Faculty: LOFT Grant Awardees
Four $2,000 awards for faculty to 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.
Abigail De Kosnik
Associate Professor - Theater, Dance & Performance Studies and Berkeley Center for New Media
Project: My play script, The Philippine Deep, is based on my research on five generations of my family history and 150 years of Philippine and Philippine-U.S. history. The first two acts of the play take place in the Philippines, the third act takes place in the U.S. I am applying for a LOFT developmental grant to organize a staged reading of The Philippine Deep during the 2025-26 academic year. That event will enable my department, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, to evaluate whether or not to give the play a full stage production in the 2026-27 academic year. Hopefully, the director that I hire for the staged reading will be able to direct the stage production the following year. The staged reading will also give me the opportunity to recruit Filipino/a-American students at Berkeley as actors, some or all of whom may be able to act in the stage production the following year. In addition, the staged reading will enable me, as the writer, to learn how best to sharpen and refine the script to be mounted on a stage.
Bio: Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies and Folklore. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.De Kosnik’s book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, was published by MIT Press in 2016. She is Filipina American. (Full bio on TDPS website)
Luanne Redeye
Assistant Professor - Art Practice
Project: In a new series of work I’ve titled Inheritances, I have been exploring alternative photographic processes, organic materials with connections to home (Place), and beadwork (Care) to create a tenderness for the relationships, memories, and stories of the people within the images. This work reconsiders how vulnerability, joy, empathy, and care can be nurtured for Indigenous families and peoples. There is deep intimacy in the ritual methods of self-care to heal generational trauma that can often be mistaken as or extracted for commodity by those within and outside the communities, and these conversations of survival and loss together with knowledge sharing, caretaking, and cycle breaking are necessary restorative acts of resistance. I wish for the work to tap into the shared histories across Native communities through visual storytelling and express how we can center our reciprocity in homelands and to each other (as family, community, “kin”) in healthy and open ways. With the support of the Arts Research Center Loft Grant, the award will further allow me to explore these new aesthetic possibilities of proudly and unapologetically bringing forward Indigeneity in the process, materials, and ways of thinking about art.
Bio: Luanne Redeye is a portrait and figurative artist working at the intersection of autobiography and community. A citizen of the Seneca Nation and Hawk Clan, Luanne grew up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York. Place carries a strong personal and emotional component as Luanne draws connections to the land and kinship of her home community. She has exhibited widely, including Kent State University, University at Buffalo, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and the MEAM in Barcelona, Spain, among others, and is a recipient of the 2023 NY Council on the Arts Grant and 2023 First Peoples Fund Grant. luanneredeye.com(Full bio on Art Practice website)
Neyran Turan
Associate Professor - Architecture
Project: I am working on an authored book titled Another Earth--Another Practice: Restaging Climate Futures. The book is about a radical reimagining of architecture--as a discipline, practice, and pedagogy--towards probable climate futures and contains both written and creative visual content. This developmental grant will help me finalize the visual content of the book.
Bio: Neyran Turan is an Associate Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Master of Architecture program at UC Berkeley. She is also a founding partner of NEMESTUDIO, an architectural office that has most recently been awarded with the 2024 Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, and multiple citations in The Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Awards. Her research explores alternative environmental imaginaries in architecture and urbanism, focusing on climate change, materiality, and the relationship between architecture and the planetary. Her book Architecture as Measure (2020) examines a new architectural planetary imagination. Turan has curated the Pavilion of Turkey at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and edited the journal New Geographies. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard and a Master of Environmental Design from Yale. (Full bio on College of Environmental Design website)
Ken Ueno
Professor - Music
Project: The recent announcement that Finale, the most widely used music notation platform, will cease operations has sent shockwaves through the music composition world, akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. This leaves composers, many of us with decades of work tied to Finale, facing the loss of our back catalogs and the near-impossible task of editing scores stored as PDFs. The LOFT Arts Development Grant from the ARC will help me develop new software translators to convert PDFs into Dorico (an alternative notation platform), which could preserve these works. I am thankful to ARC for helping me preserve my catalog. I hope my initiative will also help other composer colleagues across the US.
