10 Questions: What is Beauty?

John Cage and Mountain Lake Workshop

Professor, Department of Theater/Area Head, MFA Acting Program/Principal Actor, SITI Company

J.Ed Araiza has a long and varied history working on multicultural, cross-disciplinary projects as a writer, director and performer. Araiza holds a B.A. in theater from Texas A&I University in Kingsville, Texas and studied journalism at San Antonio College. Early in his career, Araiza was a member of El Teatro de La Esperanza Company and worked at both the Los Angeles Actors Theatre and the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Araiza is a principal actor and original member of the SITI Company, founded by Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart. SITI Company is one of the most important experimental theater ensembles in the world. He is a proponent of Suzuki and Viewpoints training and for more than 20 years has performed in productions in major national and international venues.

A Hupa man fishes from a weir on the Trinity River. These weirs were built to allow most salmon to pass, ensuring survival of the salmon run | Art by Edward Sheriff Curtis, Gift of Edwin and Irene Weinrot

Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Principal Investigator, Barber Lab

Professor Paul H. Barber is an evolutionary and conservation geneticist. His Ph.D. research at UC Berkeley focused on the dispersal of frogs among the sky islands of the desert southwest, but he turned his attention to marine ecosystems of the Coral Triangle as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. He moved to UCLA in 2008 from Boston University. Honors include the Presidential Early Career Award forScientists and Engineers, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award, and the Life Science Award for Excellence in Educational Innovation. Research interests of the Barber Lab include integrates genetics, ecology, oceanography and geology, in order to understand the processes that promote speciation in marine environments, creating marine biodiversity hotspots.

Purifoy structure | Photo: Drew Tewksbury

Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director, Fowler Museum at UCLA

Marla C. Berns received her Ph.D. in art history at UCLA, specializing in African art, and was director of the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1991 to 2001. Her work focuses on the arts of northeastern Nigeria. Berns served as the lead curator of the international traveling exhibition "Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley," which premiered at the Fowler in 2011. She authored a history of the museum for the book "World Arts, Local Lives: The Collections of the Fowler Museum at UCLA" (2013). Berns is project director of the upcoming international traveling exhibition "Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths," which opened at the Fowler in June 2018. In 2013 she received the medal of chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.

The Witch No. 1 | Art by Joseph E. Baker

Chair, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media/Professor, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media

Kathleen McHugh's most recent book is Jane Campion (University of Illinois Press, 2007), which examines the subversive style of the woman who has become one of the world’s greatest film directors. She is the author of American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford University Press, 1999), the co-editor of South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of a special issue of SIGNS on “Film Feminisms.” She has published articles on domesticity, feminism, melodrama, the avant-garde, and autobiography in Cultural Studies, JumpCut, Screen, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Velvet Light Trap. Before coming to UCLA in 2002, McHugh was Chair and co-founder of the Film and Visual Culture Program at UC Riverside, where she developed and coordinated interdisciplinary curriculum involving twenty faculty across seven departments; developed a film library with 3,000 acquisitions; wrote grants for equipment for production, editing, and screenings; and wrote proposals for a minor (approved in 1992) and a major (approved in 2000). From 2005-2012 and again from 2013-2014, she served as Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.