has joined the editorial board of The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the flagship journal of the field. JCMS is the peer-reviewed, scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The journal was renamed (from Cinema Journal) in October 2018. JCMS’s basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies.


Read more

Film Co-produced by DANM MFA Candidate Livia Perez available on MUBI

The award-winning short film A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here directed by Erica Sarmet and co produced by Livia Perez is available on Mubi. The first weeks after its release on Mubi, the film was the fifth most viewed on the platform. The film premiered at Sundance last year, receiving the Special Jury Award. In A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here, a tired-of-loneliness middle-aged motorcyclist goes to a lesbian party for the first time. There she meets four young queers who share their home and affections—an encounter of generations, a tribute to those who brought us here.


Read more

SocDoc MFAs Selected for Sundance Internships

SocDoc MFA candidates, Meru Sharma and Toyoko Saindon have been selected as Sundance Institute Interns with the Sundance Documentary Film Program (DFP).

Opportunities

Arts Dean’s Fund for

Excellence and Equity

The Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence and Equity (ADFEE) is dedicated to supporting the dissemination of student research. Qualifying projects must demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. This fund is supported entirely through the generosity of our donors, and remains open as long as funding is available. Funds are administered through the Office of the Dean of Arts. Next deadline: May 10, 2023. Decisions will follow within two weeks.


Read more

Arts Research Institute (ARI) — Funding Available

The Arts Research Institute administers a number of grant programs that support arts research and practice, visiting artists, and collaborative interdisciplinary arts-based research across the UC Santa Cruz campus. Funding is available for faculty, students, visiting artists, and research.

Read more

Deans, Chancellor’s and Steck Undergraduate Awards

There is an updated timeline for the 2022-2023 Deans’, Chancellor’s, and Steck Undergraduate Awards. These awards recognize exceptional achievements in research projects or other creative activities, in order to both encourage outstanding scholarship and promote research as an important part of undergraduate education.


Students can apply directly online, by going to the Deans’ and Chancellor’s Undergraduate Awards website, https://dca.ue.ucsc.edu. The deadline for undergraduates to submit their completed online application is April 2nd at 11:59 pm.

 

The following timeline has been set for the 2022-2023 award process:

Mar 24 Deadline for faculty mentors to submit recommendations

April 2 Online application submission deadline

April 24 Deans’ and Chancellor’s nominees due to VP/DUE 

June 5-9 Presentation of the Dean’s Awards (within Divisions)

Read more

Creative Capital Wild Futures

Visual Arts & Film – 2024 Open Call

Creative Capital provides grants up to $50,000 to individual artists to support the creation of groundbreaking new projects. The new application process comprises only six short questions (reduced from 40 questions). The 2024 “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” grant application for Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image is open through March 31, 2023 at 4:00PM ET.

Read more

California Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship Program

(CAC IAF)

This program will support artists at key career stages. It is intended to recognize and increase artists’ capacity for continued contribution to the field and the state. Through unrestricted funding and state-wide recognition as a California Arts Council Artist Fellow, this program is meant to uplift individual artistic practice. Artists and cultural practitioners from all disciplines are eligible to apply, with the intention of supporting diverse geographies and communities.

Read more

Join our events

More events at arts.ucsc.edu/events



March 25

Abolitionist Looking at Lichen

Institute of the Arts and Sciences

100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz


April 8

Walkthrough with Luke A. Fidler

Institute of the Arts and Sciences

100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz


April 12

Worlds Without Boundaries:

A Conversation With Sky Hopinka and Leanna Betasamosake Simpson

Institute of the Arts and Sciences

100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz


April 13–30

April in Santa Cruz Festival of New Music

Music Department

UCSC Music Center + San Francisco





April 14

Symposium: Visualizing Premodern Abolition

Institute of the Arts and Sciences

100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz

April 17

Film Screening: The Tuba Thieves

Film and Digital Media

UCSC Communications Studio C


April 22

Journey Through India

Indian Student Association

UCSC Theater Arts Mainstage


April 28-29

Pilipino Cultural Celebration

Bayanihan

UCSC Theater Arts Mainstage




For ticketed events, please visit ucsctickets.com

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