Arts Division Newsletter

Now in their senior year at UC Santa Cruz, Bene’t Benton is looking forward to pursuing a career in theater with the goal of getting leadership experience and also writing and developing a solo theatrical piece that they can use towards ultimately being admitted to graduate school.

At Zonamaco art fair in Mexico City, Kevin Corcoran of the EASP MFA program performed in a collaborative work titled PINKBOX, organized by performer, writer, and sculptor Alex H. Nichols. Kevin contributed live sound along with frequent collaborator Jorge Bachmann. PINKBOX combines movement, sculpture, sound and painting. The four performances for Zonamaco in February included dancer and choreographer Ana G. Zambrano, expanding the collaborative work across borders. Also in February, Kevin’s experimental audio collaboration with Beijing based artist Sun Yizhou was published in Tokyo by the label Ftarri. Rooms and Shadows is audible on CD and digital streaming platforms.

Sara Sanford’s work has been recently featured in two exhibitions. Ephemerality at Strata Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Between Us and Trees: Conversations in the Secret Language of Nature which was at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock in Los Angeles. Ephemerality featured her Pedestal, no. 1, investigates the changing paradigm of the surface of the contemporary print in relationship to the lens and technology in the post-digital age. And

Between Us and Trees: Conversations in the Secret Language of Nature. Her mixed media print collage, How Little Can We See? no. 6 selected for the show – references montage and early split-screen cinema as a tool to examine fragmentation and distrust in our current climate of political and scientific distrust. The piece was given an Honorable Mention Award by the juror, John Greco, artist/ master printmaker and founder of Josephine Press. 



Having a father who’s a scientist and a mother who was an interior designer for many notable Hollywood clients, it’s no wonder that Jason Greenberg, Art Department Assistant, has a perfect combination of artistic talent and top-notch organizational and planning skills. And even though as a kid he dreamed of being a jet fighter pilot thanks to watching Robotech and science fiction films, his interests fortuitously turned toward music.

Matthew Prescott’s career as a film editor developed progressively over time and now he’s working on one of the most watched shows on the CW network, All American, which has been renewed for its sixth season. The teen sports drama, about a high school football player who lives in South Central LA but goes to school in Beverly Hills, has been praised for how authentically it tells stories about a wide spectrum of Black experiences.

Professor Sharon Daniel and Associate Professor Anna Friz, both in the Film and Digital Media Department, have been awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2,500 applicants, these successful applicants were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

For the 2022-23 academic year ArtsBridge, directed by Sarah Sanford, successfully placed 12 Arts Division students into nine county schools to teach an Arts discipline project. The students designed and are currently teaching projects ranging from theater arts and storytelling, dance, printmaking, drawing, painting, mixed media and fashion along with film and photography. As ArtsBridge scholars, they have had the opportunity to work in collaboration with amazing teachers in a range of schools throughout Santa Cruz County including alternative and Title I schools.

Celebrated for his compelling lyrical films and his video art installations, Isaac Julien is one of the leading artists working in film and video today. This ambitious solo exhibition at the Tate Britain reveals the scope of Julien’s pioneering work in film and installation from the early 1980s through to the present day. The exhibition highlights Julien's critical thinking and the way his work breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting and sculpture by utilizing the themes of desire, history and culture. Professor Isaac Julien’s work, spanning forty years, will be presented for the first time in the UK.

This past winter (2023), the department of Performance, Play and Design offered the course Pixar – Story Matters taught by Lecturer Noah Lucé. This class dives deeply into story creation through the Pixar lens, resulting in a project that spans the entirety of the quarter. Saul Villegas (first year MFA student in DANM) was inspired by the lectures' pedagogical focus (consent-based practices and UDL) and wanted to collaborate through his inquiry of research. He suggested examining the work of OpenLab UCSC and how they have created interactive online archives of student projects. Teaching Assistants Princess Kannah and Amy Blondell supported the process through its inception, review, and completion. The final result was a virtual exhibition and an in-person viewing of the student's final projects at the Media Theater. The online gallery provides a virtual space for students to share their work and provides the platform for a wider range of inclusive storytelling.



