The new assistant teaching professor in the department of Performance, Play and Design (PPD), Patrick Michael Ballard, is no new face on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus. Ballard came to campus as a visiting assistant professor two years ago, and stayed on last year as a full time lecturer, teaching eight classes while flying back and forth between here and UCLA where he also taught.
Ballard grew up in Long Beach California and had a winding path through education. Though his parents originally planned on putting him in Catholic school, they decided he would benefit more from a Montessori school with a more flexible learning environment that could cater to their son’s idiosyncrasies. Ballard describes the experience as “very magical and mystical. It made me so passionate about instilling that kind of curiosity in my own teaching. I use wonder and curiosity and mystery in a classroom in order to get students to start figuring out how they want to explore, not just retaining whatever I’m saying.”
Through his teaching journey Ballard has explored several alternative educational styles including Montessori school, Waldorf school, online school and more. He also taught at the collegiate level at both Cal Arts and UCLA, as well as working as the arts director of the Auschwitz Study Foundation. Ballard strives to make a similarly unique experience for his students at UC Santa Cruz.
Beyond his love for teaching, Ballard’s creative career has spanned genres and styles, often intermixing artforms. “I’ve been doing things in the margins of all these other practices, like performance art and sculpture making and trying to make them legible to each other,” he says. “There wasn’t really a place where all of those things were legible to people. They’d pick out one thing that I do and be like, ‘that’s what you do.’”
His work spans all the elements of PPD having made an escape room, an experimental stand-up show, and a host of other immersive experiences that force the audience to interact with the art around them. Joining PPD seemed like the perfect environment for him: “it felt cosmic, like the universe created a department where I could go to and be a part of.”
Ballard’s love for exploration in teaching and art also carries over into his personal life. “I think I’m a person who lives a very romantic and uncanny existence in terms of being an artist and taking liberties with my own perception of the world,” he says. For him this includes taking impulsive 20 mile hikes in the middle of the night or saying his ABCs like a goat in the shower. He also has a son who he likes to make music with.
His versatile life and background have prepared Ballard to start a new adventure in teaching at UC Santa Cruz. “I didn’t really choose games, games chose me. I kept getting pushed out of different cultures until I ended up in games,” he says. But now he is here to stay.