Before the development of film and television, no art form but theater was more closely suited to bring stories to life. Yet rarely are stories told by and for an entire people as neglected in theater as those of Native Americans.
Through the month, Bay Area audiences will have a unique opportunity to experience new stories in two alternately candid and comic small-cast plays written, directed by and featuring Indigenous people.
The pro-STEM movement has gutted high school and college humanities programs — but there's some evidence of a post-pandemic revival afoot.
The Arts Research Center—a think tank for the arts at UC Berkeley—is partnering with AlterTheater to present a rolling world premiere of an award-winning new comedy, Pueblo Revolt by Dillon Chitto. Pueblo Revolt will run February 2-12, 2023 at the Arts Research Center (ARC) and February 13-26 at Art Works Downtown in San Rafael.
UC Berkeley professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als has worked with UC Berkeley alumna and pioneer of New Journalism Joan Didion (Sacramento, California, 1934 - Manhattan, New York, 2021) throughout his career, even writing the foreword to her final book of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Now, he has curated Joan Didion: What She Means, which opened less than a year after Didion’s death at age 87 and will remain on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles through Feb. 19, 2023.
In Berkeley Talks episode 160, world-renowned South African artist William Kentridge discusses the process of making the 2019 chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. He also touches on why artists should stay open to new ideas, the complex relationship between humans and algorithms — “one has to make space for that which does not compute,” he says — and the “unavoidable optimism” in the activity of making.
Meg Parker graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010 with a double major in French and Rhetoric, then went on to earn her JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
UC Berkeley English professors Hilton Als (for My Pinup) and Solmaz Sharif (for Customs) have both been longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which is awarded to a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting
Francesca Rochberg, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor Emerita of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, has been named as one of the 2023 Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturers at UC Berkeley. For more than a century, UC Berkeley’s academic senate has selected distinguished faculty members whose research has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and expanded the global understanding of a subject.
"It's hard to look at Egyptian art and not want to know more, and as I got older, I had this curiosity about how did we get to where we are today?" says Renée Dreyfus. "I always wanted to know that history of ideas."
Dreyfus, who completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2001, is Curator of Antiquities at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and the Legion of Honor.
LOS ANGELES — After decades of decline in humanities divisions across college campuses, the University of California, Berkeley has reported a resurgence of students declaring majors in the Division of Arts and Humanities — an increase of 73 percent compared to ten years ago.
For years, nearly every humanities field has seen sharp drops in enrollment. For the first time in two decades, U.S. degrees in the four major humanities fields—English, history, philosophy and languages—risk dipping below 100,000.
IN AN ESSAY on the uncompromising brilliance of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, published just months before the passing of this inimitable writer, Namwali Serpell observes: “There are many ways to be ‘difficult’ in this world: stubborn, demanding, inconvenient, complex, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is where they overlap.” Black women have always been difficult for the world, which relentlessly demands their labors, but disdains the exorbitance their labors bring forth.
Originally published June 22, 2011
A few years ago, when I was composing a concerto for myself as vocalist, I rediscovered some tapes I had made when I was 6 years old. Back then one of my favorite things was a portable Aiwa cassette recorder and I used it to make non-linear musique concrète — that is a fancy way of saying I recorded weird sounds around the house, rubbing my toy cars against the microphone, alternately growling and counting off numbers in Japanese like some spastic MC.
This Fall, the Division of Arts & Humanities hosted the 2022 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, or MMUF, Western Regional Conference in partnership with the University of New Mexico. This was UC Berkeley’s first time hosting the regional conference in 10 years and the second time hosting overall.
A surprising number of acclaimed women artists have come out of Berkeley, working in a wide array of mediums and styles and hailing from different backgrounds. Here are a few we’d like to draw your attention to because their work was/is startlingly original and their messages carry a lasting urgency. And of course, they have a good story to tell.
The Berkeley Public Library Foundation is pleased to announce that it has selected The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life as its 2023 Fred & Pat Cody Award recipient.
Founded in Berkeley in 1962, The Magnes was one of the first Jewish museums in the US. Today, it is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most preeminent collections of Jewish art, objects, texts, music, and historical documents about Jews in the Diaspora.
Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.
Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. A sculptor. A costume designer. She works in textiles, ready-made objects and assemblage. She’s not constrained by what has been or should be. Instead, she expands outward to see how far she can go. When an idea flashes in her mind, she imagines a new universe in which that idea, that creation, lives.
Berkeley, CA—The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life (The Magnes) and the Division of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley are pleased to announce the appointment of Hannah Weisman as its first Executive Director.
Weisman’s appointment is the result of a landmark partnership between Taube Philanthropies, the Magnes Museum Foundation, and UC Berkeley. The first four years of the position are generously funded by a pledge from the Magnes Museum Foundation and Taube Philanthropies.
The English Department is thrilled to host Harmony Holiday as the visiting Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry for the 2022-23 academic year. As Holloway Lecturer, Holiday is teaching a semester-long creative writing workshop this fall and will be offering a featured reading in the Holloway Series.
This article was originally posted at "OneDublin.org"
When I tell people I’m studying a subject within the humanities, they usually jump to an eyebrow raise coupled with some iteration of the following:
What are you going to use that degree for? How are you going to make any money? Wow, I wish I had an easy major too…
By now, I’ve grown accustomed to the rude comments, the derisive laughter. But the question that never fails to amuse me is this:
What will your parents think?
