Arts & Culture
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THI Moving Image Lab Public Fellow helps bring horror exhibition to life at the Academy Museum
A scholar of queer history and culture with a passion for horror, Bradford Nordeen is The Humanities Institute Moving Image Lab’s 2026 curatorial and exhibitions fellow at the Academy Museum, where he worked on the new exhibition The Horror Show, featuring nearly 400 horror-movie artifacts. The exhibition, which runs until July 21, drew nearly 8,000…
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UC Santa Cruz history professor tapped to lead historic slave trade database as it moves to Harvard
Slavevoyages.org, a free online database chronicling tens of thousands of slave-trade voyages, is heading to Harvard University, and UC Santa Cruz History Professor Gregory O’Malley has been chosen to lead it.
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Quarry Amphitheater to Present Sir Isaac Julien’s Landmark Film Young Soul Rebels
A newly restored director’s cut of Sir Isaac Julien’s acclaimed 1991 film Young Soul Rebels is coming to the Quarry Amphitheater on Wednesday, October 21. Following the screening, Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities, will join The Humanities Institute (THI) and the Moving Image Lab for a discussion of the film’s origins, its…
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The Festival of Monsters returns to Santa Cruz
As Halloween draws near, the monsters are about to descend on Santa Cruz. From Wednesday, October 14, through Sunday, October 18, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies will bring together more than 80 scholars, artists, writers and makers for the fifth annual Festival of Monsters, the center’s largest conference yet.
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Humanities students get real-world experience through summer programs
This past summer, 26 UC Santa Cruz humanities students had immersive work experiences across California in media offices, city government, museum curatorial work, nonprofit organizations and literary publishing— the result of two university programs, the Summer Humanities EXCEL program and HumLaunch. Both are designed to translate humanistic study into professional experiences.
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Legendary composer and performer Samuel L. Waymon coming to UC Santa Cruz
The visit includes two movie screenings and discussions that are free and open to the public.
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UC Santa Cruz research trip reconnects Filipino American families across the Pacific
A four-week research trip in the Philippines this summer by an intergenerational team from UC Santa Cruz, the Tobera Project, and the Pangasinan Polytechnic College (PPC) led to reunions and unexpected discoveries.
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$350,000 UC grant will expand support for doctoral students at UC Santa Cruz
A new $350,000 University of California grant will help UC Santa Cruz build a more welcoming and supportive environment for doctoral students, as part of the campus’s national leadership as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI).
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More than a resume line: high schoolers build community in Art for All
With the summer rapidly drawing to an end, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) has said a fond farewell to its 2026 cohort of eleven Santa Cruz County high schoolers who participated in Art for All, a summer youth program.
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Learning beyond the classroom: ten UC Santa Cruz students immerse themselves in Japanese art and culture
Ten students took part in an intense and immersive ten-day trip to Japan. Throughout the journey, they engaged in translanguaging, a practice that allows students to shuffle between two languages or more to deepen comprehension, express complex ideas, and build linguistic proficiency rather than treating languages as separate systems.
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Ethan van Thillo: From student film festival to a cultural institution
Ethan van Thillo (Merrill ’92, Latin American and Latino studies) founded the first-ever Chicano Film Festival at UC Santa Cruz, the first San Diego Latino Film Festival, and San Diego-based nonprofit Media Arts Center San Diego.
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Alumnus and Pixar editor Kevin Nolting empowers next-gen filmmakers at UCSC
Kevin Nolting (Porter ’79, aesthetic studies) founded Slug 48 within UC Santa Cruz’s Arts Division in 2024. The 48-hour filmmaking event empowers UC Santa Cruz students to push past creative boundaries.