Arts Division Newsletter

Siddharth Ramaswamy is a third-year student in the Music department pursuing a Global Music major. He plays Carnatic Violin and was recently named as one of the Inaugural Winner Recipients of the Rotary Club of San Jose Neurodivergent Youth Empowerment Fund. Offered by the Rotary Club's Autism Storytelling Project, this award seeks to nurture young visual and performing artists with a connection to autism.

YoungEun Kim is participating in the 15th Gwangju Biennale, which is taking place from September 7 through December 1. Under the title, Pansori - a soundscape of the 21st century, the biennale is gathering 73 artists from 30 countries whose works reflect the new spatial conditions and the upheavals of the Anthropocene.

As a new quarter starts, the Arts Division is welcoming eight new faculty members who represent the creativity, diversity, and thoughtfulness that are key pieces of the division’s identity. They come from all different backgrounds, and their artistic and scholarly endeavors cover a multitude of forms, styles, and topics.

Lissa McCullough came to UC Santa Cruz looking for a change. Currently, the program coordinator for the department of Performance, Play, and Design (PPD), she spent the past 20 years working in secondary education, and wanted a new experience.

Despite retiring last May, Jeremy Strick (Cowell ’77, History of Art) is still keeping busy. He spent the last 15 years as the director of the Nasher Sculpture Center and continued to do some work for them in June, until finally taking a vacation. But he still has personal projects to keep him busy in his newfound retirement, including writing and personal curating.

Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu was recently elected to the Board of the International Council for Arts Deans (ICfAD). ICfAD strives to provide a foundation that allows arts administrators to do their jobs better and to expand their circle of contacts with people who share common challenges and experiences. They provide resources for new Deans and hone the talents of those who will be rising into leadership.

A new paper will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in December that is the first to examine the geometric properties of highly coiled hair and propose methods for replicating their unique visual properties….In collaboration with Black hair expert professor A.M. Darke from University of California, Santa Cruz, the team quickly realized that there’s a lot more going on with hair near the scalp. The follicles in that region often form a thick, spongy layer, but as they travel further away from the scalp, they self-organize into helical curls.

This year the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division is introducing a state-of-the-art AI multimedia lab that will give students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience using the very latest in advanced technology. The Arts, AI, Augmentation and Acceleration Lab, also known as the A4 Lab, is a first-of-its-kind partnership with a global technology company AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and the Arts at UC Santa Cruz

The Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz proudly marks 25 years, celebrating a legacy of success and innovation. The department was created in 1998, growing out of a small film and video program that was part of the Theater Arts Department (now known as the Department of Performance, Play, and Design).

Derek Conrad Murray, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC), was recently appointed the editor-in-chief of Art Journal, which is published by the College Art Association (CAA). CAA is the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts. It promotes the arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners.

On September 26, 2024 at the Citadella Geo Film Festival in Citadella, Italy, Gustavo Vazquez received the Golden Earth award for Best Documentary Feature for his film Los Guardianes del Maíz (The Keepers of the Corn).

Revenant by Anna Friz, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D. Program in Film and Digital Media, recently won the 2024 Karl Sczuka Prize for radio art, which is administered by SWR (Südwestrundfunk), the public broadcasting corporation of south west Germany. Revenant is a radio artwork which explores mortality, rot, and regeneration, using electronic and radiophonic instruments, and field recordings made both below and above ground. Friz is receiving the prize at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany 2024 where the piece will also be played.

LisaMarie Rollins, Assistant Professor, Playwriting and Black Drama, Performance, Play and Design (PPD), has been invited to join the 2024-2025 Susan Fairbrooks Core Writers Group at TheaterWorks Silicon Valley. The honor joins a select group of six Bay Area writers and is part of TheatreWorks’ commitment to nurturing and amplifying the voices of local playwrights and theater makers. The program culminates in an open presentation of the works they have developed in April 2025. Rollins’ new play investigates bordellos and brothels run by Black women madams in the early 20th century in the western United States.

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of Performance, Play & Design, Marianne Weems, is also the artistic director of the New York-based cross-media company The Builders Association. Their new production, just in time for the election, ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow) is an analysis of both the current moment, in which AI-generated “evidence” influences much of what we think and feel, and also a speculation about a near future where candidates themselves are as engineered as their messages. The audience uses their smart devices to help “tune” the candidate, navigate political messaging, and compete for clout in a game that determines the end of the show. The production was supported in part by the Arts Research Institute at UCSC.

