06/03/2026
The Arts Research Center and Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is thrilled to welcome Fumi Okiji as the new Director, starting July 1, 2026!
Okiji is a performer and theorist whose work moves across Black studies, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her first book, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford, 2018), reconsiders the critical potential of art through an encounter between Theodor Adorno and traditions of Black creative music. Her new book, Billie's Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford, 2025), extends this project, thinking with Black creative practice not primarily as an object of analysis but as itself a mode of knowing, a methodology that operates at the limits of what critical theory can formalize. This commitment to forms of understanding that emerge through practice, listening, and collective study is precisely what she brings to the directorship of the ARC.
As director, Okiji hopes to build upon the 25-year legacy of ARC’s unique capacity to shape the intellectual and creative life of the university, critical research, and its engagement with the Bay Area and beyond.
“I would love to see the Arts Research Center become the place where scholars for whom practice is integral to their inquiry, and artists working propositionally—approaches that have been active but scattered across campus, and for which the institutional scaffolding hasn't yet caught up—can gather. I've been wondering: what would it mean to cultivate a space to better support such work? This, I think, has always been part of what ARC has done, and is something this next iteration of the Center would like to move front and center.”
Okiji envisions ARC as a place for study and collaboration, and a resource for maker-thinker scholarship across campus. Central to this will be sustained working groups, including cross-disciplinary crit groups, project-specific listening sessions, and a recurring public series, Notes on a Poem, in which writers, artists, and musicians are invited to reflect, with the community, on the thinking behind a piece of their work.
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