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New Arts Faculty Bring Wide-Ranging Expertise and Diverse Perspectives to the Division

The UC Santa Cruz Arts Division is pleased to announce five new faculty hires who will begin teaching throughout the current 2020-2021 academic year. These professors bring with them a wide range of expertise in their respective fields and the Arts Division is thrilled to welcome them.

Jorgge Menna Barreto
Assistant Professor, Art

Jorgge Menna Barreto
Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. is a Brazilian artist and educator, whose practice and research have been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. In 2014, he held a post doctorate at UDESC, Brazil, where he collaborated with a biologist and an agronomist to study relationships between site-specific art and agroecology, centering around agroforestry. 

Presently living in Europe, he has engaged in a second postdoctoral research study at Liverpool John Moores University, England, which will lead to the work he will present at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written extensively about the subject. He has engaged in multiple art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide. 

Since 2015, Menna Barreto has been a professor at the Art Department of Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, and will join UC Santa Cruz on January 4, 2021.

Jacqueline Olive
Visiting Assistant Professor, Film and Digital Media/Social Documentation

Jacqueline Olive
Jacqueline Olive is an independent filmmaker and immersive media producer with more than a decade of experience in journalism and film. Her debut feature documentary, Always in Season, premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency (Always in Season will re-air October 31st on PBS’ Independent Lens). Olive also co-directed and co-produced the award-winning hour-long documentary, Black to Our Roots, which broadcast on PBS WORLD. 

She has received artist grants and industry funding from Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, Independent Television Service (ITVS), Firelight Media, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Kendeda Fund, International Documentary Association (IDA), Catapult Film Fund, Black Public Media (BPM), Southern Documentary Fund, Alternate ROOTS, Working Films, Cucalorus Foundation, and more.  She was also awarded the Emerging Filmmakers of Color Award from International Documentary Association and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. 

Olive gained experience as an immersive media fellow with the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Institute for New Media Technologies and MediaMaker Fellows, the Black Public Media (BPM) New Media Institute, and most recently, the Open Immersion VR Lab sponsored by the Ford Foundation, National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and the Canadian Film Centre (CFC). 

She has a master’s degree from the University of Florida Documentary Institute and previously worked on the production team of the Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary series, Independent Lens

Kailani Polzak
Assistant Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC)

Kailani Polzak
Kailani Polzak’s research focuses on European visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular attention to histories of science, aesthetic philosophy, race, colonialism, and intercultural contact in Oceania. Her current book project, Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania, examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to so-called “Voyages of Discovery” conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were marshaled in arguments about the origins of human difference in Europe and the United States. She also maintains a methodological interest in the questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.

Polzak’s honors and awards include: Association of Print Scholars Collaboration Grant, 2020 [Co-awarded with Jennifer Chuong for our 2021 colloquium, Imprinting Race] Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Junior Fellowship, 2018-2020 C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Williams College, 2016-2018; Social Science Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2013; and the Georges Lurcy Fellowship for Dissertation Research in France, 2013.

Polzak  holds a B.A., History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.

Clint Ramos
Visiting Assistant Professor, Theater Arts

Clint Ramos
Clint Ramos is a designer, educator, activist and producer. He was recently nominated for two 2020 Tony Awards: Costume Design -- Play, The Rose Tattoo and for Scenic Design -- Play, Slave Play. He also is the recipient of a TONY Award for Best Costume Design of a Play (the first person of color to win in his category) and has been nominated twice for his designs for Once On This Island and Torch Song. He holds many other prestigious industry awards and honors, including two OBIE Awards and a Drama Desk Award. He was the recipient of the Ani ng Dangal Presidential Medal for dramatic arts from the President of the Philippines in 2014 and 2017.

Ramos is the producing creative director for Encores! at New York City Center. Film credits include production design for Lingua Franca by Isabel Sandoval for Netflix, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and chronicled the daily struggles of an undocumented Filipina transwoman in New York. His costume design for RESPECT, the Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson for MGM will be in theaters in 2021.

He has designed sets and/or costumes for over two hundred theater, opera and dance productions. Selected credits include the Broadway productions of Grand Horizons, Slave Play, The Rose Tattoo with Marisa Tomei, Burn This with Adam Driver and Keri Russell, Torch Song, Once On This Island, Six Degrees of Separation with Allison Janney, Sunday in the Park With George with Jake Gyllenhaal, In Transit, Eclipsed with Lupita Nyong’o, Violet with Sutton Foster and The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper.

Most recently, Ramos has been the professor of design and head of design and production at Fordham University. Prior to this, he was professor of scenic design at SUNY Purchase and has been a visiting professor/artist at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Georgetown University.

He holds a Master of Fine Arts from New York University where he attended on the Gary Kalkin Memorial Scholarship.

Sarah Sanford
Assistant Teaching Professor, Art

Sarah Sanford
Sarah Sanford is an artist and art educator whose practice incorporates photography, printmaking, drawing and installation to create hidden worlds of biological landscapes and scientific abstractions. Capturing the physical nature of light is a dominant component to the imagery she creates. Drawn to its ethereal properties and transient nature, her work explores themes of time passage, impermanence and interconnectedness.

Sanford works at the interface of art and science. Over the years, collaborations with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Human Genetics Unit (UK) have enabled exploration of diverse topics including genomics, cell biology and the ecological impacts of climate change. Working frequently in large series, her current work focuses on public trust and perception in science, exploring misconceptions and biases.

Sanford exhibits her work nationally and internationally. Her work has been featured in publications that include the international print magazine, E-squared: Art + Science and The California Printmaker. 

She has a B.S Art Education; Joint Program of Case Western Reserve University & The Cleveland Institute of Art and an M.F.A Printmaking, Edinburgh College of Art, and also studied at the Lacoste School of the Arts, France.