From Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu, M.F.A., Ph.D., Division of the Arts, UCSC
Welcome to our new students, staff and faculty and welcome back to our whole community! We emerge from an extraordinary time of suffering and we return with solemn joy.
As the new Dean of the Division of Arts, and as a film scholar and filmmaker, I believe in the power of the arts to transform lives. My mission as a leader is to help our faculty, staff and students to deploy the ability of the arts to create new and needed narratives, to bring communities together, to amplify an increasing diversity of voices, and to keep the definition of the arts fervently open ended.
Students interested in exploring languages beyond the textual find home in our Departments of Art, Film and Digital Media (FDM), History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC), Performance, Play and Design (PPD), and Music and the Program in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM). In world-class facilities situated in the bluffs of the Pacific and the redwood forest of our campus, each department offers innovative and distinctive ways to practice and engage in critical, historical and theoretical studies of art and culture. Composed of artists, performers, historians, critics and theorists, our award-winning faculty work across disciplines and across campus within a transnational context. They achieve global renown in how they bring new ideas together unexpectedly and in doing so, articulate new sensibilities that herald the future.
Their exemplary instruction in the arts helps students hone their ideas and develop the skills needed for impactful individual and collaborative creative thought, critical analyses, and practical action within and beyond UCSC. The Division of Arts historically aspires and ambitions toward equity, inclusion, and social and environmental justice in our processes and productions. We encourage innovation and inclusion and believe that excellence cannot be achieved without equity.
Peopled by a talented and devoted staff, internship and career opportunities are explored in the Arts Professional Pathways program. Robust support in research funding applications is provided by the Arts Research Institute and programming opportunities reside in the Sesnon Gallery and Institute of Arts and Sciences. The Dean’s Fund for Excellence and Equity supports faculty revisions to re-imagine he curriculum, student research that envisions the future of arts in the academy and community, and the centrality of staff roles in delivering the mission of the university.
Join us in the art of change at the Division of Arts at UCSC!