Faculty: LOFT Grant Awardees
Six $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.
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre
Assistant Professor – Geography and Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre is a geographer whose interests are at the intersections of political and historical geographies, political ecologies, and critical cartographies. His work focuses on peoples’ relation to their land/territory/landscape while engaging wide-reaching environmental policies, colonialism, and statism. His research is grounded on collaborative methods, mainly social mapping, and videography, highlighting the multiple geographies and ways of knowing that can inform epistemic and social justice efforts. He has worked closely with communities in Oaxaca for over a decade on a range of issues, such as forest conservation, agrarian change, social mapping, and local knowledges. Currently, he is in the final stage of a feature documentary film exploring the consequences of and experiences around the international carbon offset market in Indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico.
Project Description: This film project explores ways to build other worlds through communal struggles for water in Chatino communities (San Juan Lachao, Oaxaca, Mexico). It explores the meanings that water acquires as a maker and caretaker of worlds, and through its interrelationships with human and non-human others that highlight different ways of thinking and ordering lifeworlds. The grant would support the initial research, script, and step outline. Funds will be used to carry out pre-production work with community members and local authorities in Lachao, with whom I have worked for over a decade, and conduct field visits in the region. Among these activities, we will scout the places where the film takes place, linked to the Rio Verde river, and the different stories related to its use and transformation, e.g., dams, sacred places, etc. To this end, photographic, video, and sound recordings will be taken, in collaboration with community members. Second, we will organize a workshop to discuss local narratives around water, prayers, and places linked to them. Third, workshops will be held twice a week for two weeks with community members on acting, story-making, and performance, as well as screening of documentaries to further debates around water and representational politics.
Liz Gálvez
Assistant Professor – Architecture
Liz Gálvez is a registered architect, directs Office e.g. and teaches as Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley where she also directs the (Im)material Matters Lab. She received an MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a concentration in history, theory, and criticism of architecture and a bachelor’s degree in architectural and philosophical studies from Arizona State University. She practices between the San Francisco Bay Area and Michoacán, Mexico. Her work focuses on the interface between architecture, theory, and environmentalism through a re-examination of building technologies.
Project Description: Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth stages earthen mass and woven fiber canopies as shared civic infrastructures that generate shade, airflow, and microclimates, reframing thermal design as collective comfort in response to intensifying urban heat for the Materials & Applications x Craft Contemporary Courtyard Summer 2026 Exhibition. Earthen thermal mass supports anchor the site, paired with a lightweight, woven canopy that modulates shade, air movement, and light. These elements work together to create layered microclimates, offering visitors differentiated atmospheres of temperature and texture as they move along the courtyard’s reinforced north-to-south axis. Beyond function, the project reframes thermal design as a civic enterprise, cultivated through shared practices rather than individualized air-conditioning. Public engagement extends beyond collective fabrication to include a symposium on heat, material agency, and thermodynamic literacy. Together, these efforts foreground shared learning and experimental making as urgent design responses to increasing heat insecurity in cities. Support from the LOFT Faculty Arts Development Grant will fund a critical developmental phase: the fabrication of a campus-based prototype that tests earthen column assemblies and woven canopy elements. This prototype will serve as both research instrument and public-facing installation, bridging conceptual research and the forthcoming full-scale work to be exhibited at the Craft Contemporary Courtyard in Los Angeles.
Asma Kazmi & Jill Miller
Associate Professor (Kazmi) – Art Practice and Berkeley Center for New Media
Assistant Professor (Miller) – Art Practice and Berkeley Center for New Media
Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts. Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, Kazmi tells intertwining stories about Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements.
Jill Miller is a visual artist who works across a wide range of media, from video installations to public practices, and many hybrids in between. She often collaborates with individuals and local communities in the form of public interventions, workshops, and participatory community projects. Her work is playful, and she uses humor as a strategy for opening up meaningful conversations about difficult subjects. In past work, she: lived in the remote wilderness in search of the mythical creature Bigfoot, assisted mothers who were harassed for breastfeeding in public, and organized teenage girls who were closing the gender gap by learning to edit Wikipedia. Her recent work, My Mother’s Titanium Hip, is a digital collage that blends video conference footage with text messages and 3D models .
