CTSA Research & Innovation and Theater of Community Faculty and Graduate Student 2024-25 Research & Innovation Grants

Creative Research in the Arts

Now in its fourth year, the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts (CTSA) Department of Research and Innovation continues to prioritize projects that feature cutting-edge research and interdisciplinary collaborations with potential for external recognition and support. The Research and Innovation Advisory Committee (RI Committee) reviewed a competitive pool of 34 research proposals from CTSA faculty and graduate students requesting a total of $140,000 for the 2024-25 academic year. 20 projects have been awarded, with $50,000 distributed to fund an array of research, performances and exhibitions.  These initiatives underscore CTSA’s commitment to uplifting scholarly research and creativity at UC Irvine.

International Theater of Community Festival

This year’s call for proposals included a banner under the Department of Drama’s International Theater of Community Festival (TOC), reflecting the University of California’s commitment to respect, equity, learning and justice. Awarded projects were on their ability to confront bias and bigotry while promoting free speech and solidarity at UC Irvine. Two of the three top prize winners examine the intersections of power, consumption, identity, migration and history, aiming to challenge and transform existing power dynamics and relationships across borders.  

TOC awardees include Coleman Collins, who received $8,000 for The Intimacies Between Continents, and Daphne Lei, who was awarded $4,000 for Orientalizing Taste across Borders: Food, Migration, Violence, Belonging. Chad Michael Hall also received $4,000 for Frame(s) of Reference, which utilizes 360° video and virtual reality (VR) technologies to explore new modes of creation in contemporary dance.

Image: Danielle Dean, True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle), 2018, Two-channel video installation, color, sound, 9 min 39 sec, die cut digital prints on cardboards, Courtesy of Patrick Collins and Liv Barrett. Photo by Yubo Dong. 

Coleman Collins, Assistant Professor, Art ($8,000 Faculty Art Prize): The Intimacies Between Continents

Assistant Professor Coleman Collins joined the Department of Art in July of 2023. Collins is one of four faculty hired into the Poetic Justice cluster — part of UC Irvine’s Black Thriving Initiative. Supporting the vast creative output of black Southern Californians, the cluster seeks to strengthen connections between UC Irvine and community-oriented institutions that actively preserve black history, art and culture. Collins’ areas of specialization include new genres, electronic art and design, critical theory, film theory and Black studies. His artistic practice as an interdisciplinary artist and writer explores the ways that gradual, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time.  

The Intimacies Between Continents is an art exhibition that presents the works of three contemporary artists whose works explore the complex and often concealed relationships between space, place and power. Working variously across video, sculpture and installation, the exhibited artists highlight the ghostly connections that form between disparate societies under the auspices of consumer culture. Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Danielle Dean and Africanus Okokon collectively unearth the often-forgotten material traces of the racialized historical processes that produced our present-day reality. The show borrows its title from The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) by Lisa Lowe, in which she ties seemingly private, individualized domestic tranquility to broader systems of extraction.  

The artists shed light on how dominant forms of intimacy and their attendant comforts of consumption are materially reproduced (i.e. rice, salt, sugar, gold). Collectively, the works in this exhibition scrutinize the racialized and gendered structures of economic power that undergird idealized domesticity — and in so doing, perform and instantiate these alternate modes of intimacy. The works on view catalyze an understanding of the ties between far-flung groups and propose new ways of collaboration, which are more urgent now than ever. This exhibition constitutes a unique contribution to UC Irvine’s campus culture, highlighting the material legacies of colonialist domination in an innovative (and potentially transformative) way. 

The Intimacies Between Continents is currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery through April 5.

Daphne Lei, Professor, Drama ($4,000 Faculty Art Prize): Orientalizing Taste across Borders: Food, Migration, Violence, Belonging

Professor Daphne Lei has been a faculty member in the Department of Drama since 2001 and serves as the director of UCI Illuminations, the Chancellor’s Art & Culture Initiative since 2022. Lei is an internationally recognized researcher of Chinese opera, Asian American theater and intercultural and transnational performance. Her research focuses on intercultural exchanges across the Pacific, especially interactions between Asians and Asian Americans and negotiations between Asian and non-Asian cultures.   

Orientalizing Taste across Borders: Food, Migration, Violence, Belonging combines theater research, performance studies, ethnic and cultural studies, culinary studies and social science, materializing in the form of a publication. In addition to visiting Asian diasporic communities around the globe, Lei’s collaborations include an experimental performance with UC Irvine students and neurology experts on the impact of food and immigration.

Chad Michael Hall, Associate Professor, Dance ($4,000 Faculty Art Prize): Frame(s) of Reference 

Chad Michael Hall is a choreographer, director and dance filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA. He serves as an associate professor for the Department of Dance at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches all levels of modern and contemporary dance technique, choreography, contemporary partnering, dance and video, and screendance courses. Hall’s project, Frame(s) of Reference, utilizes 360° video and virtual reality (VR) technologies to invent new modes of creation, presentation and engagement with contemporary dance. 

