Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

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Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley The Arts Research Center (ARC) is the first UC Berkeley research unit devoted exclusively to the arts.

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is:

An Incubator
The Arts Research Center (ARC) fosters individual and collaborative research in the arts, supporting both published scholarship and new creative activity. ARC provides a forum to share, test, and critique new work by UC Berkeley artists, arts scholars, and visiting fellows. A Nexus
ARC sponsors a broad range of programs that advance interdi

sciplinary artsresearch, including fellowships for faculty and graduate students, curriculum development grants, faculty seminars and salons, online discussion forums, conferences and symposia, and artists' residencies. ARC programs are often created in partnership with other universities, arts institutions, and individual artists. An Advocate
ARC promotes the centrality of the arts in public life and at our public university. We argue for the inclusion and support of the arts and creativity in a broad range of campus initiatives and across the disciplines.

04/24/2025

Portals is THIS WEEKEND! Opening tomorrow and running through Sunday, this mixed program features the work of a collective of Asian American femme dance makers including ARC Affiliate Faculty SanSan Kwan, ARC Program and Communications Coordinator Lily Gee, TDPS Faculty Iu-Hui Chua, TDPS Alum Tatianna Steiner, as well as Frances Sedayao and Stacey Yuen.

📆April 25-27
📍Dance Mission Theater
🎟️Tickets can be found at portals2025.eventbrite.com or through the link in our bio
Centered around the theme of transition, this mixed program highlights their varied stories, each piece probing what it means to be at the crossroads of transformation. The evening will offer six distinct and unique journeys from the artists, each exploring the liminality.

Portals will present:
Like Dragon to Snake by Lily Gee
Senior Moment: Episode 6 by Frances Sedayao
Unbecoming by Iu-Hui Chua
A Drop in the Ocean by Stacey Yuen
Socks by Tatianna Steiner
Two Doors by SanSan Kwan

📸Images by Robbie Sweeny

Please note: Performances of Portals are Friday, April 25 at 8pm and Sunday, April 27 at 7pm. The Saturday, April 26 at 8pm performance WILL FEATURE ONLY TWO DOORS, PLUS A PANEL ON ASIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION with SanSan Kwan, Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ben Wang, moderated by Colleen Lye.

04/23/2025

Tomorrow at BAMPFA! Sky Hopinka, SFFILM 2025 Festival Persistence of Vision Awardee, shares his first feature film “maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore” preceded by a pre-screening conversation with ARC Director Beth Piatote.

📅 Thurs, April 24th at 7pm
📍BAMPFA (2155 Center Street, Berkeley)

About Sky Hopinka:
Ferndale, WA, native Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendant of the Pechanga band of Luiseño Native Americans. He is a video artist, photographer, writer, and teacher, in addition to being a filmmaker. He is the recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship.

About maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore”:
Bodies of water ebb and flow throughout Sky Hopinka’s poetic experimental documentary that follows the wanderings of two Native Americans as they share their rituals and relationships to life, identity, language, and their homeland.

About SFFILM’s Persistance of Vision Award:
Established in 1997, the Persistence of Vision Award honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking each year. This year, the award goes to filmmaker and multi-hyphenate artist Sky Hopinka.

🔗More at the link in our bio

04/22/2025

Portals premieres this weekend! Anchored by ARC Affiliate Faculty ’s “Two Doors,” this evening of dance will showcase works by six Asian American femme choreographers centered around the theme of transition. Come out and support!

The show will feature works by ARC’s Program and Communications Coordinator Lily Gee, TDPS Faculty Iu-Hui Chua, and TDPS Alum Tatianna Steiner, in addition to Frances Sedayao and Stacey Yuen.

📆April 25-27 at Dance Mission Theater

🎟️Tickets are AVAILABLE NOW at portals2025.eventbrite.com

Featured excerpts include:
“Socks” by .st
“A Drop in the Ocean” by
“Like Dragon to Snake” by

04/17/2025

TODAY! Playwright & Berkeley Alum Drew Woodson's week-long residency wraps up with an Artist Talk and Public Reading of his new play "From Above". These programs are featured in collaboration with Alternative Theater Ensemble’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, a collaborative initiative piloted by ARC and TDPS.

