You are here
MFA Students
we are entranced by how bodies emerge with,
adapt to,
and endure environmental transformation;
we immerse ourselves in stewardship,
as we advocate for radical formations of becoming.
Dav Bell is an artist and independent arts organizer who is interested in collaborating with kind people to cultivate tangible and creative connections. Through encounter, relationship building, and humor, he sees art as a possibility for truth and reconciliation. He participates in gift-giving and is interested in how storytelling, lyricism, and craft can flourish in gift economies. He is committed to finding more ways we, as humans and other sentient beings, can thrive together. Prior to making a life in the arts, he worked as a firefighter for the US Forest Service and as a park ranger at the Upper Tampa Bay State Park in Florida. He studied visual art at Metáfora School of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and holds a BFA from the University of California Los Angeles. He is the founder and former director of the Los Angeles artists’ project Visitor Welcome Center (2015-2021) and is building The Greenhouse Project with L Gilbert an inter-generational education space that centers, art, food and climate justice.
Annika Berry is an artist and writer dedicated to expansive and promiscuous modes of collaboration and correspondence. Through experiments in language, documentary, and fictioning, her work scaffolds conversations about care, sustainability, health, illness, and in/visibility across scales. Annika is interested in how creative dialogue can train our capacity and drive for transformation, leading to a more inclusive, curious, survivable future. Since 2016, they’ve exhibited and performed as one-half of the artist duo My Husband. Annika holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and before moving to California spent years working as a dementia caregiver while pursuing a fictional career as an American cowboy.
Working at the intersection of the social sciences, geography, and the documentary arts, Amy Blondell originally trained in urban visual anthropology at New School for Social Research in New York. After completing postdoctoral work in public health, she joined the research faculty at UCSF where she was a PI on an NIH-funded study utilizing mobile technologies to collaborate, over a two-year period, with migrating homeless youth documenting healthcare, housing, transportation, labor, and income-generating activities. Together they created and exhibited travelogues combining annotated migration maps with photos, photo-essays, and geo-narratives.
Exploring the environments and urban social spaces that enable queer communities to survive, flourish, and create social change, Blondell has undertaken action research and social history projects focusing on the relationship between urban kinship, community, and political action. Social history projects include: the campaigns of homeless and marginally housed LGBT2QQ youth to create transitional shelter in San Francisco; the anti-racist and feminist political work of Black and White Men Together and Men of All Colors Together, New York; and feminist kinship and political mobilization in San Francisco’s Valencia Corridor, 1990-2010.
Amy Blondell currently resides in the Monterey Bay Area, with her wife Andrea and their six-year-old, Jamie.
Pete Brook is a writer, curator and educator focused on prisons, photos, power and labor. In 2008, he founded the website Prison Photography to bring together research and interviews unpacking issues of procedure, visibility, distribution and art in intersection with the U.S. prison industrial complex. Pete curated exhibitions including Status Update (2015) exhibitions, Prison Obscura (2014-2016) and Cell Signals (2020). He has taught histories of photography at San Quentin State Prison and California State University, Sacramento.
Kevin Corcoran works with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication and place and takes form as performance, publication, installation, and image. His background in percussion and improvisation opens up to field recording practices and place-based making with focus on abandoned and overlooked areas, conditions of excess, processes of decay and intersections of infrastructure and open space. Based in the California Bay Area, he collaborates across disciplines and borders having exhibited locally while performing and publishing work throughout the US, Europe and East Asia. Since 2015 he has co-organized the Mare Island performance series Re:Sound. Kevin holds a BA in Technocultural Studies from UC Davis.
B.1990 Queens, NYC
Drawing and printmaking house the visual practice of Génesis de Las Olas. After receiving her BFA in Illustration from Maryland Institute College of Art, life became an endless road-trip between West Philadelphia, Queer underground Bay Area, Middle Tennessee and New Orleans. In Philadelphia She was a shop monitor for Second State Press, Interned with Philadelphia Printworks and had a 2-year artist residency with 40th Street AIR. Since 2018 she’s had been a collective member of Idyll Dandy Arts (IDA), an artist-led queer land project in Middle Tennessee. Years of living in New Orleans and the Southeast lead to cultivating queer community among a rapidly changing social and environmental climate. In 2022 she completed a Clean Water Certification in Green Infrastructure with Louisiana Green Corps. Using landscaping techniques to manage urban stormwater along with coastal restoration rerouted the artist's social practice. In UCSC’s Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA she’s taken on a cultural practices of Radical Remediation, through printmaking, conservational wetland research and cultivating the importance of Queer and Trans Land Projects.
L. Gilbert is an educator, gardener, builder, and artist focused on nurturing our connection to the land. During their time in the environmental art and social practice program, they have worked towards collaboratively building an intergenerational community space that centers art, food, and climate justice, with their fellow cohort member and collaborator, Dav Bell. Prior to their MFA, they worked as an educator at the Oxbow School in Napa, CA. They grew up in the Sierra Foothills of California and received their BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City.