Bio: Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist, sound artist, and author. His music and installations has been performed and installed around the world. He is known for inventing vocal techniques, composing “person-specific” music, instrumentalizing architecture, and for his activism in decolonizing classical music. As a vocalist, he has performed his concerto with orchestras in Boston, New York, Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, North Carolina, and California. Ueno’s writings have been published by the Oxford Handbook, TDR, Ethics Press, the New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, and Wiley & Sons. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and his bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. (Full bio on Music website)
Students: LIFT Grant Awardees
Nine awards of $500 for undergraduate and graduate students to fund specific creative arts projects or arts research, including workshops, conferences, performance costs, collaborations, materials, publication, or exhibition costs.
Jacqueline Canchola-Martinez
4th Year Undergraduate - Geography and Conservation & Resource Studies
Project: “por vida // for life: A Geographic Study of Environmental (In)justice using Photography & Sound” seeks to investigate Latinx life carved out in the face of rural environmental injustices. Following the lead of Black feminist geographers, the project foregrounds relations to land and notions of “home” that exist despite eco degradation caused by both corporations & state neglect. por vida aims to do this visually and sonically, paying close attention to the intricacies, tensions, and poetics that the camera and sound recorder are especially poised to capture.
Bio: Jacqueline (any pronouns) was born and raised in the California San Joaquin Valley, the ancestral lands of the Yokuts people. They are interested in cultural geography, land liberation, and art.
Kristiana Chan
1st Year MFA - Art Practice
Project: My work seeks to connect ancestral paths of migrating fish species, and how the growth of early fishing industries established by Chinese migrants influenced larger patterns of human migration. By casting dried seafood (the earliest preservation method for export) in tin (the alloy that is found in aluminum cans, the next preferred preservation method in the seafood industry), I will create an installation that is activated by the movement and sound of suspending metal-cast forms in space. Through these material explorations, I hope to draw connections from my own position as immigrant-settler in the coastal Bay Area and descendant of Chinese Malaysian tin laborers under colonial rule.
Bio: Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩 (she/they) is a first year MFA candidate in the Art Practice department. She researches the political, historical, and environmental heritage of the landscape and its material elements and organisms incorporating their properties into her processes. Kristiana is interested in themes of science and speculative fiction, and the littoral coastal zones, gleaning ancient wisdom from environments that have adapted to rapidly changing conditions. www.kristiana-chan.com
Lena Chen
3rd Year PhD - Performance Studies
Project: Conceived in 2021 amidst abortion bans in so-called "sanctuary cities," We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories celebrates the labor of abortion providers, midwives, healers, herbalists, doulas, clinic escorts, and all who care for abortion seekers. The wreath is made from dried abortifacients and emmenagogues (medicinal plants like yarrow or safflower), which have been used for millennia to control reproductive cycles, regulate menstruation, and induce abortion. As the artwork traveled through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and California, the artist invited members of the public to communal wreath-making workshops and to contribute thank you letters to be sent to abortion workers nationwide. The funding from this grant will enable the project's continuation in the post-Roe era.
Bio: Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) explores care, intimacy, race, and gender through an artistic practice spanning performance, new media, and socially engaged art. Collaborating with communities including sex workers, reproductive health workers, and trauma survivors, she has exhibited, screened, and performed her work internationally. Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award and Best Emerging Talent at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, her art is in the collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, the MUST Museo del territorio in Vimercate, Italy, and the University of California, Irvine. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in performance studies at UC Berkeley, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art. www.lenachen.com
Priyanka D'Souza
2nd Year MFA - Art Practice
Project: The title of my thesis project, ‘b. Call in sick’, is taken from a point in the 1964 document, Instructions for Walk-Out Coordinators, from the Free Speech Movement on UC Berkeley’s campus. As part of the artist duo, Resting Museum, I have been long engaged in questioning the sick, debilitated, and disabled body’s political validity in spaces—particularly protest sites, that are not always accessible. This project is envisioned as a series of site-specific interventions in the institutional space of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives that draw attention to infrastructural ableisms through the body’s experience in the space.
Bio: Priyanka D'Souza (she/her) is a current MFA2 student in Art Practice, UC Berkeley. She is one half of the artist duo, Resting Museum, with Shreyasi Pathak that uses rest, queerness and disability as methodology in its art practice and curatorial projects to intervene in art and design history discourse and archives. Priyanka is the recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Award ’24, the FICA Emerging Artist Award ‘23 and has exhibited her work widely.