⏰ SCHEDULE:

🎤 Artist Talk with Drew Woodson
in conversation with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell
Thursday, April 17, 2pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

🎭 Staged Reading: “From Above”
Thursday, April 17, 6pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

🎟️ Free & open to the public

ABOUT DREW WOODSON:
Drew Woodson is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, was named Yale's Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021, and opened the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is an MFA Graduate from the Dramatic Writing department at NYU, and an alumni of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

ABOUT “FROM ABOVE”:
In the middle of an unnamed desert sits a lone church just at the edge of town. Sister Karina, Sister Maggie, and the Father all lead the small Native congregation that comes through its doors. In the five years since Sister Karina has found God and joined the church, calamity has struck the small town, leading to a string of deaths that some in the community believe to be God punishing them. Inside his darkened room, the Father believes he's hearing the voice of God, and what God has told him to do reverberates through the Native community, causing an uproar inside and out – leading to a decision that the community must make that tears each other apart.

04/16/2025

‼️📢 RALLY ON SPROUL: THURSDAY 12:00-2pm📢‼️

Join hundreds of colleges and universities across the country in manifesting the public value of academic research as part of the National Day of Action for Higher Education.

💥SCHEDULE:

🐾 11-11:45: Student-led march through campus
🎤 12-12:30: Speeches & Rally on Sproul
📚12:30-2pm: 12 faculty and student-led teach-ins on the present crisis and the public value of our research; from “Immigration law 101” to “How (biological) diversity can save your life.”

More info can be found with .our.education, , and .berkeley

04/16/2025

Playwright & Berkeley alum Drew Woodson has been in residency at UC Berkeley this week workshopping his new play “From Above”.

Join us tomorrow to celebrate Woodson’s visit with two public offerings!

🎤 Artist Talk with Drew Woodson
in conversation with Patrick Russell
Thursday, April 17, 2pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

🎭 Staged Reading: “From Above”
plus a talk back with Drew Woodson
Thursday, April 17, 6pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

🔗 More at arts.berkeley.edu

04/11/2025

It’s been a year since we hosted Blossom Johnson for the 2024 Indigenous Performing Arts Residency. During her time at UC Berkeley, Johnson workshopped and presented a staged reading of “Diné Nishłį or, A Boarding School Play,” a humorous and poignant exploration of coming of age and coming into identity.

Kicking off next week, this year’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency spotlights Playwright Drew Woodson and his new play “From Above,” which investigates themes of religion, community, and punishment. Woodson is a TDPS alumni who seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device.

🔗 Find next's schedule of events at arts.berkeley.edu

📸 Images by David Allen

🎭 Actors featured: Lea McCormick, Honokee Dunn, Zoey Reyes, Sage Hemstreet, Sabrina Saleha, Brianna Nez, and Shawna Shandiin Sunrise

04/09/2025

A look into Stephanie Syjuco’s latest work, Blind Spot (Artifacts), at The Bishop Museum for The Hawai'i Triennial. Syjuco is an Associate Professor of Art Practice and will be featured in TOMORROW’s Loft Hour alongside Andy Shanken.

More on the Loft Hour:
🗓 Thursday, April 10th 2025
⏰ 12-1pm
📍 Arts Research Center (Hearst Field Annex, D23)
🎟️ Free & open to the public

More on Stephanie Syjuco’s Blind Spot (Artifacts):
Building off an earlier work, this expanded installation format intersects an array of historical museum casements and empty object display mounts with the artist's digitally "healed" ethnographic photographs of colonial-era subjects. Placed together, the resulting work appears as if the objects and peoples once on display have been released from the conscriptive gaze of the audience, leaving behind only traces. Yet what remains is also a compelling visual metaphor of museological structure and a potentially suggestive new form of "post-post-colonial modernism." The empty object mounts become themselves seductive sculptural forms, elusive and curious in their function, suggesting skeletal Brancusis or Noguchis. And the digitally manipulated photographs echo everything from 19th Century spirit photography to early avant-garde surrealist gestures. Rather than focusing exclusively on loss or lack of heritage and personhood as a result of colonial imperialism, the artist creates a visual proposition for an expanding methodology of looking and finding in the aftermath of a potential liberation.

