The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce Fumi Okiji as the new Director of the Arts Research Center (ARC), starting July 1, 2026.
Okiji is a performer and theorist whose work moves across Black studies, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her first book, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford, 2018), reconsiders the critical potential of art through an encounter between Theodor Adorno and traditions of Black creative music. Her new book, Billie's Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford, 2025), extends this project, thinking with Black creative practice not primarily as an object of analysis but as itself a mode of knowing, a methodology that operates at the limits of what critical theory can formalize. This commitment to forms of understanding that emerge through practice, listening, and collective study is precisely what she brings to the directorship of the ARC.
As director, Okiji hopes to build upon the 25-year legacy of ARC’s unique capacity to shape the intellectual and creative life of the university, critical research, and its engagement with the Bay Area and beyond.
“I would love to see the Arts Research Center become the place where scholars for whom practice is integral to their inquiry, and artists working propositionally—approaches that have been active but scattered across campus, and for which the institutional scaffolding hasn't yet caught up—can gather. I've been wondering: what would it mean to cultivate a space to better support such work? This, I think, has always been part of what ARC has done, and is something this next iteration of the Center would like to move front and center.”
Okiji envisions ARC as a place for study and collaboration, and a resource for maker-thinker scholarship across campus. Central to this will be sustained working groups, including cross-disciplinary crit groups, project-specific listening sessions, and a recurring public series, Notes on a Poem, in which writers, artists, and musicians are invited to reflect, with the community, on the thinking behind a piece of their work. The Center will also offer practical support: pedagogical guidance and frameworks for navigating scholarship that moves across disciplinary, methodological, and formal boundaries. A residency program will bring visiting practitioner-thinkers into substantive, generative encounters with students and faculty, who can help shape the collaboration and draw the wider community into its orbit. Okiji also looks forward to building relationships with Bay Area venues and arts communities as part of this new phase for the Center.
Okiji expands on the critical need for ARC’s programs at this time: “Scholars across the humanities are increasingly engaged in work in which practice plays a constitutive role. This is scholarship that spans a wide range of orientations, from practice as method or illustration to formal experimentation as a theoretical posture. Whether this signals a shift, or merely a more intentional leaning into something that has always been central to a number of fields in the critical arts and humanities, is an open question. What is beyond question, though, is that this work is very much alive at Berkeley, and that ARC can be an important resource and home for it.”
Okiji's scholarship and artistic practice are deeply intertwined, even as the demands of academia have often required her to tend to one more than the other at any given time. She is committed to creating space on campus where both can flourish.
“I am increasingly drawn to creating spaces where insights that emerge through practice might flourish, particularly in community. Making, listening, and thinking are not only tools through which we arrive at understanding, but arenas where knowledge that evades our conventional approaches to study might be cultivated. Being in practice is a form of thought unavailable to commentary alone.”
This engagement also reflects her attentiveness to the varied ways faculty and students already navigate these intersections across Berkeley: “I recognize that many at Berkeley carry their own version of this. For some, the question is how to cultivate a practice alongside more conventional disciplinary work; for others, it's that making and performing IS the theorizing, even if the institution hasn't always recognized it as such; for others still, the interest lies in hybrid forms — where creative work and critical writing are genuinely in dialogue, each shaping the other. ARC can hold all of these orientations.”
“This is a moment that calls for urgency, imagination, and conviction about the role of the arts and humanities in shaping our collective future. At a time when we are prioritizing the arts through active fundraising and renewed institutional investment, it is essential that we also articulate a bold and compelling vision for the next decade of the Arts Research Center. Fumi Okiji brings that vision. Her commitment to bridging critical theory and artistic practice speaks directly to the challenges and possibilities of our time. I look forward to the work she will lead and to the vibrant intellectual and creative communities she will continue to build across our campus.” said Sara Guyer, Dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities.
Okiji is also thinking carefully about how ARC's work becomes legible and accessible within the university's formal structures. "How do students and faculty find their way into this work, and how does the university sustain them when they do? Whether that takes the form of a Designated Emphasis for graduate students, curricular pathways for undergraduates, or new modes of engagement for faculty, I want to leave the Center with something durable in place."
Okiji is clear-eyed about what this work requires. A priority of her directorship will be cultivating the philanthropic and institutional relationships that can sustain and expand the Center's programs, bringing in new partners who are invested in what ARC is building, and deepening existing ones. She is committed to ensuring that the Center's aspirations are matched by the resources to realize them.
As ARC looks ahead, the Division also celebrates the extraordinary leadership of outgoing director Beth Piatote, whose tenure brought poetry, Indigeneity, and performance into the core of academic inquiry at Berkeley. Through her work, ARC has become a vital space for engagement across disciplines and communities, deepening the university’s commitment to creative practice as a form of knowledge.
Founded to support innovative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of scholarship and creative practice, the Arts Research Center has, over the past 25 years, continually responded to the evolving needs of research and artistic production. The legacy of its directors has established enduring frameworks for collaboration, experimentation, and public engagement.
Building on this foundation, Okiji will continue and expand ARC’s mission, strengthening its role as a laboratory for new forms of inquiry and ensuring that the arts and humanities remain central to understanding and shaping the world today.