Congratulations to Carolyn Dean, Distinguished Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, for receiving the Excellence in Teaching Award. Each year, the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching (COT) selects faculty to receive these esteemed awards. Launched in 1996, they highlight the university’s long tradition of innovative and creative teaching and honors UC Santa Cruz instructors who have demonstrated exemplary and inspiring teaching.

Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, micha cárdenas is an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist, and is sounding the warning about climate catastrophe tipping points in her new high-profile exhibition Probability Engine: Atlantic Overturning, which opened on October 5 at Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s all-night celebration of contemporary art.

Fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media, Yasmine Benabdallah gave the presentation With and Against the Archive: Building a Decolonial Collective in Morocco at the Global Audiovisual Archiving Conference 2024 (co-organized by Toronto International Film Festival, Eye Filmmuseum, and Archive/CounterArchive). And their film How to Reverse a Spell: the Promise of an Archive was screened as part of Beyond The Seventh Gate: Contemporary Moroccan artists’ moving image at the Glasgow Short Film Festival.

On August 1, 2024, Assistant Teaching Professor of Art and Creative Technologies, Dorothy Santos, began a two-year fellowship as a part of the Just Tech program, a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) project. Along with nine other artists, technologists, educators, activists, and visionaries, they tackle complex issues at the intersection of technology and society. Their project will focus on emergency infrastructures, including an open-access archive, an interactive syllabus, and creative works.

On October 26, Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media, Kevin Corcoran, joins a collaborative intervention at Djerassi in Woodside, California. Navigation II: Solitude is an event organized by artist Alex H. Nichols, bringing temporary installations and performances into the Djerassi landscape. Corcoran will share a new sound and sculpture installation with collaborator Jorge Bachmann, perform a duo with Berlin-based butoh dancer Min Yoon, and perform in PINKBOX for electroacoustic sound, movement, and sculpture. He also is currently an artist in residence at the Winslow House Project in Vallejo, California where he is continuing his field recording research on Mare Island. A cohort exhibition is scheduled for October 27th.

Laurie Palmer, Professor, Art, and Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA, had a solo exhibition at Watershed Art & Ecology in Chicago called SOULSTORM, Caucus & Memorial.

Second-year Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) candidate Keshav Batish passed his qualifying exams with honors last June and is now preparing for an upcoming performance at Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco on November 8th. The event will feature traditional Hindustani raga music and original ensemble compositions. His ensemble, EKTA, includes him on sitar and drum set, his father, Pandit Ashwin Batish, on tabla, Kristen Strom and Shay Salhov on saxophones, and Nelsen Hutchison and Ryan Pate on guitars. His dissertation work, featured in this concert, will be released as an album next year entitled Sonic Kinship.

During the spring 2024 student government elections, Ontario Alexander, 4th Year Ph.D. student in Cross-Cultural Musicology, was re-elected the Graduate Student Association (GSA) 2024/25 president for the second consecutive year.

Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) alumna and lecturer at Film and Digital Media (FDM) Livia Perez’s new documentary project, For Ourselves, received a grant in Brazil. This documentary explores the legacy of Brazilian queer filmmaker Norma Bahia Pontes, focusing on her pioneering 1970s works like Lesbian Mothers and She Has a Beard. Through archival footage and personal stories, it uncovers her contributions to the lesbian community in New York and the Brazilian Cinema highlighting the challenges faced by marginalized Latina filmmakers. The project aims to connect generations, fostering dialogue on feminist transnational filmmaking and emphasizing the need to preserve diverse narratives in film history.

Last September, Elijah Dalley, fourth year, Art, was part of a panel to discuss circularity and design for disassembly in shoemaking, at this year’s London Design Festival. Moderated by designer Helen Kirkum and curated by Bunmi Abidogum, the panel focused on a redesign of the Wellington boot, of which the final versions made by several different artists and designers will be on display at LDF 2025. Other panelists included Valeria Pulici, who works with home-grown bio plastics and bio material to produce her work, and researcher Joyce Addai-Davis, who explores our relationship to waste and repurposed material.

First year Ph.D. student, Film and Digital Media, Yoonkyung Lim’s, Letters to you is being presented at the Gangwon International Triennale 2024 Ecological Art Beneath in Pyeongchang, Korea through October 27, 2024. In Letters to you, babysitters, whose first languages are not the same as those of the children they supervised, are filmed delivering messages to those children (in the children’s languages) at an imaginary time ten years in the future.