For both UC Santa Cruz alums, that moment of flying art was a tangible example of the importance of collaboration and of community.
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Arts Division
When he arrived at UC Santa Cruz, Adrian Centeno was already a seasoned drama teacher with aspirations to be engaged with arts management. He was assigned to be one of the managers of the Theater Arts program, Barnstorm, where he thrived, bringing a vision of inclusion to the program.
UC Santa Cruz professor of art Dee Hibbert-Jones has won a 2019 International Documentary Association (IDA) grant for Run With It, an animated documentary film she is currently working on in collaboration with San Francisco artist Nomi Talisman.
Ryan Lambe is a sixth-year PhD candidate and teaching fellow at UC Santa Cruz studying cross-cultural musicology. His dissertation is an ethnographic study of performance and emotional labor in US queer open mics examined through queer and critical race lenses.
Growing up in Indonesia, Jay Afrisando heard his mother singing karaoke almost every day. He partly credits this experience for him becoming a composer and sound artist.
Three huge clay sewer pipes carved by alumnus Tom Franco and a team of artists are now gracing Danville’s art gallery in an exhibit curated by a fellow Slug. Marija Nelson Bleier and Tom Franco watched as a crane lifted the colorful, 800-pound sculpture 30 feet into the air. The piece, carved and painted by Franco from an eight-foot-tall clay sewer pipe, was part of an exhibit Bleier had curated in her job as visual arts coordinator for the town of Danville. There were to be three of these huge ceramic sculptures set outside the town’s 1,200-square-foot gallery space.
With an amazing career in Hollywood spanning nearly 40 years, Dency Nelson has been the stage manager for almost every major award and event show for the past 25 years, including the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Kennedy Center Honors.
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.
UC Santa Cruz alumnus Rick Carter, a two-time Academy Award winning film production designer and art director, returned to his alma mater on September 28th to receive the Distinguished Banana Slug Award at the second annual Arts Convocation, a ceremony established by Arts Dean Celine Parreñas Shi