Fall 2026 Message from Dean Lionel Popkin
It’s October. The quarter has begun, campus has reawakened, and the year has that particular momentum it only has in the fall.
With the 2026–27 academic year, we welcome 188 new undergraduate and 92 new graduate students. We’re thrilled to have you here, and we can’t wait to get to know you and your work.
Something that is surely on everyone’s mind right now is the heat. It was a hot summer and, so far this week, it isn’t relenting. Weather patterns are changing at an alarming rate, and the same is true of so much else: technologies, institutions, our assumptions about the future.
I have been asking myself what it means to do this work in a moment like this. I keep coming back to the same thought: knowing how to adapt is not new for any of us. It is what we do as a matter of course. A choreographer revels in the unexpected accident that reshapes how to approach an idea. An architect redraws when the site or the budget or the brief insists. A painter might keep the mistake because it made their painting better. We’re trained to respond to the conditions in front of us and to find in the revision something better than what we first had in mind. Those are critical and creative skills, and I would argue, they will only become more valuable as the world keeps changing.
I spent part of the summer in a county records office on the outskirts of Exeter, going through the historic papers of an arts school started by Uday Shankar during World War II that no longer exists. It had been founded on an extraordinary idea and sustained for a while by the charisma of the person at its center. When it closed, the archive moved out of a grand castle in the Devon countryside and into a nondescript grey building beside a car park, where I read correspondence for several days and ate a surprisingly good chicken sandwich from the vending machine.
As I begin a new year as dean, I find myself thinking about what allows an institution not only to endure, but to thrive. A vision without sound structure spins out. An institution with too much structure stifles the very thing it was built to cultivate. What holds the two in balance, as far as I can tell, is whether the people responsible pay attention to what the place actually needs, and remember that a school is made by the community inside it and belongs to them.
At the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, we follow people and ideas and possibilities, and we try to give them the support to go somewhere. We measure ourselves by whether each student has the room to become the best version of what they are trying to be, and by whether everyone—students, faculty, staff—has what they need to flourish.
We lost three people this summer who spent much of their working lives helping make our school this kind of place. Heather Roberge taught in our department of architecture and urban design for more than two decades, chaired it from 2017 to 2020, directed its undergraduate program, and was named AIA‑LA Educator of the Year earlier this year. Thomas Hines held a joint appointment in history and in architecture and urban design for more than five decades, and his scholarship reshaped how we understand modern architecture, especially in Southern California. Simone Forti spent seventeen years on the faculty of world arts and cultures/dance across a career of more than sixty years. All three helped shape what this school is, and their students are in studios, classrooms, and practices all over the world, carrying the work forward.
Which brings me to what is ahead, much of which is new.
This fall, our visual and performing arts education (VAPAE) program launched a Career Technical Education (CTE) Credential in Arts, Media, and Entertainment with a Specialization in Teaching Artistry, the first CTE credential in the UC system built specifically around teaching‑artistry pedagogy. Developed with UCLA Extension, its signature feature is “teach while you credential,” as every candidate holds a paid teaching position in a public middle or high school alongside their coursework. The program answers California’s Proposition 28 directly, and it will help close a shortage of credentialed teaching artists for the arts‑education positions districts are now required to fund. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of adaptation I am describing: the world changed, and we built something for it.
We are also launching Shared Practices, a schoolwide initiative that creates occasions for students, faculty, alumni, and community partners to exchange ideas, share research, and develop work across disciplinary and institutional lines. Its four inaugural projects, led by Candice Lin, Victoria Vesna and Anuradha Vikram, Kate Ladenheim, and Michael Osman, explore the relationship between technology and the human body, housing justice and immigrant rights, and the overlooked architects and materials that shaped Los Angeles. Each will have a public component, with details to come.
The public programs across the school this fall are extraordinary. On October 10, the Hammer Museum will host a free public celebration of its fall exhibitions, including Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines, Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, and new Hammer Projects from Vibeke Mascini and Gê Viana. At the Fowler, Textiles as Monument is not to be missed, and this weekend the museum opens Uhengaparaoa, Taonga Tuku Iho: Ancestral Gifts and Contemporary Māori Art, which brings ancient and contemporary Māori work into conversation. On October 16 and 17, our own Victoria Marks premieres A Deer Walks into a Dance at CAP UCLA’s Nimoy Theater, a piece about connection in a divided world. From November 12 to 14, CAP UCLA launches its international opera initiative, Far Away, Here, with Kafka’s Letter to His Father, which turns one of the twentieth century’s most difficult documents into a gripping piece of theater about authority, vulnerability, and identity. And here in Broad, you can still see Fugitive Planning, an exhibition curated by graduate students in the department of art that’s open through this Thursday and our second annual exhibition of student work selected from last spring’s final shows, on view in the dean’s office throughout the year.
This is a school expanding the boundaries of what’s possible: new credentials for a changing profession, research that crosses departments, and work that goes out into the world with the hopes of making it a better place. This is who we are, and this is what we do.
As dean, my job is to tend to the conditions, to make sure the structure holds, and to ensure the environment is one in which we can all flourish. The work of researching, teaching, and creating that makes our school what it is belongs to all of you and to the broader community that supports it.
I hope this quarter you’ll engage with some of this work. I’d love to see you there.
With my best wishes for a fantastic fall,
Lionel Popkin
Dean, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
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