News

A new adaptation of Sophocles’s classic will be staged at a museum that once held Native remains—but it’s hardly a staid museum piece.

Clara Olivares, who received her PhD in Music Composition from UC Berkeley in May 2021, will debut her second opera, Les Sentinelles, at the Opéra National de Bordeaux in November 2024, followed by performances at the Opéra de Limoges in January 2025 and the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 2025. This opera is a joint commission from the three co-producing opera houses and has received support from the French Ministry of Culture's grant for original musical works, as well as the Beaumarchais - SACD Lyric Award.

Saagar Asnani is a graduate student in Musicology and Medieval Studies. He focuses particularly on the regions of France, Italy, Occitania, and Catalonia. He works mainly with the relationship between language and music, as his research bridges sociohistorical linguistics with musicology. Saagar earned his MA from UC Berkeley in 2022, and BA in Music, French and Biology from University of Pennsylvania. 

In this first-person narrative, Yesenia Ochoa, a first-year student at UC Berkeley, tells UC Berkeley News about her experience being a student from a migrant family and her educational aspirations.

“I grew up in Yuba City. My parents immigrated there from a little village on the side of a hill called Las Estacas in Michoacan, Mexico, when they were 23. They work in the fields — agriculture is a huge industry in the region — so they leave really early in the morning to harvest peaches, walnuts, tomatoes, almonds, almond fields, things like that.

Major(s): Rhetoric and Legal Studies

Alejandra Colon, a proud Latina and 2018 graduate of UC Berkeley, has continued to honor her heritage through her work and community involvement. She remains an active member of the UC Berkeley Chicanx Latinx Alumni Association, and has served on the executive boards of both the Orange County and Los Angeles chapters. 

UC Berkeley’s Department of Music unveiled the new Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall in September, following an extensive renovation that was years in the making. The reopened space includes a larger stage, new seats, and state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and digital technology upgrades.

The 100-seat venue occupies a former lecture hall at Morrison Hall, a building that also houses music classrooms, practice rooms, and Berkeley’s storied collection of baroque, classical, gamelan, and other world instruments. 

Professor and Chair of Art Practice Ronald Rael was selected to design one of the 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations for Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, which explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations.

A surge of scholarly interest across the country in Ukrainian studies is far exceeding American universities’ capabilities, but UC Berkeley is positioning itself to fill that gap.

Curators of Berkeley is a series of interviews with Berkeley alumni from a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities who work across curatorial practices and fields. Patricia Cariño Valdez is an art consultant, independent curator, and manager of the Olivia Collection. 

Tadiwa Madenga 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.

The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to welcome 10 professors in the departments of Art Practice, Comparative Literature, English, German, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Philosophy, Scandinavian, and Spanish & Portuguese as of July 1, 2024. 

For over a century, the modern Olympics have brought athletes from around the world together to compete and celebrate. Victors, whether they’re gymnasts flying across the balance beam or casually cool pistol shooters, are awarded coveted bronze, silver and gold medals. But one of the top honors of the Games is to stand atop the podium as the gold medalist’s national anthem plays and their country’s flag is raised.