Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

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Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley

The Arts Research Center (ARC) is the first UC Berkeley research unit devoted exclusively to the arts.

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is:

An Incubator
The Arts Research Center (ARC) fosters individual and collaborative research in the arts, supporting both published scholarship and new creative activity. ARC provides a forum to share, test, and critique new work by UC Berkeley artists, arts scholars, and visiting fellows. A Nexus
ARC sponsors a broad range of programs that advance interdisciplinary artsresearch, including fellowships for faculty and graduate students, curriculum development grants, faculty seminars and salons, online discussion forums, conferences and symposia, and artists' residencies. ARC programs are often created in partnership with other universities, arts institutions, and individual artists. An Advocate
ARC promotes the centrality of the arts in public life and at our public university. We argue for the inclusion and support of the arts and creativity in a broad range of campus initiatives and across the disciplines.

10/15/2026

Where are you; where am I? How do we orient ourselves in relation to one another?

The Arts Research Center presents NORTH STAR: A Movement Workshop hosted by interdisciplinary artist, writer, and ARC Open Rehearsal Artist-in-Residence Steffani Jemison. In dialogue with the children’s game “Marco Polo,” Jemison will lead participants through a series of playful prompts connecting perspective, movement, language, and relation through guided improvisation.

🌟NORTH STAR: A Movement Workshop
📅Monday, Nov 2nd from 10am-12pm
📍Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23
🔗Click the link in bio to learn more!

The workshop is open to anyone interested. Physical movement in this workshop is adaptable to all bodies and physical capacities; no movement experience is required. Come as you are!

10/14/2026

Introspection, movement, identity—what a privilege it was to have hosted last Wednesday’s Loft Hour. Thank you to all who joined us.

We wanted to especially thank our participants Mark Minch-de Leon (Film & Media), Latanya d. Tigner (TDPS), our fabulous interlocutor Tadiwa Madenga (English & Comp Lit), and ARC’s Director Fumi Okiji.

To our community members interested in hearing UC Berkeley arts faculty speak on their research and practice, a YouTube link will be available soon. Stay tuned!

10/12/2026

Study + Practice Working Group Highlight: D23 Gallery

led by Yiming Clara
held weekly on Mondays from 6-7pm at ARC
for anyone who is interested
registration form linked in bio...
come build with us ✨

ABOUT: D23 Gallery is a provisional gallery space that brings together students, faculty, and community members to explore how artistic forms of presentation may give rise to new modalities, contexts, and socialities for their work. Mainly focusing on pushing ongoing work, this group draws from the practical methodologies of artists to imagine alternate forms for ideas to surface, providing new outlooks on what research, practice, and collaboration can look like when they leave the page and enter a room.

The forms we build toward will become exhibitions that transform the Arts Research Center (HFA D23) into a gallery for their full run, with related programming for ideas that take shape in live and time-based forms. Working in seasonal cycles, each one is anchored by a curatorial fellow and a lead artist, with a cohort gathering weekly as the exhibition takes shape. Meetings are always optional, but the constellatory practice that grows out of sustained encounters is our method.

This working group is a satellite initiative of APARTMENT 19, an independent, artist-run project space that grows from the impulse to create new encounters through the context of art.

photo credits: 1, 2, 5, 8 : Yiming Clara; 3: Sofia Choi; 4, 7, 9, 10: Lucas Santana; 6: Hyungate Kim

10/06/2026

“Spending time loving a material is always worthwhile.” - Cathy Lu, Assistant Professor of Ceramics Department of Art Practice, featured in ARC’s Feb 2026 Loft Hour

The Loft Hour returns TOMORROW at 12pm! Hear from Berkeley Arts faculty Mark Minch-de Leon (Film & Media) and Latanya d. Tigner (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) in dialogue with Tadiwa Madenga (English and Comparative Literature) as the series kicks off its fourth year.

📽️ The Loft Hour: Mark Minch-de Leon + Latanya d. Tigner
📅 Wednesday, October 7th, 12-1pm
📍 Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23

We hope to see you there!

🔗 Click the link in bio to learn more

09/29/2026

Are you an UC Berkeley student or faculty member dreaming up an excellent project or research endeavor in the arts? Let us help you make that dream a reality!

This year, with the generous support of the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities, the Arts Research Center is awarding up to ten $500 LIFT Grants to undergraduate & graduate students and up to three $2000 LOFT Grants to ladder rank faculty.

ARC’s LIFT/LOFT Grant applications close THIS FRIDAY at 11:59pm on October 2nd.

LIFT Grants will support specific creative arts projects or arts research, including workshops, conferences, performance costs, collaborations, materials, publication, or exhibition costs.

