A 2013 University of California, San Diego M.F.A. graduate in acting, Ngozi Anyanwu, has won the inaugural Humanitas Prize for “Good Grief,” a play about a first-generation Nigerian girl dealing with love and loss in a small Pennsylvania town. Chosen from more than 230 submissions, “Good Grief” will be presented in staged readings Feb. 12-14 at the Humanitas Play Festival in Culver City.
The University of California, San Diego Division of Arts and Humanities recently sponsored, “The Scarlet Stone,” a modern dance/theater retelling of a tragic Persian myth developed by Shahrokh Yadegari, professor of sound design in the Department of Theatre and Dance. The production was performed last summer at UC San Diego’s Mandell Weiss Forum, toured to Toronto—for the Tirgan Festival, the largest Persian arts festival in the western hemisphere—and then to Los Angeles at UCLA's Royce Hall. This production, which involves university faculty and alumni, is now set to reach more than 14 million viewers worldwide through four satellite broadcasts during the week of Feb. 8 on BBC Persian in Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and online streaming at the time of broadcast.
The University of California, San Diego is an institution known for achieving scientific and creative innovations. So it is no surprise that the Department of Visual Arts broke boundaries and crossed audiences when it recently transformed a 2,500 square-foot, San Diego Art Institute (SDAI) project-space at Horton Plaza into an unexpected home for innovative contemporary art.
UC San Diego Department of History Professor Natalia Molina, who also teaches urban studies and serves as associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity and equity, was recently awarded the 2015 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for her book, “How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts.” Molina’s publication examines Mexican immigration from 1924 to 1965 to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are established. She will discuss her research publicly as the next keynote speaker in the Division of Arts and Humanities’ Degrees of Health and Well-being lecture series, Wednesday. Jan. 27, 7:00 p.m., in UC San Diego’s Great Hall.
Katharine Anderson, a historian of science in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, will present a free public lecture, “Experimenting with the Expedition: Renewing the Ocean Sciences after World War I,” on Feb. 8, 2016, at 3 p.m. at the Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science Society and the Environment on the Scripps Oceanography campus (8610 Kennel Way, La Jolla, CA 92037).