Having recently graduated in June, 2023, lavender grey higley, who majored in anthropology and minored in dance, is ready for whatever lies ahead as they start exploring various graduate school programs.
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Featured Students
As a history and education major with a minor in theater arts, senior Sara Sotelo is looking forward to taking time to decompress after graduation before taking the next big step of applying to graduate school for an MFA in dramaturgy or possibly an MA in history.
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.
Originally, Matthew Kim intended on attending UC Santa Cruz to continue his volleyball career while also enjoying the sunny surf that Santa Cruz has to offer. But injuries changed his best laid plans and his priorities took a steep turn along the way.
Becky Diaz is a transfer student from Los Angeles County and moved to UC Santa Cruz to pursue her B.A. in Art.
Ever since middle school Jackson T. Collins has had a passion for filmmaking that continued through high school when he was especially inspired by the advisor in his video class who encouraged him to always to his best.
After visiting the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery in 2018 on the UC Santa Cruz campus, Marian (Mari) Mafnas knew that UCSC was the place for her.
Loss and grief have turned out to be uncanny inspirations for artist and student Aja Bond, who is currently in her junior year, working towards earning a B.A. in art at UC Santa Cruz.
Immigrating from Taiwan to the United States with her family when she was just nine years old, filmmaker Janet Chen learned to speak English by watching American television shows and movies.
Last month, NASA released NeMO-Net, an innovative iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs by painting 3D and 2D images of coral.
Congratulations to the following Music Department students for their outstanding accomplishments!
Nelsen Hutchison
Ph.D Ethnomusicology Student
Jon Myers, a DMA candidate in composition at UC Santa Cruz, creates music for a variety of settings, from fully notated acoustic pieces to live electronic feedback music. He works on soundscapes and sonic maps of places.
UC Santa Cruz DMA candidate in composition, Andrew C. Smith, composes music that involves intonation tunings, repetition, and language at the threshold of making sense, often connected to computational processes throughout the composition.
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.
The recipients of this year’s UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni awards are out in the world inspiring change and advancing science.
Francesca Romeo received her BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and a dual Master’s degree from Pratt Institute in Photography and Art History.
Melanie Ho is a queer Vietnamese American filmmaker and writer who currently works as the Graduate Student Coordinator at UC Santa Cruz’s Women’s Center. She’s in her second year, pursuing an MFA in the Social Documentation program (SocDoc).
The UC Santa Cruz Arts Division was very proud to present the following, very talented students with this year’s awards. Congratulations to all of our awardees!
Arts Dean’s Award Winners:
Kathleen Deck awarded Best in Arts Division
Film and Digital Media PhD graduate student Marc Francis seemed destined to be a storyteller. As a child he put his wild imagination to work, dreaming up fanciful stories and movie plots, and even back then thought of becoming a film director and screenwriter.
Over ten years ago, Koret Scholar and UC Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media major Sarah Flores made her way from her hometown in Sacramento, California to San Francisco and at the young age of 20, found herself working in film.
Dividing his time between such divergent places as Barcelona, Cairo and Oakland, transdisciplinary artist-theorist Ian Alan Paul is currently a PhD candidate in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media program, and has recently received acclaim for his virtual exhibit, The Guantanamo Bay Museum of... [more]
Since he was a young boy, Billy Woo has had a fascination with museums, and that interest is what eventually lead him to a journey of a lifetime as he now gets ready to do research at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum in Hanoi, and the Southern Women’s Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) during the... [more]
It’s been quite a journey for Terre Lee, now in her final quarter at UC Santa Cruz, as she contemplates graduating in June and thinking about what lies ahead in her future.