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Faculty

Elliot W. Anderson, Associate Professor, Electronic Art, Digital Arts/New Media

Anderson's work incorporates a wide range of media including video, sound, computer interaction, animation, and digital imaging.  His work includes interactive computer sculptures and installation, public art, interactive video for performance, and digital photography. He has created computer controlled interactive video sets for New Music and Dance performance. Anderson's current research incorporates computer technologies to engage questions about land use and social interventions into the environment.  His recent work, Silicon Monuments - in collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition - uses augmented reality software on hand-held devices to create a site-specific, multimedia documentary about toxic Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.  Viewers can explore the sites and interact with the documentary, which reveals hidden environmental damage and its health and social costs.  Anderson’s work has been exhibited and performed widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Venues include the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. and the M.H. de Young Museum (Average Landscapes). His work includes a commissioned large-scale photographic diptych that is a centerpiece for the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia.

 

Jorgge Menna Barreto, Assistant Professor, Environmental Art

Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. is a Brazilian artist and educator, whose practice and research have been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. In 2014, he did a post doctorate at UDESC, Brazil, where he collaborated with a biologist and an agronomist to study relations between site-specific art and agroecology, centring around agroforestry. Presently living in Europe, he has engaged in a second postdoctoral research at LJMU, England, which will lead to the work he will present at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written extensively about the subject. He translated related authors from English to Brazilian Portuguese, including Miwon Kwon, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hito Steyerl and Anna Tsing. Menna Barreto has engaged in multiple art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide. In 2016, he participated in the 32 São Paulo Biennial, where he showed his award-winning project Restauro: a restaurant set up to work out a complex system of environmental restoration in collaboration with settlements of the landless people movement of Brazil [MST]. The project travelled to the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2017, where the artist worked with a wild edibles expert, a botanical illustrator and local organic growers. In 2020, as a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands, he launched a periodic called Enzyme, in collaboration with his partner Joélson Buggilla. In Geneva, Switzerland, he has collaborated with the MFA in Socially Engaged Art at HEAD - Haute École d’Arts Appliqués, with whom he is building a cooperation agreement focused on ecopedagogy. Since 2015, Menna Barreto has been a professor at the Art Department of UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, and will join UCSC in 2021.

 

 

Dee Hibbert-Jones, Professor, Sculpture and interdisciplinary practice, public art, documentary film. Affiliate faculty DANM, FDM, Legal studies, Director, Arts Research Institute, Founder, co-director Social Practice Research Center

Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy award winning filmmaker and artist. She works collaboratively with Nomi Talisman on films, cross-disciplinary installations, drawings and animations. Exploring diverse subjects from land use and wasted resources, to power and politics, institutional racism, regulation of behavior and the blinding cover of privilege. Currently, Hibbert-Jones and Talisman are working on a series of animated documentary films that examine the crisis in the criminal justice system and the U.S. racial divide with the families of prisoners on death row. For this work they were awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition of their "outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice”, and a California Public Defenders Association Gideon Award for support to indigent minorities. Their short animated documentary Last Day of Freedom won best short at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards, a Northern California Emmy and was nominated for an 88th Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Hibbert-Jones is a National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital and International Documentary Association awardee; a MacDowell Colony Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow. 

 

Karolina Karlic, Associate Professor, Photography and Practice

Through a range of photographic media Karlic creates work that widely addresses the intersection of photography, ethnofiction, and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor, industry, and the social and environmental effects of globalization. Karlic has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including theJohn Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), the Cultural Exchange International Fellowship of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency Program, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, amongst others. Her research is dedicated to telling the stories of those who have been affected by the post-modernization of the industrial world. Through the use of documentary art practice as a research method rather than an artistic style, her work seeks to better understand societal, environmental, and industrial constructs by critically making visual notes of them. Her projects are on the cusp between art and documentary photography, aimed at creating a new way to reflect on the possibilities for the visual arts today to deliver an act of criticism. Karlic invites the viewer into a space and environment where historical consciousness is critical to reflecting on our relationship to consumption by questioning photography’s limitations, engaging contemporary concerns around the social impact of art, and elaborating on the distinctions between art and lived experience. In her research, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the ways natural rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically formed, Karlic proposes that rubber + photography are both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution. This research proposes that each are equal players in the development of a globalized contemporary mobile society of making, and consuming.

