Announcements

04.29.2008 :: Sharon Daniel awarded Media Arts Fellowship

UCSC DANM Chair and Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel has received a 2008 Media Arts Fellowship (formerly the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship) from the Tribeca Film Institute. Awarded to filmmakers and media artists whose work is innovative, creative and pushes boundaries, the Fellowships provide support to 22 filmmakers and media artists each year. The Fellowships offer financial support for artists working in the narrative, documentary, experimental, installation and computer-generated media genres. Daniel was one of six artists to be named as a New Media Fellow.

The Fellowship was awarded in support of her new media documentary Capitalist Punishment, a multi-media work which examines the politics of privatization and labor exploitation within the United States prison system. The work will include a museum installation and related electronic tour of prison industry products inscribed with statements by prison laborers, as well as an interactive website that maps the social geography of the prison industrial complex.

For the full article, visit http://news.renewmedia.org/2008/04/30/2008-fellows/

03.10.2008 :: Felicia Rice honored with Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship

(from Currents article by Scott Rappaport)

UCSC alumna Felicia Rice (Cowell '78)--manager for the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program—has been awarded a $20,000 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. Rice is one of four Santa Cruz County artists selected from a pool of 46 visual artists that will receive the grants to pursue their work.

The Rydell fellowships were established by long-time Santa Cruz cultural icons Roy and Frances Rydell and are administered by the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County. They are awarded solely on artistic merit by a panel of arts professionals from outside the Santa Cruz area.

A lifelong resident of the California coast, Rice came to Santa Cruz as a student at UCSC in 1974. Three years later, she established Moving Parts Press web site and began her career as a printer, teacher, literary/fine arts publisher, and book artist.

Work from Moving Parts Press has been included in exhibitions and collections both nationally and internationally--from book shows in New York and Frankfurt to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Moving Parts Press has also received numerous awards and grants from organizations that include the National Endowment for the Arts and the French Ministry of Culture.

Welcome to the world!

Congratulations to two of our DANM families on the birth of their beautiful, healthy babies!

Amel Helen Sakr, born November 5, 2007 to DANM student Laila Shereen Sakr and Fadi Sakr.

Edward Haydn Zenack Warburton, born January 9, 2008 to Samantha R. Zenack and DANM faculty Edward C. (Ted) Warburton

The DANM MFA program continues to grow, evolve, and adapt. This review highlights a few of the exciting developments over the past year.

Construction begins on new Digital Arts Center

Construction has begun on a new Digital Arts center, a state-funded $25 million arts building slated to support our expanding digital arts program with a state-of-the-art media lab and theater, exhibition areas, studios, workshops and offices. The new building is scheduled for completion in May 2009. The community celebrated with an official groundbreaking ceremony on October 18.

New DANM Leadership

We are very pleased to announce Prof. Sharon Daniel as the new chair of the DANM MFA Program. She has been central to the development of the DANM program as a faculty member, and we are grateful to have her leadership as well as her expertise in digital media theory and art practice (see below) to guide the further development and expansion of our program. She replaces Margaret (Maggie) Morse, who was called upon to serve as the Acting Dean of the UCSC Arts Division.

Professor Sharon Daniel honored in 11th annual Webby Awards

In May, Public Secrets, an online art project created by DANM Chair Professor Sharon Daniel, was named an Official Honoree in the Activism category at this year's Webby Awards. Hailed as the "Oscars of the Internet" by the New York Times, the Webby Awards honors the outstanding work that is setting the standards for the Internet. Read full story. Experience Public Secrets.

Jennifer González receives Wyeth Foundation art grant

Jennifer González, associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture and Digital Arts and New Media, received a $16,000 publication grant in March from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art in support of her forthcoming book: Subject to Display: Restaging Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press). Read full story

Metavid–a DANM thesis project–funded through Sunlight Foundation

In May, UCSC received a $157,000 grant from the Sunlight Foundation to support Metavid—an online, open-source archive of U.S. House and Senate proceedings. Created in 2006 by Michael Dale and Abram Stern as their DANM thesis project, Metavid uses public domain video feed from C-SPAN to create video archives of congressional floor proceedings on the web, searchable according to who said what, and indexed, so that users can easily link to any moment of dialogue. Read full story

MFA Exhibition: Emergence 2007

During two weekends in June, a diverse group of six DANM graduates came together to display their original works of digital and new media art from cutting-edge video and animation, special projection presentations, participatory performance pieces, sound installations, web art and much more. The seventh participant in the exhibit was a Fulbright Scholar, a digital artist from India whose work contrasts our two cultures in dramatic video installations. See more: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/Emergence2007

DANM student’s research listed in Profiles in Excellence

As part of her DANM thesis, graduate student Cynthia Payne performed with her group, E2.510, in late March from a studio she created on the fifth floor of the Engineering 2 Building. The performance: a live concert featuring four different musical ensembles improvising simultaneously over the Internet across three different time zones. Read more

DANM students take top prizes at Annual Graduate Research Symposium

The UCSC Graduate Research Symposium aims to recognize and promote the outstanding and diverse research that is being carried out by graduate students across our campus, from all disciplines. At the 2007 symposium, DANM students again took top honors:

Tyler Freeman wins first prize with DrumPants! See the video of Tyler's DrumPants! performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KNteCjkMR8
Will Justice wins second prize with "Lips 1.1"