2024-2025 Research & Innovation and Theater of Community* Grant Recipients:

Juliette Carrillo, Associate Professor, Drama: San Ignacio Project 
Completion of a full-length screenplay of a story inspired by family history, set in San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Me. 

Fabricio Cavero Farfan, Ph.D., Music: The Primeval Project
An automated sonorous sculpture that converges multiple artistic practices through sacred Andean symbolism and operatic performance.   

Oliver George-Brown, Ph.D., Music: Burns-Piñon Arts Collective 
Burns-Piñon Arts Collective will organize the Burns-Piñon Creative Showcase, a series of exhibitions and live performances that will concurrently take place during “HWY 62,” an annual festival in Joshua Tree. 

João P. Ducci Pereira, M.F.A., Dance: Untitled Thesis Concert (Thesis Title: Meaning Making in Abstract Contemporary Concert Dance) 
This concert will present three dance works that each express and explore a different facet of the Abstract-to-Narrative spectrum.  

*Laura Dudu, M.F.A., Art: We Will be Ancestors Too 
We Will Be Ancestors Too is a two-day open-to-the-public free participatory performance and hybrid theater project hosted at the Experimental Performance Lab (xMPL), at UC Irvine. This multimedia installation integrates rituals, video projections, live performance and community workshops to explore intergenerational memory, spiritual feminism and collective healing. It offers an interactive space for audiences to engage with narratives of war, diaspora and identity through a queer ancestors’ cyber-shrine. 

Diana Fathi Rasgani, Ph.D., Drama: Beyond the Frame: Zari, Resident of Citadel 
Rasgani’s project examines archival traces of female representation, using autotheory and critical fabulation to interrogate archival absences and repair hi/stories. 

Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Assistant Professor, Art: I’m Your Biggest Fan 
A group exhibition featuring new and recent works by CTSA graduate students that considers the histories and current conditions of various fandoms online and otherwise and the anonymity of commentary around these digital spaces (and how it spills into the real world).  

Kasi Kirkpatrick, M.F.A., Dance: Episodic Seriality in Screendance through the Feminist Lens 
Five original screendance works contributing to the rich history of women in avant-garde cinema and dance film exploring the intersection and influence of pop culture consumption, artistic production and audience engagement with screens, digital culture and the 21st-century phenomenon of mass media, television series and streaming services — short, interconnected, episodic stories where dance and choreography serve as the primary language.  

SeeVa Dawne Kitslis, M.F.A., Art: Burns Library Collection  
Burns Library Collection establishes a collection of readings for future users of the Burns-Piñon Reserve site in Yucca Valley.  

*davora martine lindner, M.F.A., Art: wolfmyn 
A group exhibition that explores the affective, sociological and political landscapes of transgender identity through the iconic figure of the "wolfman" as represented in folklore, psychoanalysis and popular culture. 

*João Tiago Duarte Martins, Ph.D., Music: Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: The Music of Northeastern Brazil 
A lecture-recital centered around Afro-Brazilian music, to be filmed at UC Irvine in 2025. 

Nolan Miranda, Ph.D., Music: boxed in/pushed out 
boxed in/pushed out is a public interactive arcade cabinet for two players; each of several game vignettes explores movements of oppressed populations. 

DJ Maloney, M.F.A., Drama: Twelve Angry Jurors 
This production is in collaboration with the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, to create the classic production of Twelve Angry Jurors.  

Yee Eun Nam, Assistant Professor, Drama: Untitled: Sequel 
A sequel to Nam’s 2020 video project Untitled: for the Global Form Theater Festival. Whereas the first film captured stories of discrimination, exclusion and marginalization in the U.S., the sequel is a celebration of hope and reminder that healing is an ongoing process.  

Andrew Palermo, Professor, Drama: Dancers in the Dark 
A pilot study to determine whether twitches during sleep are associated with greater dance memory, and whether expertise (novice vs expert dancer) modulates experience-dependent muscle movement during sleep. 

Mariánageles Soto-Díaz, Lecturer, Art: Spills and a Pineapple Moon Under Water 
Spills and a Pineapple Moon Under Water is a multimodal, interdisciplinary performance event at the beach, exploring the ocean as a site of perils and a poetry of disaster — oil spills, plastic gyres, overfishing, rising tides, tsunamis, colonial conquests, transatlantic slavery — and as promise, a sustaining life force of transnational import. 

*Anna Zalevskaya, M.F.A., Art: Split  
A film inspired by visiting Diocletian's palace in Split, Croatia, that originally conceived as an experimental film exploring sublime pluralities of love and religious experiences. 

Special Thanks 

Associate Dean of Research and Innovation Jesse Colin Jackson and the RI Committee would like to thank Dean Tiffany López and the Claire Trevor Society for providing major funding for this program.

International Theater of Community Festival support is provided by CTSA Department of Drama and Office of Inclusive Excellence.