Recently featured at the 2023 Outfest Fusion Festival, the film short, Oceanic: Queering the Ocean, was a creative collaboration between Arts Division faculty: micha cárdenas, Anna Friz, Cynthia Ling Lee, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong, along with Gerald Casel who is currently a professor at Rutgers. How do we move through the loss of people, places, and even our own capacities due to COVID-19 and climate crisis? Oceanic responds to this question and to the urgent need to build new queer and trans BIPOC worlds of disability justice and climate justice.

Saul Villegas, first-year DANM MFA student, will show a virtual world hosted by Newartcity. The art and science collaboration began with Professor Thomas Guilderson at the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) in 2020-21. The third installment of the project Deep-Sea Coral centers on a deep-sea scene with real archives provided to him by Hawaiʻi Undersea Research Lab (HURL) and placed in a 3D sculpture coral garden with speculative iterations of enhanced imagery to recreate submersible dives and encounters of denizens of the sea. He will highlight Guilderson’s research through an immersive view of photographs and video projections from coral “biological archives.” The in-person adaptation to the exhibition will take place at the Institute of Arts and Sciences building on the third floor, June 2-3, 2023.

The editorial board of Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, is pleased to announce the publication of its fifth volume. Issue 1, Sensing Place, features critical and creative work exploring the intersections of ritual, place and the sensorium. They are thrilled that Sensing Place includes contributions from emerging and established scholars from UCSC’s History of Art & Visual Culture department. The second issue of Volume 5, Imagining the Future of Digital Publishing, is a special supplemental issue dedicated to the unique possibilities and potential trajectories of publishing scholarship digitally. It was generously funded by The Humanities Institute.



Christina Hellmich, who recently earned her PhD in Visual Studies, co-edited the publication Native American Art from the Thomas Weisel Family Collection. The book is the culmination of a five-year project and includes contributions from 89 authors from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds—scholars, culture-bearers, artists, collectors and museum professionals—and was developed in collaboration and consultation with Indigenous cultural leaders. The publication features 30 specially commissioned essays and 100 full-page plates of works including extended captions.

At a recent four-day symposium at Indexical featuring a number of artists, researchers and scholars from the UCSC Arts Division, graduate student Aaron Samuel Mulenga (History of Art and Visual Culture, Ph.D. student) discussed his artistic practices as informed by the histories of Black portraiture and the racial imagination in the United States. Mulenga was in conversation with Carolyn Jean Martin (Chair of the Arts and Cultural Studies Department and lead faculty of the Art History Program, Berkeley City College). The event was supported by the Visualizing Abolition initiative at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, curated by Arts alumna Kira Dralle (Ph.D. Musicology, 2022), and satellite events at the UCSC Music Department are coordinated by Matthew Shumaker, Assistant Professor of Music.

Social Documentation MFA student Chisa Hughes’s thesis film MANY MOONS will have its World Premiere at the CAAMFest 2023 film festival, the nation’s largest showcase for new Asian American and Asian films. The film will play as part of the festival at SFMOMA on May 20. Many Moons will also make its Los Angeles debut at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) at the Regal Los Angeles on May 13.

Professor of Film and Digital Media Irene Lusztig’s new documentary, RICHLAND, will open at the world-renowned Tribeca Festival in June. Richland is a sobering, meditative portrait of a nuclear company town that embraces its origins and divisive past, all while reflecting on its future. Irene Lusztig’s patient and inquisitive storytelling expertly navigates themes of security, violence, and community.

Balakrishnan Raghavan, Ph.D. Student in Cross-Cultural Musicology, has just been awarded a digital sonic and visual projects fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) as a Summer DIL Student Fellow, where he will focus on Oral Epics and Narratives of India: Annanmar Katai, working on tamizh, translation, performance, story and installing a digital exhibition, to be carried out in the summer of 2023.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a prestigious $75,000 Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions Planning grant to Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH). Housed in The Humanities Institute at UCSC, WIITH is a community-driven public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley. Christina Ayson Plank, PhD candidate in the History of Art and Visual Culture’s Visual Studies and is head curator of the project.