Leslie is a traveler on an odyssey through the intersecting realms of our climate crisis, from policy, to technology, to land-regeneration. Her past experience includes advising presidential candidates, launching climate start-ups, and getting her hands dirty with land projects across Northern California and Southern Oregon. Drawing on these experiences, her artistic practice works to engage unlikely alliances and germinate new seeds out of narratives of damnation. She is especially interested in building bridges between the arts and emerging technologies, creating new pathways through methods of translation. Leslie holds a BA in Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
Ant(onia) Lorenzo is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer committed to practices of decolonization and reciprocity. Their work interrogates structures of power, dominance, and distribution, seeking to undermine processes of ongoing and historical erasure. Through participation and creation of collective spaces, they undermine individualism in art-making with an emphasis on that which emerges during experiments with non-extractive, wonder-based research, improvisation, collection, and curatorial practices. They received an engineering degree in bioinformatics from UCSD, where they began their organizing work with Liyang Network.
Lee Chang Ming is an artist from Singapore working across photography, publishing, video and writing, and is interested in themes of intimacy, gender, environment and the everyday. His practice contemplates the subjective act of looking and the photographic medium as a process, exploring ideas of optics and haptics. His current research focus includes the intersections of queerness and nature, as well as alternative histories/narratives of marginal communities relating to his identity and ethnic heritage.
He has exhibited at places such as Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan), basis Frankfurt (Germany), Ilham Gallery (Malaysia), The Substation (Singapore), Komunitas Salihara (Indonesia), and Sa Sa Art Projects (Cambodia), among others. He also runs Nope Fun, an independent publisher and platform focusing on photography and contemporary image making.
Shane Scopatz (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer, and multimedia artist. He grew up dancing in California and graduated from the University of Califonia, Irvine, with a BFA in Dance. He spent most of his professional performance career in Tel Aviv, Israel dancing for the Batsheva Dance Company, the Inbal Dance Theater Company and freelancing. A drive to choreograph environmentally-themed works inspired him to move to the remote desert of the Colorado Plateau, to Corvallis, Oregon, where he received an MA in Environmental Arts and Humanities, and now to Santa Cruz to dive deeper into his practice as an MFA student in the Environmental Art and Social Practice program. Shane believes art is essential in the struggle for environmental and climate justice. In the shell of the old, his performance work aims to build a world of ecological flourishing for humans and the more-than-human.
Raty Syka (they/she), aka NUMPIE, is a comic artist and illustrator based in Santa Cruz, CA. With a background in sociocultural anthropology, folklore, and American Studies, Numpie makes comics and visual projects based on ethnographic research. Collaborative works highlight stories of agriculture in California - from the sustainable to the surprising. Raty has also served as a cooperative kitchen worker-owner, an academic advisor for undergraduate art students, and is a proud 4-H alum. Current projects-in-motion include exploring narratives of equine evacuation during the 2020 CZU fires in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, and highlighting experiences of goat/sheep grazing for fire reduction throughout California.
isola tong is a transpinay artist and architect interested in what we lose in translation and what is created in these transient zones. Her community-specific research and practice involve counter-imagination and place-making embedded in animism, incorporating its connective power, and acknowledging its frictions with postcolonial realities while questioning reigning perspectives of natural science, translated into soundings, poetry, gatherings, and visualizations of relational specificities and ecologies. Invested in the mystery of nature, time, as well as intersections of displacement, tong sees her role as a transducer appropriating materials from archives and the built/natural environment. Intersubjectivity and intertextuality are foregrounded in her ritualistic making and site-specific performances in the public realm that problematizes the contradiction of finding belongingness in an itinerant existence. As part of her socially engaged practice, she hosts Transcestral Gatherings, an experimental space for trans* Filipinxs in diasporic communities to connect with their complicated heritage, offering respite, affinity, and remembrance through a critical lens. Rooted in collaborative placemaking guided by engaged pedagogy, this transformative practice creates a liminal space for reimagining, reinventing, and reflecting upon our unstable becomings, challenging imperial paradigms.
Graduated with a BS in Architecture from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, the Philippines, and worked as an architect in Osaka, Japan; she is currently a graduate student in the MFA Environmental Art and Social Practice program at UC Santa Cruz, California.
Natalie Zajac is a cook, filmmaker, and artist interested in visual and sensory interplays between edible foods and human-turned toxic microorganisms. Natalie experiments with speculative food recipes that are rooted in her family’s generational foodways and stories of food survival, making room for narratives that contain speculative and immediate ways of consuming “survival” food. She is most concerned with how survival is inextricably linked to the rituals of gathering, making, and consuming food, beyond the necessary nourishment of the body and being. She looks at familiar foodways as a survival of love, one that attests to the immeasurable change we would collectively and individually experience at the loss of that access, from ruptures of climate change, migration, and wars. Love is only as deep as grief; Natalie’s work relates the loss of biodiversity to the loss of generational memories and bodily archives she would no longer be able to access, like the smell of beets so pertinent in every summers Polish cold salad, or being able to see the texture of cauliflower as her mom picks it apart with her fingers.
Before coming into the inaugural EASP MFA Cohort at UCSC, Natalie received a BFA in New Media from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. She was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. California is only her second home ever.
Jingtian Zong is a multimedia artist interested in art's power as resistance and social mediation. In the forms of interactive installations, interventions, videos, and adapted objects, her recent work discusses surveillance, collective memories, displacement, and manipulated history in and beyond the contemporary People's Republic of China.
Learn More
MFA-apply-block
