Welcome to the Arts Division 2024-2025 from Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu

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Welcome to the Arts at UC Santa Cruz where world class research and creative practice transpire in a place where teaching and service matter. 

When you first arrive on campus, the beauty overwhelms. In my fourth year as Dean of the Arts, I assure you of the greatness ahead in how your definition of beauty will expand to include different cultures and variant values that will become part of you. No longer will movies, books and music be satisfying unless they reflect the world you encounter here as Banana Slugs. 

Get ready. The tall trees will give way to the giant intellects you will encounter in your faculty. Your classmates and colleagues will compel you to rise to your greatest self as you experiment and play, read and learn, speak and listen to each other. The staff will impress you in their care for the institution and its mission — which is our collective lifelong education. 

The classroom – where you learn to analyze, behold history, and contend with your intellectual and artistic inheritance – is a space you will come to see as simply the best on earth. In and beyond our buildings, the classroom brings us together in multi-generational collaboration bound together by empowering pedagogy, argument based on evidence, and close readings of literature and other objects. When we stand on the shoulders of those who write, make, and think before us, we formulate solutions to our social problems with those who come after us. We learn that the hard things we do are relative to the achievements of other struggles. Therefore, we are poised to ambition and aspire to achieve greatness. 

Yet, we live in an era where the university is widely misrepresented as a bastion of something else entirely. What I know is that UC Santa Cruz is a real engine for social and economic mobility in nurturing a powerfully analytic, historically grounded, critically minded, and aesthetically adventurous student body that will transform the world. Banana Slugs are not docile subjects, our education emboldens us. Social justice and impact are our declared values as an institution. What an amazing thing to be members of this community that believes all can be great artists and scholars deserving of access and opportunity. 

Everyday, as Dean, I am in awe of our enterprise and our eminence in fulfilling our mission. In the redwood forests on the bluffs of the Pacific, I witness our beloved community change in completing our courageous and fearless work. The first week of school always amazes me, there will be new works finished and disseminated that did not yet exist now. And along the way, we birth our new selves. I memorialize this fact as we embark on the new academic year. 

In 2024-25, my goals as the leader of the Arts Division include:

• Institution building for innovation, efficiency and productivity

We must continue to evaluate the efficiencies of our systems and respond to needed changes. The Arts recently launched the Creative Technologies program, the first online undergraduate major in the UC system, and we will develop and grow to lead in innovative teaching and learning methods to provide more equitable access to higher education.

• Major fundraising
  We will no longer remain the best kept secret as the best institution for the arts in the country. Working with alumni, friends, parents, donors and students as well as development, foundation relations, and industry partners, we seek gifts of support including major grant opportunities and individual and industry gifts. The Arts too will continue to prioritize growing new, multigenerational, and diverse major donor pools.
• Student, Staff and Faculty Success
  Further establish exceptional student success programs, support a world-class faculty in impactful research and teaching, and honor our staff. Through mentorship and professionalization efforts within the division, we will continue to examine each of our roles in student success, faculty recruitment and retention, and staff career opportunities.

Many engaging programs within the Arts Division exalt our community of learning. The Institute for Arts and Sciences (IAS), Arts Research Institute and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery offer research, exhibitions and community engagement. Our Third Thursday Sesnon Salons join faculty, staff, students and community as an antidote to silos. Our Arts Advocacy Council, composed of outstanding leaders in the arts, including Arts alumni, help us to enact our future, informed by their expertise, experience and care for public higher education. And the Arts Professional Pathways program demystifies careers, offers opportunity for professionalization, and provides crucial financial support for internships and the dissemination of student work.

This Fall, the #METOO AND WOMEN OF COLOR IN THE ARTS forum, for which I was awarded support by a grant from the Beyond Compliance Advisory Committee, will include film screenings and prominent guest speakers Rowena Chiu and Drew Dixon who will share their experiences enduring sexual assault, harassment, and marginalization as young professionals within entertainment industries. Their presentation is designed to empower our students to enter traditionally exclusionary industries and instigate necessary change.

In closing, I call upon the remarkable work of the late composer, singer, activist and scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding member of the Freedom Singers in the 1960s and the legendary all-Black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. A professor of American history at American University, curator at the Smithsonian, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, her death this summer lands as a profound loss. She left us with infinite wisdom from which I continue to draw. Upon re-reading her classic 1981 essay (a favorite of mine as an undergraduate), “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,”  I am moved by how her artistic practice made her recognize the power of community. Reagon captured the attendant discomfort and struggle working alongside those with different perspectives, backgrounds, and priorities. She points to coalition work as not about comfort. It is about achieving change. By embracing diversity, finding common ground, and building strong relationships, she advised how powerful coalitions help us make new and needed narratives that transform the world. 

Let us continue to care for each other and do great things together here in the Arts at UC Santa Cruz. 

Fiat Slug,
Dean Celine

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, M.F.A., Ph.D.
Dean of the Arts Division
Distinguished Professor, Film and Digital Media