Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

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Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

The Arts Research Center (ARC) is the first UC Berkeley research unit devoted exclusively to the arts.

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is:

An Incubator
The Arts Research Center (ARC) fosters individual and collaborative research in the arts, supporting both published scholarship and new creative activity. ARC provides a forum to share, test, and critique new work by UC Berkeley artists, arts scholars, and visiting fellows. A Nexus
ARC sponsors a broad range of programs that advance interdi

sciplinary artsresearch, including fellowships for faculty and graduate students, curriculum development grants, faculty seminars and salons, online discussion forums, conferences and symposia, and artists' residencies. ARC programs are often created in partnership with other universities, arts institutions, and individual artists. An Advocate
ARC promotes the centrality of the arts in public life and at our public university. We argue for the inclusion and support of the arts and creativity in a broad range of campus initiatives and across the disciplines.

05/12/2026

THIS THURSDAY: ARC Director Beth Piatote () will grace Pegasus Books Downtown for a reading and craft talk in conversation with ARC Affiliate Faculty Alex-Saum Pasucal.

Join us in celebrating the release of Beth’s new collection of poems, “distant water”, from Milkweed Editions ()!

“distant water” is an exquisite debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit.

🗓️Thursday, May 14th
⏰7pm
📍Pegasus Books Downtown (2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley)
🦋 free & open to the public

Sending big love to Beth and Alex, dear members of our ARC family 🌊🩵

04/22/2026

Sam Aros-Mitchell has arrived at UC Berkeley for the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency! Yesterday the Yaqui dancer & choreographer led TDPS Professor & Chair SanSan Kwan's Choreographies of Space course in a masterclass diving into Muscle/Bone technique. Aros-Mitchell led students across the dance floor stepping, reaching, crawling, and jumping in a river of movement.

Tomorrow at 4pm, Sam Aros-Mitchell will present a free & public lecture-performance, aligned with his ongoing work in Performance as Ceremony. He will dance two short José Limón solos—El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung)—in a hybrid format that weaves together movement passages and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies.

You don't want to miss this this! Taking place at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Studio, it rounds out the 2026 Indigenous Performing Arts Residency and is the last of ARC's events for the academic year!

How wonderful to close out with dance and connection to the body.

04/20/2026

This week kicks off ARC & TDPS’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) with artist-in-residence dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell!

Now in its fourth cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to take a trip down memory lane and shine some light on the incredible artists we’ve hosted through IPAR alongside our partners at Alter Theater.

In 2023, playwright Dillon Chitto premiered “Pueblo Revolt,” an equally hilarious and poignant play that wove together history and Indigifuturism to examine queerness, family, religion, and survival. Chitto was also joined by Laurie Arnold of Gonzaga University for a public lecture, Theater as a Site of Public History.
(photos 1-2, pc: David Allen)

In 2024, playwright Blossom Johnson fine-tuned the script and oversaw staged readings of “Diné Nishłį, (i am a sacred being) or, A Boarding School Play,” visited TDPS Professor Timmia Hearn DeRoy's directing class, and participated in a talkback alongside Director Daniel Leeman Smith. Johnson’s comedic and sincere play was exuberant, sunny, and just a little bit haunted, celebrating the dreams, hopes, and confidence of young Native women as they each find their own way to honor their cultural traditions and live their dreams in a modern world.

In 2025, playwright and UC Berkeley alum Drew Woodson held a series of open script development workshops with local Indigenous actors, visited TDPS Professor Philip Kan Gotanda’s scriptwriting class, gave an artist talk with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell and ARC Director Beth Piatote, and presented a public reading of his new play “From Above.” Woodson’s “From Above” opened in a lone church just at the edge of a desert town and unfolded to tell a tale of calamity, religious reckoning, and a perilous decision that threatened to tear a community apart.

This year we are pivoting from playwriting into dance! Join us at 4pm this Thursday for artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell’s lecture-performance hybrid “Performance as Ceremony” at Bancroft Dance Studio on UC Berkeley’s campus.

04/16/2026

“To write poetry, especially political poetry, is to lay both oneself and the grief of the modern world bare, and do it time and time again.

Difficult conversations allow us to learn about ourselves and our craft, and this conversation between Long Soldier and Sharif showed that poetry can exist in questioning and in exhaustion.” (Anjalie Butte, The Daily Californian)

It’s been two weeks since poet Layli Long Soldier visited UC Berkeley for two days of well-attended events, including a reading introduced by Geoffrey G. O’Brien and conversation with poet Solmaz Sharif.

Us at ARC are still processing Long Soldier's effervescence, generosity, and unique perspective on writing and creating in this day and age.

Click the link in bio to read an article on Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif’s conversation by Daily Californian reporter Anjalie Butte.

pc: Anjalie Butte/Daily Californian

04/08/2026

What a fabulous trio! Snapshots from February's Loft Hour with Chris Batterman Cháirez of Music + Cathy Lu of Art Practice in conversation with Alex Saum-Pascual of Spanish & Portuguese and New Media. This session was an absolute joy! Our packed audience received crash courses on ethnomusicology, Chinese creation mythology, and the importance of location in artistic research.

Join us at noon TOMORROW as we offer up the final Loft Hour for this academic year! Shiben Banerji (History of Art) + Alexandra Lossada (English) will be in conversation with Estelle Tarica (Spanish & Portuguese).

Free and open to the public! Can't believe we're at the end already...

04/07/2026

THIS THURSDAY! Our last Loft Hour of the academic year features Shiben Banerji (History of Art) + Alexandra Lossada (English) in conversation with Estelle Tarica (Spanish & Portuguese).