📷 Images property of Stephanie Syjuco

04/08/2025

TOMORROW: TRANS FEMME FUTURES BOOK LAUNCH ON APRIL 9, from 2-5pm. THERE WILL BE FREE FOOD, FREE BOOKS, and a CONVO W THE AUTHORS! come be in community and learn about trans feminist futures 🏳️‍⚧️⚧️💕

04/07/2025

We're delighted to welcome Alternative Theater Ensemble and TDPS Alum Drew Woodson back to UC Berkeley for a second year of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, a collaborative initiative sponsored by Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center.

On April 17th, Drew Woodson will give an Artist Talk in conversation with TDPS Professor Philip Gotanda and AlterTheater will present a staged reading of "From Above," a new play written by Drew Woodson and directed by R. Réal Vargas Alanis. Both events are free and open to the public.

⏰ Schedule:

🎤 Artist Talk with Drew Woodson
Thursday, April 17, 2pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

🎭 Staged Reading: “From Above”
Thursday, April 17, 6pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

Drew Woodson is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, was named Yale's Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021, and opened the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is an MFA Graduate from the Dramatic Writing department at NYU, and an alumni of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

About “From Above”: In the middle of an unnamed desert sits a lone church just at the edge of town. Sister Karina, Sister Maggie, and the Father all lead the small Native congregation that comes through its doors. In the five years since Sister Karina has found God and joined the church, calamity has struck the small town, leading to a string of deaths that some in the community believe to be God punishing them. Inside his darkened room, the Father believes he's hearing the voice of God, and what God has told him to do reverberates through the Native community, causing an uproar inside and out – leading to a decision that the community must make that tears each other apart.

🔗 More at arts.berkeley.edu

04/04/2025

Join ARC for our final Loft Hour of the academic year featuring Andy Shanken + Stephanie Syjuco in conversation with Lauren Kroiz!

🗓 Thursday, April 10th 2025
⏰ 12-1pm
📍 Arts Research Center (Hearst Field Annex, D23)

Andy Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; and consumer culture and architecture. Professor Shanken’s first book, 194X, examines how American architects and planners on the American homefront anticipated the world after the war. He is currently working on the history of imagery in American urban planning. He teaches courses in the Department of Architecture, but also in American Studies. He is currently the Director of American Studies.

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

Lauren Kroiz is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department. Her research and teaching focus on art and modernism in the United States during the twentieth century. She is a Faculty Curator of photography, paintings, and works of art on paper at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, as well as affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program and the Center for Race and Gender.

🔗 Learn more at arts.berkeley.edu

04/02/2025

Introducing D'mani Thomas of tomorrow's Chapbook Launch and Poetry Reading!

🗓 Thursday, April 3rd
⏰ 5-6:30pm
📍Arts Research Center (Hearst Field Annex, D23)
🎟 Free & open to the public
✨ Join us in celebrating the chapbook publications of Poetry & the Senses Fellows Maurya Kerr, Vincente G. Perez, & D'mani Thomas! Each poet will read for 15 minutes, followed by a book signing.

D'mani Thomas () (he\they) is a writer, and creative from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). They are currently obsessed with surveillance and intimacy. They have received fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Art & Research Center via The Engaging the Senses Foundation, The Watering Hole, Foglifter and others. In 2023, they became a finalist for the Penrose Poetry Prize and were awarded a California Arts Council grant through Youth Speaks. His work can be found in The Shade Journal, Oroboro Lit Journal, KALW 91.7 FM, The Auburn Avenue, The Ana, and elsewhere. D’mani’s debut chapbook, “Grown-up Elementary”, is now available through Black Lawrence Press. Outside of poetry, catch them studying horror movies, dancing, and eating too many fries.

04/01/2025

Introducing Vincente G. Perez of Thursday's Chapbook Launch and Poetry Reading!

🗓 Thursday, April 3rd
⏰ 5-6:30pm
📍Arts Research Center (Hearst Field Annex, D23)
🎟 Free & open to the public
✨ Join us in celebrating the chapbook publications of Poetry & the Senses Fellows Maurya Kerr, Vincente G. Perez, & D'mani Thomas! Each poet will read for 15 minutes, followed by a book signing.

