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HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Music

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Music

This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative students across the UCSB campus. Here are the first and second prize winners in the music category.

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Visual Art

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Visual Art

This spring, UC Santa Barbara’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted an annual contest to highlight creative student voices across the campus. The following are the winning submissions in the visual art category.

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Poetry Third Place Winner

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Poetry Third Place Winner

This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative students across the UCSB campus. The following poem won third place in the poetry category.

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Poetry First Place Winner

HFA Creativity Contest 2024: Poetry First Place Winner

This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative students across the UCSB campus. This poem won first place in the poetry category.

Honoring Student Creativity: Give Day 2024

Honoring Student Creativity: Give Day 2024

An award ceremony and luncheon was held at UC Santa Barbara’s Mosher Alumni House last week to honor the recipients of the Give Day 2024 Student Creativity Contest, sponsored by the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. HFA dean Daina Ramey Berry joined students, faculty, staff, alumni and donors to celebrate. Winning entries will run in the coming days on the HFA website.

Jazz as a Design for Living

Jazz as a Design for Living

UCSB Black Studies professor Jeffrey Stewart recently hosted his jazz pop-event Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse featuring the Los Angeles based jazz artists Ben Caldwell and Love and Exile Players. The event, which was originally created to bring healing to the Isla Vista community following a mass shooting tragedy, honored the history of jazz music and brought members of the community together.

UCSB Students Start a Musical Theater Company

UCSB Students Start a Musical Theater Company

Stained Glass Productions, a new student-run theater collective at UC Santa Barbara, staged its first production, "Seasons of Broadway: A Cabaret," hoping to give students more opportunities to perform musical theater. The ensemble of 16 students performed from multiple renowned musicals, all songs falling into the theme of fall, winter, spring, or summer.

A Cinematic Focus on Native American Women

A Cinematic Focus on Native American Women

As part of its “Storytelling for the Screen” series, the Carsey-Wolf Center hosted queer and Native American director, writer, and producer Erica Tremblay for a post-screening conversation about her film, “Fancy Dance” with moderator Lisa Parks, a professor in UCSB’s Film and Media Studies department. 

Bridging Public Art and Academia

Bridging Public Art and Academia

Discussing a career in public art spanning 30 years, Art Department professor Kim Yasuda presented the talk “Public Art and Campus Placemaking: Recentering the Artist in Communities of Practice” at UC Santa Barbara’s library, in conjunction with UCSB Reads 2024. Yasuda emphasized collaboration across disciplines and cultural advocacy in her efforts to connect students, scholars, and the public.

 Political Satire in Middle East Literary History

Political Satire in Middle East Literary History

UCSB Religious Studies professor Janet Afary discussed her book Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911 with department colleague Dwight Reynolds as part of the series “Humanities Decanted,” an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center program in which UCSB scholars present their newest works in a relaxed environment. Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911, explores the first era of the 20th century Middle Eastern journal Mollā Nasreddin and its use of visual art, folklore, and satire to transmit social democratic ideas in Transcaucasia and Iran.

 Art as Agency: Helping Immigrant Children Cope

Art as Agency: Helping Immigrant Children Cope

Community-engaged artist, writer, and UCSB professor of Chicana/o Studies, Silvia Rodriguez Vega, recently spoke to students about her work on how immigration policies impact children. She spoke about her book, “Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance Among Immigrant Children,” at an event hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

"Beloved Daughter" and the Buddhist Text Translation Initiative

"Beloved Daughter" and the Buddhist Text Translation Initiative

Christoph Emmrich, an associate professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto, recently spoke to a UCSB audience about the fictional retellings of Dhammawati Guruma’s life as a Buddhist teacher. Emmrich’s talk was hosted by Rory Lindsay, a visiting scholar at the 84000 Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative, a global collaboration housed in UCSB’s Religious Studies department that began in 2021.

The Role of Bookstores in Queer History

The Role of Bookstores in Queer History

Sarah Dunne, a doctoral candidate in UC Santa Barbara's History department, gave a talk about Queer bookstores and their historical significance—how they created vital community spaces for LGBTQ members and had first-hand involvement in gay liberation advocacy. A rise in the number of Queer bookstores occurred in the 70s after the first bookstore dedicated to LGBTQ work opened in 1967, the Oscar Wilde Bookstore.

The Catalyst: A Literary Community Comes Together

The Catalyst: A Literary Community Comes Together

The Catalyst is a student-run literary magazine that UC Santa Barbara students can participate in through the English Department. They recently held a fundraiser that gave students, advisors, and community members a chance to enjoy live music and spoken word poetry in an effort to fund the next physical publication.

Alumni All-Stars: Inspiring Emerging Journalists

Alumni All-Stars: Inspiring Emerging Journalists

UC Santa Barbara Alum and former Daily Nexus reporter Gretchen Macchiarella spoke with journalism students of UCSB’s Professional Writing Minor about ways that they can use their reporting to spur social change. Macchiarella advocated for the implementation of Solutions Journalism, a type of reporting that highlights how people solve social problems.

Beyond Plot, to Storyworlds

Beyond Plot, to Storyworlds

Ingela Nilsson, a scholar from Sweden, gave a talk at UC Santa Barbara titled Ekphrastic and Embodied, on spatial form in fiction. It was hosted by the Classics department’s Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction.

Christian Nationalism in the FBI: A Forgotten History

Christian Nationalism in the FBI: A Forgotten History

Lerone A Martin, Stanford religious studies professor who directs the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, recently talked about the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for half a century. Hoover curated networks and worked with prominent white evangelists to promote and strengthen Christian nationalism. Martin used recently declassified documents to expose the religious culture in the FBI during Hoover’s era, which has had long lansting repercussions.

The 'AI' Panic in Perspective

The 'AI' Panic in Perspective

UC Santa Barbara Germanic and Slavic Studies professor Fabian Offert teaches a course called “Critical AI.“ Offered through the Comparative Literature department, he explores and critiques artificial intelligence’s current abilities with his students, which puts potential threats in perspective.

Border Crossings: Dance Seen Through the Lens of Injustice

Border Crossings: Dance Seen Through the Lens of Injustice

UCSB Theater and Dance professor Ninotchka Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, emeritus professor in History of Art and Architecture, conceived the exhibit Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955. The exhibit examines how artists of color and indigenous artists had a deep impact on dance as an art form. It is running concurrently at UCSB’s Art and Architecture Museum and the New York Public Library.