Author: Peggy Townsend

Little did Akiva Schaffer know, but those nights with his high school buddies—Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone—were actually prep work for a career that would lead them to a stint on Saturday Night Live, a series of iconic music video parodies, movie credits, and even a role as cultural touchstones for the Internet era.

A couple years out of UC Santa Cruz, Stephanie Foo decided she wanted to work for the radio show This American Life. So she hitchhiked to the world’s biggest porn convention with a load of borrowed radio equipment, talked her way inside with a fake press pass, and began a podcast she called “Get Me…

Kris Perry doesn’t think about the way historians will tell her story. Instead, the 1986 Merrill College graduate with degrees in sociology and psychology thinks how life will be different for children nationwide because of what she did.

From saving falcons to peering into the universe, sequencing the human genome, and putting organic food on American tables, UC Santa Cruz has become known as the small university where big things happen.

As a successful TV producer, Paul Sparrow helped catch murderers and child abductors. He guided a 100-person production team across the wilds of Morocco to document one of the world’s toughest adventure races. He directed more than a dozen documentaries and 300 hours of primetime TV, and won two Emmys. But ask the 61-year-old Sparrow…

When the opportunity came to help start Salud Para La Gente, a tiny health clinic for those same low-income residents in Watsonville, Barbara Garcia gave up her goal of being a teacher and jumped at the chance. Little did she know where that decision would lead.

The 2007 story of Johanna Orozco haunted director/playwright Tlaloc Rivas for more than six years because her story coincided with his desire to upgrade the narrative of Latinos in the U.S.