Vincente G. Perez () is a decolonial poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop studies, and digital culture. He pushes the limits of theory through a poetics that treats decolonization as a tangible reality and consciousness as a material that poetry can mold otherwise. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program and a Poetry and the Senses Fellow (2021) at UC Berkeley. His debut chapbook, Other Stories to Tell Ourselves (Newfound 2023), won an Eric Hoffer finalist award. He will be a 2024 Tin House Autumn workshop participant. His poems have appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Obsidian, Third Coast, Poet Lore, Honey Literary, and more.

03/31/2025

Introducing Maurya Kerr of our April 3rd Chapbook Launch and Poetry Reading!

On Thursday, April 3rd at 5pm, join us in celebrating the chapbook publications of Poetry & the Senses Fellows Maurya Kerr, Vincente G. Perez, & D'mani Thomas.
Each poet will read for 15 minutes, followed by a book signing.
Free & open to the public.

Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer and artist. Her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appears in multiple journals. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya is a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, and other honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Maurya is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award). Her work has been supported by fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, Monson Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Photo Credit (first image): Alan Dixon

03/23/2025

American roots music singer and songwriter Martha Redbone gestured to herself, “The twenty year-old me was not this. This right here is a product of mistakes and therapy.”

Almost a month ago, the Arts Research Center, Cal Performances's Illuminations, and the Department of Music hosted Martha Redbone and her longtime collaborator Aaron Whitby for a songwriting workshop open to UC Berkeley students.

Head to arts.berkeley.edu or click the link in bio to read ARC staff member Lily Gee's reflections on the fruitful, honest, and inspiring workshop.

Illustration by Chris Leboa

03/21/2025

Celebrate the chapbook publications of Poetry & the Senses Fellows Maurya Kerr, Vincente G. Perez, & D’mani Thomas with the Arts Research Center! Each poet will read for 15 minutes, followed by a book signing.

Thursday, April 3rd 2025
5-6:30pm
Arts Research Center (Hearst Field Annex, D23)
Free & open to the public

ABOUT THE POETS:

Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer and artist. Her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appears in multiple journals. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya is a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, and other honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Maurya is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award).

Vincente G. Perez is a decolonial poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop studies, and digital culture. He pushes the limits of theory through a poetics that treats decolonization as a tangible reality and consciousness as a material that poetry can mold otherwise. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program and a Poetry and the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley. His debut chapbook, Other Stories to Tell Ourselves (Newfound 2023), won an Eric Hoffer finalist award.

D'mani Thomas (he\they) is a writer, and creative from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). They are currently obsessed with surveillance and intimacy. They have received fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Art & Research Center via The Engaging the Senses Foundation, The Watering Hole, Foglifter and others. In 2023, they became a finalist for the Penrose Poetry Prize and were awarded a California Arts Council grant through Youth Speaks. D’mani’s debut chapbook, “Grown-up Elementary”, is now available through Black Lawrence Press. Outside of poetry, catch them studying horror movies, dancing, and eating too many fries.

Learn more at arts.berkeley.edu

03/20/2025

Professor Tadiwa Madenga’s Magazine Cultures class visited the Arts Research Center on Wednesday for a zine making workshop led by ARC Indigenous Poetics Lab fellow and PhD Ethnic Studies candidate Sierra Edd!

🎓 Tadiwa Magenda is an Assistant Professor with the Departments of Comparative Literature and English. She is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.

03/19/2025

February’s Loft Hour with visiting professors Cecily Nicholson and Ana María Ochoa is now up on ARC’s Youtube! Click the link in our bio to watch the full video.

Last month, Cecily Nicholson, Holloway Visiting Lecturer with the Department of English, shared poems from her collections Harrowings and forthcoming book, Crowd Source. Ana María Ochoa, Visiting Bloch Lecturer with the Department of Music, spoke on her ancestral relationship to hurricanes and her neighbor and mentor Maria Eugenia Londoño. To close the event, Tom McEnaney of the Department of Comparative Literature and Berkeley Center for New Media facilitated a conversation inquiring about the work of Colombian poet Candelario Obeso and the relationship between music and poetry.

The Loft Hour is presented by the Arts Research Center and supported by the Dean’s Office of Arts and Humanities.

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Hearst Field Annex, D23
Berkeley, CA
94720

Website

http://arts.berkeley.edu/

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