LOFT Grants will support developmental phases of arts creation, including activities such as manuscript workshops, staged readings, composition performances, or other activities to advance work in creative writing, visual arts, music, theater, performance, film, or other arts practices.

Click the link in our bio for more info!

09/23/2026

✨THE LOFT HOUR IS BACK!✨

This year’s series kicks off in October with welcoming Mark Minch-de Leon (Film & Media) and Latanya d. Tigner (TDPS) in conversation with Tadiwa Madenga (English and Comparative Literature).

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS:
Mark Minch-de Leon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media. His current research focuses on Indigenous anticolonial resistance and its relation to communism and anarchism, radical conceptions of community and understandings of violence, and Indigenous theories and practices of aesthetics and media-making before, beyond, against, and after settler life. His recently published book, Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies After the Apocalypse looks at the anticolonial, nonvitalist dimensions of California Indian intellectual and cultural resurgence in the wake of destruction. He is a member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria and co-founder of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association.

Latanya d. Tigner, a longtime member and administrator of Oakland’s esteemed Dimensions Dance Theater, Inc. and is certified in the Yanvalu Level 2 of Talawa Technique™, the first American to do so. Her time with Dimensions includes studying Guinea, Senegalese, South African, Cuban, Haitian, modern, and jazz dance, as well as performing multidisciplinary contemporary works anchored in African diasporic dance and the African American experience. Latanya became a lecturer for TDPS after leading the dance program at Contra Costa College for eight years. She developed the course African Dance Presence in Hip Hop, based on her Here We Go Again workshop that unfolds her research and “movement line” pedagogy. She has received The Michael Mansfield and Randy Sweringen Social Justice Award for Artistic Excellence in Creating a More Equitable and Inclusive World.

Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres.

🔗Click the link in bio to learn more!

09/15/2026

🎉ARC GRANTS IN ACTION!🎉

Last fall, TDPS Professor SanSan Kwan received a LOFT Faculty Arts Development Grant to support the creation of “How to Make a Passive Dance,” an evening-length immersive dance performance.

This weekend, “How to Make a Passive Dance” premieres in San Francisco! It asks: Might there be reason for us to reconsider qualities like deference or quietude? And how can dance – a medium defined by embodied action – serve paradoxically as a space for exploring inaction?

Join SanSan and her cast for a performance of deep listening, attunement and receptivity. You can’t miss it!

Show details:

🎟️$20-60 Sliding Scale

📆 3 Performances ONLY!
Friday and Saturday, Sept 18th and 19th at 8 PM
Sunday, Sept 20th at 3 PM

📍IMPACT Center for Art and Dance
1625 Bush Street, San Francisco

ARC’s LIFT/LOFT Grants are accepting applications through Oct 2nd! If you’re a UC Berkeley student or faculty member seeking support on an artistic endeavor, head to arts.berkeley.eduto apply for funds!

09/08/2026

Applications are now open for ARC’s LIFT & LOFT Grants!

Thanks to generous support from the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities, this fall the Arts Research Center will award up to ten LIFT Student Art Development Grants of $500 each, and three LOFT Faculty Art Development Grants of $2,000 each.

LIFT Student Arts Development Grants: $500 awards for graduate or undergraduate students to support specific arts projects, including workshops, conferences, performance costs, collaborations, materials, publication, exhibition costs, or arts research.

LOFT Faculty Arts Development Grants: $2,000 awards for faculty to support developmental phases of arts creation, such as a manuscript workshop, reading of a play, composition performance, or other activity to advance work in creative writing, visual arts, music, theater, performance, film, or other arts practices.

Applications close October 2, 2026 at 11:59pm.

Click the link in our bio for more info

06/22/2026

Lush moments of movement from artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell's performance lecture hybrid, Performance as Ceremony, presented in May.

During his visit to UC Berkeley, Aros-Mitchell danced two short José Limón solos—El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung)—in a hybrid format that wove together movement passages and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies.

The Arts Research Center & Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies welcomed Yaqui dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell through the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR). A multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and ARC, IPAR seeks to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future.

06/16/2026

🗣🗣 On view at BAMPFA until July 26th! 🗣🗣

Countermyths, the fifty-sixth annual UC Berkeley MFA exhibition, features three ARC LIFT Arts Development Grant awardees, Eleni Maria Berg, Kristiana Chan 薧礼醑, and Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán, alongside their talented classmates Zuhoor Al Sayegh, Itzli OCIEL, and Swaleha Masude.

An exhibition of artwork by graduating MFA students, the works on display represent the culmination of rigorous research and experimental making across two years of collaborative study.

We are so proud of our grantees and all the brave artists forging their way post-graduation!

Address

Hearst Field Annex, D23
Berkeley, CA
94720

Website

http://arts.berkeley.edu/

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