L.A. artist Amir H. Fallah paints portraits without faces, telling life stories through objects and symbols instead. Speaking at UCSB, he described how his work reflects his Iranian-American identity and challenges how we define people. From stained glass to sculpture, his art explores memory, culture, and the unseen layers of identity.
The 2025 winners of the UCSB Humanities and Fine Arts Division’s Give Day Creativity Contest joined HFA faculty and donors at a lunch last week to receive awards for their original work in writing, photography, art and music.
Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera visited UC Santa Barbara in in an interdisciplinary event in which he highlighted poetry's power to honor ancestors by sharing their stories with others. He shared poems on social issues such as police violence and immigration.
In a lecture as part of Art Department’s Visiting Artist Speaker Series at UCSB, artist Eamon Ore-Giron explores the fluid movement of cultural narratives across borders, blending ancient traditions with contemporary expression. His work insists that art, like history, is never singular—it's a conversation in motion. Currently on display at the AD&A Museum as half of the art duo Los Jaichackers, Ore-Giron walks the audience through his creative journey.
Olga Faccani believes Ancient Greek theater remains relevant today, shaping how we understand justice, democracy, and human connection. Through her Ph.D. work at UCSB, particularly with The Odyssey Project, she explored how classical texts resonate with marginalized voices, helping incarcerated youth navigate themes of isolation and trauma.
Writing Program professor Victoria Houser draws upon her teaching experiences to create an inclusive learning environment that engages students of diverse backgrounds. Houser prioritizes class discussions and encourages students to set clear goals for their writing. In a recent interview, she spoke about strategies to support multilingual students.
Authoritarian leaders use fear, crisis, and rebranding to push far-right agendas and erode democracy, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat told a UCSB audience at the inaugural Charles R. Ross Distinguished Lecture in the Department of Italian Studies. She highlighted how figures like Mussolini, Meloni, and Trump manipulate public perception to justify extreme policies.
Selene Kalra is an Environmental Studies exchange student from the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom who found her passion in the Jazz program in UCSB Music Department.
A panel held by the Religious Studies Department at UCSB called on the university to strengthen its efforts to return Native ancestors' remains and cultural objects, highlighting the spiritual and human rights importance of repatriation. Panelists stressed that education and understanding are key to addressing the long-standing harm caused by the desecration of Native burial sites.
UC Santa Barbara music student Donavan Walker’s senior recital, Layers, was an immersive performance blending original compositions, live music, and set design to explore the connection between dreams, nightmares, and creativity. Centered around a bed symbolizing his restless mind, the show built to a breathtaking ensemble finale, capturing the exhaustion and rewards of the creative process.
Christina Han, an associate professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, visited UCSB to present on the 17th-century Korean Sihwa ch'ongnim 詩話叢林 Compendium of Poetry Talks and the importance of collaborative, transnational scholarship in digital humanities.
Harvard University professor and filmmaker Vincent Brown spoke at a UCSB Key Passages series talk titled “Black History’s Warning to the World” and gave insights on the past, present, and future of Black history in the United States and internationally.
Dian Zeng’s experience providing music therapy during the Covid-19 pandemic led her to explore the broader impact of music on well-being, from supporting overwhelmed doctors to working with cancer patients. Now a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara, she researches how elderly Tai Chi practitioners in Los Angeles use music to enhance both their physical and mental health . At the same time, she works as a teaching assistant in Music and Asian American Studies.
The newly opened exhibit Creative Currents: Student Expression in the Arts at UC Santa Barbara’s Sara Miller McCune Arts Library showcases decades of student creativity, spanning from 1960 to 2017. Curated by graduate student Carlyle Constantino, the exhibit highlights emotionally resonant works while exploring themes of identity, belonging, and the evolving role of curation in amplifying historically overlooked voices.
UCSB alumna Alexandra Goldberg turned her passion for journalism into a career in broadcast news. From reporting at UCSB to working at WHAS11, an ABC-affiliated TV station in Louisville, Kentucky, Goldberg believes her time at UCSB helped her develop key journalism skills. Now, she shares how her college experience shaped her path to the professional newsroom.
University of Washington humanities scholar Kathleen Woodward shared the literary connections she has made between both aging and the Anthropocene last week at a Key Passages talk held by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
UCSB English student and actor-turned-director Curran Seth made his directorial debut with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, collaborating with the UCSB Music Department and Shrunken Heads Production Company to bring the dark, character-driven story to life. Emphasizing emotional depth over technical precision, Seth guided his cast—many of whom were primarily singers—to tap into their characters' psychology, resulting in a raw and immersive production.
Five years after COVID-19’s initial outbreak across the U.S., Letty García, Nomi Morris and Nathan Roberts from the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts gathered to unpack its impacts on film, the performing arts, writing and academia for a UC Santa Barbara audience. While quarantine fostered artistic innovation and collective creativity, it also transformed university students in both positive and negative ways, according to the speakers.
Amanda Harris, a UCSB Art major, uses painting to explore memory and healing. From childhood sketches to public art projects like Santa Barbara’s Painted Pianos on State Street, her work reflects a deep connection to nostalgia. As she prepares for a career in art therapy, she hopes to use creativity as a tool for healing and self-expression.
Shane Book, a poet and filmmaker, spoke at An Evening of Film and Poetry with Shane Book last week. Co-sponsored by the College of Creative Studies, Film and Media Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research, Book spoke about his poetry books, his two short films, and his time spent learning and living in a myriad of different cities.
