Arts Division Newsletter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.



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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.



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.

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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.

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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.

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