 

Enrique Leal, Assistant Professor, Print Media

Enrique Leal received his B.F.A. from the Polytechnique University of Valencia, M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla La Mancha (UCLM). A major body of his work explores photography as a central subject within print media, a vehicle best understood in relation to a host of developing rather than fixating factors. Recipient of fellowships from the Institute of Iberian-American Culture and the Spanish Academy in Rome, he has been an artist in resident at the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium), Scuola Internazionale di Grafica (Italy), Proyecto ACE (Argentina) and as a visiting artist at Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University. Leal’s work has been exhibited and is found in collections in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the United States.

 

Jimin Lee, Professor, Print Media

Working in a blend of old and new print media techniques, Jimin Lee has focused on themes that explore the movement of the body and object in space and in a temporal continuum, with inclusion of references to migration, globalization, transportation and mobility. Lee graduated from Seoul National University with a BFA in painting (1990) and an MFA in printmaking (1992).  As a recipient of a Japanese governmental scholarship, she studied printmaking at Tokyo Arts University (1992-93).  She also holds a second MFA in printmaking from San Francisco Art Institute (1997). She has shown in over 200 group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Anchor Graphics in Chicago; QCC Art Gallery at the City University of New York; Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco; DoART Gallery/Hyundai Gallery in Seoul; Shirota Gallery in Tokyo; AndrewShire Gallery in Los Angeles; Megalo Gallery in Canberra; Open Studio Gallery in Toronto; Galerie Alain Piroir in Montreal; AP Gallery in Calgary; Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen; Chengdu Art Museum in Chengdu; Seven Star Gallery in Berlin; and Yeongang Gallery in the Korean DMZ. Lee heads the print media program as well as the Contemporary Print Media Research Center.

 

Laurie Palmer, Professor, Sculpture, installation, public art, contemporary theory, writing

A. Laurie Palmer's writing, sculpture and public art projects draw on the history of science and materialist philosophies to engage with contemporary movements for environmental and social justice. She is currently researching the shapes and structures of underground oil shale formations, and collaborating with local activists and artists in central California to put private property on trial for crimes against the common. Her book, In the Aura of a Hole (2014), investigates material extraction sites in the US; her current book project, The Lichen Museum, explores lichen's role as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor. Palmer collaborated with the four-person art collective Haha for twenty years on site- and community-based projects. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, including at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Grimaldi Forum, Monaco; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Artists Space, NY; Aperto XLV Venice Biennale; Magasin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; MASS MoCA, North Adams. Palmer taught sculpture and contemporary theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 18 years before coming to UCSC in 2015. 

 

Jennifer Parker, Professor, Sculpture, Digital Arts/New Media, Founding Director, OpenLab Collaborative Research Center

Parker is the founding Director of OpenLab, a collaborative research center at UC Santa Cruz. Parker served as Art Department Chair from 2012-17, helped spearhead the UCSC IDEA Hubfor Social and Creative Entrepreneurship program from 2016-19, and is currently serving as campus lead PI for PlaceMakers: UC Place-based Art + Designa 2019 Multi-campus Research Initiative with UCSC, UCB, UCD, and UCSB. Parker also served as principal faculty for the Digital Arts & New Media (DANM) MFA program where she directed the Mechatronics collaborative research cohort from 2009-2015 developing research projects that combine art, design, science, and technology. She serves on the faculty advisory board for UCSC CITRIS and the Banatao Instituteand is an active board member for SOUNDWAVE, a a Bay area non-profit promoting innovative voices in sound with captivating sound art and performance experiences. Parker maintains a multifaceted art practice at the intersection of art and science. From 2008-2012 she collaborated with artist Barney Haynes on SonicSENSE, an expandable and evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, collaboration, and participation. More recently Parker has been working with the Genomics Instituteto develop an Art + Media Lab and is a founding member of The Algae Society: Bio Art and Design Collective. 

 

Elizabeth Stephens, Professor, Environmental Art, Performance Art, Film, Sculpture and Writing, Director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab

Beth Stephens, Ph.D. is a performance artist, filmmaker, sculptor, activist and writer. Stephens’ has made artwork, films, performances and writing about queerness, feminism, sex. and environmentalism for over 25 years. Dr. Stephens is the Founding Director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at UC Santa Cruz. She has been a Professor of Art for 25 years. Her most current project is the book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2021. This book is co-authored by Stephens’ longtime collaborator Annie Sprinkle. Together Stephens and Sprinkle are founders of the “ecosex movement.” Their award-winning documentary film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story. has been screened internationally. Their most recent documentary film, Water Makes Us Wet, premiered in Kassel, Germany and screened in venues such as BFI’s Flare Festival in London and MOMA in NYC. Sprinkle and Stephens are married to the Earth, Sky, Sea, Soil and many other nature entities. They performed in the Venice Biennale in 2009 and are official documenta 14 artists. 

 

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