Arts Division Newsletter

After taking a tour of UC Santa Cruz, Chanel Chavira knew that she had found the perfect place to study. She loved the sheer beauty of the campus with its towering redwood trees and lush greenery, and how very different it was from the other UC campuses she had visited.

Allen Riley’s show Synchronization Station is an official selection of the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, UT. He performed this work at Indexical in Santa Cruz, CA in January 2023 in a program curated by Michael Masaru Flora. Synchronization Station is a participatory live show about mediated intimacy that is set in a fictional moment in the history of human-computer interaction.

Camilla Henneman is a puppeteer/artist/educator with a 20-year career creating creatures, costumes and puppets for the film industry. She was recently featured in Lookout Santa Cruz for her very popular Performance, Play & Design (PPD) puppetry class. Her work can be seen in Michael Jackson’s Thriller (where she also played a zombie,), Harry and the Hendersons, Gorillas In the Mist, Ghostbusters II, Fight Club, George of the Jungle, Michael, Weird Al Yankovic’s Fat, Childsplay and several other productions.

Valéria Miranda has several ideas about what she’ll do as the new director of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz. For years, Miranda has been coming to campus to attend performances and lectures and to see exhibitions at the gallery, and she looks forward to collaborating with faculty members, students and alumni. 

Sara Blaylock has been awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for first books published in 2022. Dr. Blaylock is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Jurors felt that her lively and accessible study "makes a unique and significant contribution to our understanding of the role of (experimental) art in the GDR." A provocative and exciting book that should - and will - be read by many, Parallel Public "strikes out into new explanatory ground," and by so doing "provides a very important corrective to the popular memory of the GDR" and as such serves "as a means for articulating memory and identity."

In The Movies of Racial Childhoods Celine Parreñas Shimizu examines early twenty-first-century cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American children. Drawing on psychoanalysis and her own perspective as a mother grieving for a deceased child, Shimizu considers how cinema renders Asian American children through sexualized racial difference, infantilization, and premature adultification.  

Dean Celine’s film, 80 YEARS LATER, recently premiered on PBS and was aired on KQED-TV in the San Francisco Bay Area on January 16.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus John Brown Childs enjoyed the fireside chat he and Joseph Erb, an assistant professor of Film and Digital Media, had recently at an Arts Advocacy Council meeting. There were several aspects of the conversation that appealed to Childs — including getting to discuss the Indigenous philosophies that inform his work with men in prison and Erb’s as an animator of Cherokee stories. But the best, Childs says, was getting to talk the way they did when Erb and his wife and son were neighbors on campus and would get together for dinner.  

ArtReview, one of the world’s leading contemporary art magazines, has named University of California, Santa Cruz Arts and Humanities Professor Sir Isaac Julien as the fifth most influential artist in its ArtReview Power 100 list.  

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas, Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, was awarded an honorable mention for the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus Book Prize. The committee discussed many laudable elements of the book and were impressed by the level of insight, bold reformulation of algorithms, and important contributions to liberatory thought and action. 

Ed Gregor, who has been teaching Game Development, 3D Modeling, Texturing, Rigging and Animation in the Art for Games and Playable Media Program since 2015, was awarded a Patent US11825394B1 in November of 2023 for his work at Tanzle, Inc. with Oliver Davies and Kris T. Force. Patent US11825394B1 is the virtualization of sensors and sensor data which can be located inside of buildings, within a software platform, to allow for embodiment of the sonification and visualization of both location and sensor information for enhanced data analysis. This type of invention can help analysts, insurers, first responders and state and local officials better comprehend building and environmental status during or post-event, such as earthquake, fire or other disaster through multi-sensory embodiment of data sonification and visualization. 

Head of Exhibitions, Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) Louise Leong and Film and Digital Media Ph.D. student, Shirin Towfiq have both been selected by Community Foundation Santa Cruz County to receive Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship awards for 2024 and 2025. Each fellowship recipient receives a $20,000 award to further their artistic career along with an exhibition of their work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.  

Anna Friz will be part of the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship exhibition at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, January 19--March 24, 2024. Blending observation with fiction, she is presenting audio visual work that considers industrialized zones of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile characterized by vast copper and lithium mining operations are radically reshaping the desert. Atacama is a testing ground for both exploration robots like the Mars Rover and for off-planet mining operations envisioned by today's billionaires. Two visual pieces and a parallel multi-channel sound piece consider visiting the desert as a space scientist and as an earthly visitor guided by listening and a desire for adaptation. 

Marina Magalhães, UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Dance at the Department of Performance, Play & Design, was awarded the National Center for Choreography Akron (NCCAkron) Creative Administration Research (CAR) 2024 Award. Magalhães is joined by dance artists Kara Jenelle Wade (Atlanta, GA) and taylor knight and anna thompson of slowdanger (Pittsburgh, PA) in the 5th cohort of the NCCAkron CAR program. The Creative Administration Research program supports U.S. dance artists and challenges the field to think beyond the boundaries of known, traditional models and “best practices.” For the past three years, NCCAkron has built a think tank of artists and thought partners across 16 states to do this work.

Assistant Professor of Music Jay Afrisando’s film installation In Which to Trust? is at the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences through March 2, 2024. For this work, five people with diverse hearings (deafness, autism, tinnitus, Ménière’s disease, and “normal” hearing) were invited to interpret sound sources, resulting in open captions that reflect the listeners’ various bodily conditions and experiences. Questioning the superiority—and reality—of so-called “normal” hearing, this work has previously been exhibited at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) and Curb Appeal Gallery (Chicago, IL). 

New York-based The Film Sales Company has pounced on the worldwide rights to Colombian documentary feature Igualada by UCSC Film and Digital Media, Social Documentary MFA program alumna (2007) Juan Mejía Botero, ahead of its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition sidebar. 

Astrid Chevallier, an established artist and graphic designer, has been selected as the Platinum Award Winner for the 2023 Distinguished Artist Award Program by the City of Cupertino

The Arts and Culture Commission states: "The Distinguished Artist Award Program recognizes established artists that have a substantial body of work, one that displays merit and excellence. The award also celebrates an artist’s contributions to their artistic field and within the art community.” Chevallier is currently enrolled as an Art major at UCSC, with the goals of developing her practice and becoming an art professor.

Assistant Professor, Film and Digital Media, Jon Ayon Alonso has been recognized as a Huerta Center Awardee for his work Niki•Tomi•Beto. Also recognized was FDM graduate student, Jamilli Pacheco-Urquiza, for En Puerto Escondido. The Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas (Huerta Center) at UC Santa Cruz is thrilled to support research by UC Santa Cruz faculty and graduate students as well as sponsor three research clusters.

On February 17, at the ATA Gallery in San Francisco, Beth Stephens will be co-producing Kaytlin Bailey’s Whore’s Eye View, a mad dash through 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective. Stephens and her partner Annie Sprinkle will join Bailey for a post-show Q&A talk back.

Film and Digital Media, Social Documentary (SocDoc) alumna Mitra Ghaffari’s thesis film Bicycle Island is screening in February at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival—one of the major documentary film festivals in the United States.