The National Asian Culture Center (ACC) recently announced that artist YoungEun Kim, Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media, was awarded the 2026 ACC Future Prize. Established by the ACC, the ACC Future Prize is a strategic support initiative designed to nurture innovative and interdisciplinary artistic practices that envisage future societal values and potential.

Allen Riley is the Spring 2025 curator-in-residence at Indexical, a site for radical and experimental work located in the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, California. Riley is curating Oddly Satisfying, a series of audiovisual and performance works by artists who work with video as a physical material. The artists in this series incorporate hand-drawn animation,…

Allen Riley shared new work at the International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling in Barranquilla, Colombia, in December 2024. Riley presented Popcorn Movie, an improvisational movie-making party game that relies on a humorous feedback loop between dialogue improvised by players and narrative summaries generated through an unconventional use of artificial intelligence. Riley’s paper on the subject was…

Maya Scherr-Willson, Ph.D. student, Film and Digital Media, recently participated in the Berlinale Talents, the annual summit and networking platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for outstanding creatives from the fields of film and drama series. This year’s theme is Listen Courageously: Cinematic Narratives in Times of Dissonance.

Inês Pedrosa e Melo and Amy Reid each won $250 for winning the first round of the UCSC Grad Slam and will be in the final competition at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in downtown Santa Cruz on March 1. The winner of that contest advances to the UC Office of the President system-wide Grad Slam…

The Neighbour, a film produced by Lalu Ozban, Ph.D. Candidate in Film and Digital Media (designated emphasis in Feminist Studies; designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies) and directed by Cedoy, was recently featured as part of the San Francisco Urban Film Festival’s Trans World-Building event at the Tenderloin Museum. Trans World-Building was curated by Kaiya Gordon (UCSC…

Allen Riley has his video installation and arcade game Videofreak on display at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY through September 8, 2024. Videofreak reimagines the arcade game experience by emphasizing the art of video manipulation over traditional gameplay elements like scorekeeping and end goals. Inspired by the participatory ethos of the Portapak-wielding Videofreex art collective…