Emma Lloyd
1st Year PhD - Comparative Literature
Project: Emma will print an artist/translator edition of Un lugar interminable (An Endless Place), poems and translations in Spanish and English in collaboration with poet Julieta Vittore Dutto, as well as hold two small launch events. Drawing on Latin American DIY print cultures of cartoneras and cordeles, Vittore Dutto and Lloyd will work with the Doe Library’s fantastic collection to conceive of a book-object that enacts translation in body, as well as voice. We envision experimenting with different print and illustration techniques, playing with word, image, and paper.
Bio: Emma Lloyd is a translator and writer. She is the translator of Guardianas: Dispatches from the Association of Midwives Rosa Andrade (APRA), a collection of testimonies from midwives in El Salvador who delivered babies during the Salvadoran Civil War and continue this work under repressive conditions today (Seven Stories Press 2025, compiled and edited by Noemí Delgado). Her translation of Pedro Lemebel’s De perlas y cicatrices (Of Pearls and Scars) won a 2019 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and has a master’s in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center at the CUNY.
Eythana Miller
5th Year Undergraduate - Political Economy
Project: Eythana Miller has been working on personal narratives reflecting on her passage from rural ex-Amish upbringing in Montana to academia, urban life, and the reorienting of perspectives. With the support of the grant, she plans to attend workshops at Hugo House in Seattle, a nonprofit literary arts organization, to refine her narrative and receive focused feedback on her writing. Her work weaves together a complex cultural heritage, internal evolutions, and the muddled boundaries of identity.
Bio: Eythana Miller is a California transplant originally from Montana, currently studying political economy. Her work has appeared in CalMatters, The Daily Cal, and Edible Shasta-Butte. A lifelong writer, she now enjoys working on personal essays and creative nonfiction.
Pa N. Vue | Paj Hnub Vwj
5th Year PhD - Education
Project: This creative collaboration brings to life a retold Hmong folktale of star-crossed lovers. Pa and artist Maivzeb Lauj transform Pa's poem “Nkauj Hnub thiab Nraug Hli” (the Sun Goddess and the Moon Goddess) into a multimodal and multimedia experience. Background music will accompany a recorded reading of the poem, which will play as viewers scroll through moving animations created by Maivzeb.
Bio: Pa N. Vue is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at University of California, Berkeley where she researches Hmong language reclamation, literacy practices, and knowledge production. She is also an educator, writer, and content creator whose work centers Hmong language revalorization.
Dion Nataraja
1st Year PhD - Music
Project: Sandikala Ensemble, a contemporary gamelan group I founded four years ago, reimagines traditional Javanese music through a customized 36-tone tuning system. Featuring commissioned instruments—gendèrs, gambangs, and a gong kemodong crafted by a skilled gamelansmith—our work explores new sonic territories. With ARC Grant support, I intend to commission an additional gong kemodong with a new tuning system to further expand the ensemble's sound and push the boundaries of Javanese gamelan music.
Bio: Dion Nataraja is an Indonesian composer, experimental vocalist, and scholar pursuing a PhD in music composition at UC Berkeley. His work explores the intersections of Javanese gamelan, electronic music, and instrument building, inspired by philosophy and anticolonial theories and histories.
Michelle Zaragoza
2nd Year PhD - Social Welfare
Project: Michelle’s current research project builds on a community-engaged partnership with Oakland Unified School District’s Newcomer Wellness Initiative, broadly examining newcomer Latinx/o/a immigrant youth mental health and well-being upon their migration, adjustment, and resettlement to the U.S. Her arts-based qualitative study is the first of its kind to use innovative methodological approaches such as body mapping to better understand newcomer Latinx immigrant youth's mental health and well-being from their perspective and aims to make recommendations on policy and practice to support culturally responsive mental health and holistic wellbeing efforts. This grant will support Michelle’s oral presentation at the Society for Social Work and Research in Seattle, Washington, in January 2025, where she plans to share findings from this project and advance the visibility of arts-based research as a valuable social work research method.
Bio: Michelle Zaragoza, MSW, LCSW, is a Chancellor’s Fellow and doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, her research centers on the lives of Latinx immigrant youth and families and directly intervenes in addressing the wide-ranging disparities of mental health service use and access through the development of culturally grounded and community-driven pathways of support and intervention. With over six years of experience as a mental health therapist, Michelle employs storytelling and arts-based research to advance Latinx immigrant well-being and bridge research, practice, and policy.