Ever since middle school, Jackson T. Collins has had a passion for filmmaking that continued through high school when he was especially inspired by the advisor in his video class who encouraged him to always do his best.

Dorothy R. Santos received a 2022 Mozilla Creative Media Award for their project, The Cyborg’s Prosody which is an interactive non-fiction work and creative intervention in response to the establish-ment of “accent reduction schools” in the Philippines, which has the highest number of call centers and virtual agents in the world. The project requires participants to learn and speak Tagalog and serves as an “accent induction school”—providing a decolonial method of exploring how language is learned, human-computer interaction, listening, and accent preservation. This work is a part of Santos's Ph.D. research and creative practice.

The Arts’ Isaac Julien has a collection of work on view at Adelaide's Samstag Museum of Art, Australia, through May 27, presented concurrently for the 2022 Adelaide and Perth Festivals. In addition, Julien’s photography from his Looking for Langston series is being presented in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear on view now through November 2022.

After 38 years… 38.1718 to be exact, the Arts Division’s IT Director/ITS Divisional Liaison to the Arts/Webmaster, Scotty Brookie, a man of many talents, has decided to retire. An alumnus of UC Santa Cruz, Brookie has enjoyed an extensive career at the university which began when he landed a student job as a computer tutor.

Juan Morales-Rocha, a recent UCSC grad and Design Analyst at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, spoke with students of the new course, Careers in the Creative Economy. This first-time course in the UC Santa Cruz Division of the Arts has been introducing students to a wide array of professionals in creative fields to help them explore and prepare for arts careers.

Professor of Theater Arts Patty Gallagher is performing the only speaking role in a new play, An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, based on Homer’s The Iliad. Even though the play is rooted in Homer’s ancient Greece, events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine make it not only relevant but vital in grappling with humanity’s habit of self-destructive warfare.

The proposal from the Arts to the University of California-Hispanic Serving Institutions Doctoral Diversity Initiative (UC-HSI DDI) was selected for funding. The review was very competitive and only the highest-ranked proposals were recommended for funding. Pathways to the Professoriate in the Arts and Humanities has been awarded $350,000 for five years.

The UCSC Art Department is collaborating with the Sustainability Minor of Rachel Carson College in the form of a 3-unit class called Sustainability Laboratory Tools, Techniques, and Applications (CRSN 151C). Students are being trained in fabrication techniques and applications of steel, aluminum and wood. The objective of this class is to support project design and implementation while considering resource efficiency and renewability. Students are granted access to the Art department's state-of-the art facilities for the duration of their class which will culminate with student-led group projects installed in various locations around campus. These projects will bring form, function and sustainable design to the forefront of the conversation as we explore ways to glean discarded material and build new objects that last.

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Laurie Palmer, traveled with Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) graduate student Natalie Zajac and former Ph.D. student in Feminist Studies, Vivian Underhill, to Bakersfield to participate in the creation and performance of a community-based, environmental justice art project titled WE ARE HERE/ ESTAMOS AQUI. Lead artist Michelle Glass organized the production of a 2500 foot long banner, colored with natural dyes, to demonstrate the 2500 foot setback between residences and new oil wells that medical professionals recommend. Natalie Zajac is creating a mini-documentary of the two-day event, in draft form here.



Dean Celine talked with ABC-TV’s Kristen Sze about her new film, 80 Years Later, and its special significance to the local, San Francisco Bay Area community.

The world premiere of the short film documentary was held at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival on May 12, 2022. The film explores the racial inheritance of Japanese American family incarceration during World War II through multi-generational conversations with survivors and their descendants.

SF Docfest will screen Film and Digital Media Professor Irene Lusztig’s new short film Contents Inventory (2021, 31 minutes), online and in person on June 5th at the Roxie in San Francisco. Filmed in the Santa Cruz Mountains during the nine months following the CZU wildfire, Lusztig invites her own neighbors to share objects lost or found in the fire, creating a collective emotional map of what home means at a moment when the idea of home feels most fragile. The film is showing in a short film program that also includes a new film by Soc Doc MFA alum Kyle Baker, A People's History of Cement.

Giovanni Aloi, reviewed The Algae Society's CONFLUENCE exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum for Esse Magazine. CONFLUENCE by The Algae Society, a collective co-founded by Professor Jennifer Parker, showcases a variety of media formats, time and magnification scales, and creative approaches to being with algae as a multi-sensory art and science (media art and culture) experience. Including growing algal portraits in a Bio Art lab, VR worldmaking experiences, biodegradable 3D printed sculptures, immersive video and sound works, seaweed pressings, 19th-century botanical illustrations, a floating island ecosystem, and more.

Claire June Apana, senior Art major, History of Art and Visual Culture Minor, History of Consciousness minor, will be exhibiting her senior show, IMPRESSIONS, as a public installation at Adams Square Mini Park with the City of Glendale, May 23-July 7, 2022. This 1930’s gas station turned gallery space is accessible to the public 24/7. This installation is Apana’s public art debut.

Dav Bell, M.F.A. candidate in the Environmental Art and Social Practice program, is releasing a collection of short stories Driving by Dead Reckoning with Nonsensical, a publication founded in 2013 that platforms, artists, designers, and thinkers who explore and experiment with language and meaning.

David Crellin, M.F.A. Candidate, Digital Arts New Media, Class of 2022 has a recent MFA project: Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture. The accompanying website, www.decolonizethesurf.com was one of the featured exhibits in the 2022 DANM show, unforgetting. The installation exhibit for the project has been extended for viewing in the Digital Arts Research Center through June 3. The project was awarded the Arts Dean's Fund for Excellence and Equity, the Graduate Dean's Research Travel Grant, and the Florence J. French Scholarship Fund. It also won "Best of the Arts" at the 2022 Graduate Symposium at UCSC. The project was recently featured on "Unheard Voices" on radio station KQSD, in an interview with Esabella Bonner, founder and executive director of Black Surf Club Santa Cruz.

Raed El Rafei, Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media, was awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his dissertation, Queer Film and Art Practice from Lebanon: New Political Imaginaries, Radical Aesthetics, and Utopian Futures. The fellowship supports advanced graduate students in the last year of Ph.D. dissertation writing to help them complete projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Since its launch in 2006, the program supported more than 1,000 promising emerging scholars. This year, 51 fellows were selected from a highly competitive pool of nearly 800 applications. The final cohort of Dissertation Completion Fellows was named in 2022. You can meet the awardees at this link. 

UCSC freshman, Michael Fischer Haagens, studies piano with Dr. Chia-Lin Yang and performs as a pianist with the UCSC Large Jazz Ensemble. In February 2022, he participated in the Franz Liszt Center International Piano Competition and was awarded third prize for his performance.

Marilia Kaisar, Ph.D. Candidate, Film and Digital Media, published an article in the latest issue of Clog Magazine: Clog X Feeds.  "Death and Resurrection: The Short-Lived Tinder Feed" explores through an embodied account the feed feature on Tinder and how it allowed to eliminate or revive old matches and past flames.

The first ever Catalyzing Change BIPOC Fellowship in Digital Arts and New Media has been awarded to Saul Villegas, incoming student for the DANM Fall 2022 cohort. Villegas was selected for the $10,000 fellowship based on the excellence of his application and portfolio.

Be sure to watch episodes of the Art Division’s video podcast on UCTV, featuring conversations about various programs and departments, and their approaches to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Audrey Stanley led a remarkable life. She was a pioneering member of the UCSC faculty, a much-loved professor of theater arts and the founding artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz. She died on May 15 at her home in Santa Cruz. A memorial celebration is being planned.