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS:
Shiben Banerji joins the Berkeley community after eleven years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was an associate professor in the Department Art History, Theory, and Criticism. He earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, as well as a Master in City Planning, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Columbia University. Interested in the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture, Shiben’s research practice, historical scholarship, and classroom teaching focus on the work of art and design in cultivating habits of democratic judgment. Shiben is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy and the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies.

Alexandra Lossada works on immigration, citizenship, and language in contemporary American ethnic literatures, especially in Latinx and Chicanx writing. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention, reevaluates the figure and the role of the interpreter in post-9/11 literary works that depict detention, deportation, and/or family separation via the legal apparatus of crimmigration, or the intersection of criminal law with immigration law. Her work has recently been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for 2025-2026. Before joining Berkeley, Lossada worked as an assistant professor of English at Berry College. She received her PhD in English at Johns Hopkins University.

Estelle Tarica is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research and teaching cover a range of topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourse after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; Holocaust consciousness in global perspective; and the transformative power of narrative and poetry.

04/01/2026

And we fly right into April! This final month of programming is rich with visits from poet Layli Long Soldier and artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell. We invite you to wrap up the academic year with ARC, celebrating poetry, dance, and music together. Can April showers give way to April flowers? We think so!

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ APRIL EVENTS･:*࿔.ೃ⋆❀°

4/1: Layli Long Soldier Poetry Reading
introduced by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
5pm • Maude Fife Room 315
Presented by ARC in collaboration with the Department of English, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities and media co-sponsorship from Native American Student Development

4/2: In Conversation: Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif
5pm • Maude Fife Room 315
Presented by ARC in collaboration with the Department of English, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities and media co-sponsorship from Native American Student Development

4/9: The Loft Hour: Shiben Banerji + Alexandra Lossada
in conversation with Estelle Tarica
12pm • Arts Research Center
Hosted by ARC with support by the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities and co-sponsored by the Dept of English

4/10: Art & Activism: Composition Colloquium
with Simone Browne, Cathy Park Hong, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Ken Ueno
3pm • Wu Performance Hall
Presented by the Dept of Music and Center for New Music and Technologies with co-sponsorship from ARC

4/21: Dance Master Class with Sam Aros-Mitchell
part of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency
closed to the public, open to UC Berkeley dance students
Co-presented by ARC and the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities

4/23: Performance as Ceremony
performance-lecture hybrid by Sam Aros-Mitchell
part of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency
Co-presented by ARC and the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities

03/31/2026

"the grief the grief the grief the grief"
– Layli Long Soldier

Whiting Award and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Layli Long Soldier will grace UC Berkeley for a poetry reading tomorrow and conversation on Thursday! Join us and kick off National Poetry Month perfectly.

Layli Long Soldier Poetry Reading
introduced by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
Wed April 1 • 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315

In Conversation: Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif
Thurs April 2 • 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315

*****
both events free & open to the public

presented by the Arts Research Center in collaboration with the Department of English, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities

03/30/2026

Announcing artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell!

During the week of April 20th, the Arts Research Center & Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies will welcome dancer & choreographer Aros-Mitchell as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program!

SCHEDULE:

Masterclass: Choreographies of Space
📅Tues April 21 at 3:30pm
🎟️closed to the public, open to UC Berkeley dance students

Performance as Ceremony
📅Thurs April 23 at 4pm
📍Bancroft Dance Studio
🎟️free & open to the public
Lecture-performance hybrid weaving together short movement passages, video from recent works, and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a McKnight Dance Fellow, and the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance. For over eight years, he has also been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse.
Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. He is among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these historic modernist works with Indigenous embodiment and critical recontextualization. Recent original works include Juya Nokakamea, a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam, an immersive sound and movement installation.

ABOUT IPAR:
The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for emerging Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future.

🔗click the link in bio for more info!

03/20/2026

Introducing LIFT Grant Awardee Bhavani Srinivas!

Support from the LIFT Grant will allow Srinivas to develop and test key technical components of their latest work, including rubberized textile structure, fountain pumps, and audio systems needed to produce their installation’s dynamic sound and circulation effects.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Bhavani Srinivas is a multidisciplinary artist working across weaving, metalwork, electronics, and found materials. Their installations often bring together contrasting symbolic systems and layered references, moving between personal narrative, cultural memory, spirituality, and global histories. Through experimental material processes, Srinivas explores how meaning shifts across different contexts and scales, from intimate lived experience to broader social and historical forces.

Srinivas holds a BA in Art Practice from Princeton University and is currently an MFA candidate in Art Practice at University of California Berkeley. Their work frequently engages questions of identity, diaspora, and knowledge systems, drawing on their Tamil-American background as well as wider histories of food, migration, and medicine.

ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Srinivas’s current installation project examines relationships between religious imagery and contemporary pop-cultural icons. Drawing from multiple interpretive frameworks, including Hindu understandings of materiality, cyclical time, and fan culture, the work investigates how devotion, repetition, and symbolic attachment operate across spiritual and cultural contexts.

The installation will center on a handwoven textile that is treated with rubber to form a watertight vessel. Water will circulate through a copper framework connected to amplifiers and audio exciters, producing a sonic feedback system that activates the surrounding gallery space. Through the movement of water, vibration, and sound, the installation creates an environment where material, sensory, and symbolic elements interact.

All photos courtesy of the artist.

Address

Hearst Field Annex, D23
Berkeley, CA
94720

Website

http://arts.berkeley.edu/

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