Faculty Spotlight: December 2020

Updates from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty

Faculty Spotlight: December 2020

The creative and scholarly contributions of the UCLA Arts community mine the complexities of the human condition, ask essential questions of our time, and expand the potential of creativity. Read more for a list of recent accolades and current and upcoming virtual and in-person exhibitions, performances, and lectures. 

 

Kyle Abraham

Kyle Abraham, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, shared these recent accomplishments and accolades: 

Kyle Abraham's upcoming projects and events include: 

  • From January 11-February 7th, A.I.M will participate in a “pod residency” at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and the Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts. 

 

Anurima Banerji, associate professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, has been awarded The Dance Studies Association's 2020 de la Torre Bueno® Prize for “Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State” (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, 2019). Banerji’s book offers a multilayered argument about Odissi dance history, gender, and shifting relationships to the state.   

 

Jenna Caravello, assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, participated in the UCLA Arts series “10 Questions: Reckoning,” which brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine 10 essential questions. She responded to the question “What Is Loss?” on Monday, Nov. 23. She also joined the UCLA Arts podcast “Works In Progress” to talk about creating digital avatars, storytelling in virtual spaces, and what inspires her, from ‘90s video games and “Akira” to European and Soviet animators (read more and listen here). 

 

Dana Cuff, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was awarded Educator of the Year from the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles chapter (AIALA). Also in November, Cuff received the James Haecker Prize for Leadership in Architectural Research from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, and delivered a keynote address in Valencia Spain (sadly, virtually) to the convened European and North American architectural research communities. 

The Cuff-led research group cityLAB, with AUD lecturer Marta Nowak as designer and Gus Wendel as project manager, produced their first BruinHub prototype “Study Pod.” AUD lecturer Nathan Su produced this video, and you can read more about it on the cityLAB website here. The group is in the midst of fabricating four more prototypes. It’s a solution for housing-insecure students, targeting those who commute long distances and need a home-away-from-home during the day or overnight. This dignified and destigmatized alternative to a shelter will live in the Wooden Center.  

 

Kevin Daly

Robertson Recreation Center. Image courtesy Kevin Daly Architects.

Kevin Daly, adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, won several AIALA Design Awards for several recently completed and upcoming projects:  

  • Merit in Institutional/Civic for Robertson Recreation Center – This new neighborhood gymnasium and community center serves the South Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, replacing a beloved but deteriorated recreation facility. The original center, built on the model of a large manor hall with a vast fireplace, first served as a community gathering space. In the 1960’s the city removed the fireplace and installed a substandard-sized basketball court; although the court was not regulation-sized, the recreation center has an established basketball legacy, counting professional players Nick Young and Cedric Ceballos among its alumni. 
  • Merit in Commercial/Mixed-Use for Gramercy Senior Housing - One of the first developments to utilize city-sponsored Supportive Housing (Prop HHH) funds, currently under construction Gramercy Senior Housing provides much-needed options to low-income and homeless seniors in one of America’s most expensive housing markets. The 70,000SF mixed-use, high-density project includes 64 new apartments for senior (55+) residents making less than 50% of the area's median income levels (with half designated for those who were formerly homeless), a commercial café, community spaces, and public plaza on the entry-level.
  • Merit in Institutional/Civic for The Houston Endowment Headquarters - The new Headquarters will enable Houston Endowment to relocate from its current offices in the city’s business district to a 1.5-acre site in Spotts Park near the banks of the Buffalo Bayou. KDA’s winning design is strongly connected to the site, conceived of as an airy and elegant superstructure generously shaded by a large canopy within a grove of oak trees, and successfully met the Endowment’s stated initiative: to provide the philanthropy a “more accessible, welcoming base from which to work”. 

The Architect’s Newspaper also recognized The Houston Endowment Headquarters as the best unbuilt commercial building of 2020. 


Dan Froot, department chair and professor in the Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance, and his company will conduct a three-day virtual residency in Miami, Florida from Feb 4-6, 2021. Dan Froot & Company will be joining community partners, including Miami Light Project, Empowered Youth, and Guitars Over Guns, to join in on community activities and build relationships as part of DF&Co’s new project, Arms Around America, a series of podcasts and live performances based on the oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been touched by guns.  
 

Dan Froot and Company conduct a five-day virtual performance residency at the Redfern Arts Center in Keene NH, the week of March 15, 2021. DF&Co will be conducting Instagram takeovers, TikTok challenges, teaching guest classes and workshops at Keene State College, performing excerpts from their evening-length performance, Pang!, and hosting listening parties for their Pang! Podcast. Pang! is an evening of three short plays based on real families around the country who are living with food insecurity.  

Through Positive Eyes

David Gere, the founding director of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center and professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, curated the “Through Positive Eyes" travelling exhibition of photos and stories by people living with HIV and AIDS. The exhibition was originally scheduled to open at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center in the summer of 2020 with an intensive 10-day workshop to support a group of HIV-positive people in learning how to share their stories and photographic images to confront the stigma associated with the illness. Due to COVID-19, the expected workshop had to be reconsidered and transformed to a virtual setting. The result was an extended five-month version of the group workshop, augmented by individual sessions, during which the cohort bonded as a collective, considered various aspects of their HIV stories, and developed unique visual approaches and individual photographic voices for the virtual format. The results were documented by The Guardian in this photo essay. 

 

Julia Koerner, assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, has several recent publications, including: 

Lauren Lee McCarthy, associate professor in the Department of Design Media Arts and interim associate dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion, premiered several new works including: "Later Date" at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Nov. 18 and Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China, Nov. 20 and of IA Suzie at Institute for Contemporary Ideas and Art, Göteborg, Sweden, and from September through November had a solo exhibition, "You Can Say "Reset the Room"," on view in Shanghai, China. 
 

 

Yogan Muller, visiting scholar and visiting lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts, was interviewed by Mona Kuhn, the Creative Director of The Billboard Creative and a prolific photographer. An abridged version of their conversation was published on L'Œil de la photographie here. 

 

Lionel Popkin

Lionel Popkin, Steep 2013. Cinematography Cari Ann Shim Sham. Single Channel video. 04:40. Courtesy of the artists 

 

Lionel Popkin, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, participated in the exhibition “Building Networks of Empathy” at the 18th Street Arts Center’s airport campus hangar galleries. It’s the second of a two-part show that asks us to consider the ways in which art empowers not only the artist, but its viewers to transform their most difficult experiences into enlightened outcomes. Artists were asked to respond to how they have changed as a result of their inner reflections on darkness, and to imagine new futures and societal structures as we see our way out of crisis. The exhibition sees empathy not only as a way to share and understand what others are going through, but also as a natural and endless resource that we can rely on when crisis and emergency hit, with hopes that we can turn this moment of collective fear into a sublime experience.  

 

Casey Reas, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, has work featured in two ongoing exhibitions: “Thin as Thorns, In These Thoughts in Us: An Exhibition of Creative AI and Generative Art" at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles and “Immaterial/Rematerial: A Brief History of Computer Art" in Beijing. He contributed artwork to the new publication “Atlas of Anomalous AI" (Ignota Press) and published his latest book, “Making Pictures With Generative Adversarial Networks" (Anteism). 

 

HEADER IMAGE: Detail from "You Can Say "Reset the Room"" by Lauren Lee McCarthy, on view in Shanghai, China.

 

 

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