Project Description: For the LOFT grant, we are proposing a research and production trip to Thacker Pass, Nevada (known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Northern Paiute people), the site of the largest known lithium deposit in the Western Hemisphere. Located on public land, Thacker Pass is at the threshold of rapid transformation as mining operations expand, despite ongoing Native-led resistance. Our project will document the ecological, cultural, and political totality of the site before its change. Through multi-channel video, we intend to record the plants, animals, and atmospheres of the landscape, while also bearing witness to the voices and actions of the Peehee Mu’huh community and allied movements who are resisting the mine. This dual focus positions the work as both documentation and witnessing—a record of fragile ecologies and of human struggle to protect them. This is not a journalistic account, but an artistic intervention: a way to hold space for a contested landscape, simultaneously imagined as a “green” resource site and as sacred land. By preserving images, sounds, and testimonies, the project will create an immersive experience that foregrounds the entanglement of environmental futures, Indigenous sovereignty, and the costs of technological progress.
SanSan Kwan
Professor & Department Chair – Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies
SanSan Kwan (UC Berkeley). Recent dance collaborations: Lenora Lee Dance, Chingchi Yu, Jen Liu. Recent choreography: Two Doors (2024), How to Make a Passive Dance (2026). Books: Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford, 2021) (de la Torre Bueno© Award, Isadora Duncan Dance Award); Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford, 2013). Journal articles: Dance Research Journal, TDR, Theatre Survey, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, ASAP/Journal, plus chapters in several book anthologies. Awards: Dance Studies Association Mid-Career Award (2024), UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science Beatriz Manz Faculty Award (2023).
Project Description: A LOFT Grant will support the development of my new dance work, How to Make a Passive Dance, an excerpt of which will premiere at Dance Mission Theater in April 2026. I plan to build a full length piece over summer and fall 2026. Passivity is a well-worn Asian stereotype. My new piece reframes the political possibilities of Asian American passivity. What is activism that is passive? Can we challenge stereotypical characterizations of Asian American passivity and ask instead whether an ethos of deference can be celebrated as a choreo-political practice – an assertion of Asian American sovereignty? I utilize dance to explore the affordances of passivity for Asian American well-being. That is, I want to make a passive dance. In this distressing time when we are facing an alarming increase in political violence, along with an unchecked flood of federal actions driven by bigotry, xenophobia, and greed, how might we recuperate passivity as a practice of attentiveness and connection? And how can dance – a medium defined by embodied action – serve paradoxically as model of inaction? This dance piece quietly asserts the body’s unique ability to listen, to follow, and to attend.
Tadiwa Madenga
Assistant Professor – English
Tadiwa Madenga is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersections of African literature, Black Queer Studies, 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: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.
Project Description: "Vera’s Gallery" is a publication-in-progress that explores the curatorial legacy of Yvonne Vera (1964-2005). Vera was an acclaimed novelist and the first Black director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. From 1999 to 2003, the National Gallery became her second home as she sought to transform the museum from a building often mistaken for a colonial hotel into a space for communal exhibitions. Her shows included the first display of gay and lesbian art at the gallery, the longest running exhibition on Black township photography, and an expansive program for children’s art and film. My project traces her world building through the gallery, a radical vision that remains under-documented. "Vera’s Gallery" is an expansion of a zine by the same name that was commissioned for the 2025 Coventry Biennale and is currently on view as part of the exhibition “in transit under another sky." The publication will feature a dialogue with the exhibition's curators E.N. Mirembe and Rosie Odhiambo. It will also be a collection of essays, photographs, and ephemera that trace Vera’s foundational contributions to a genealogy of queer African curatorship. With the support of the LOFT grant, I plan to gather archival materials and conduct interviews for the project.
Courtney Desiree Morris
Associate Professor – Gender & Women's Studies
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and is currently completing a book entitled To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present.
Project Description: "everything would have to change for me to be happy here" is a week-long, multi-sited performance critique of the ordinary violence of the corporate university. The performance will unfold over seven days, each day representing every year I have taught at the University of California, Berkeley. What do we carry with us into the classroom that allows us to survive in learning environments that have historically been hostile spaces for women, black and indigenous peoples, people of color, queers, and immigrants? How do we navigate these institutional spaces? How do we speak the hidden transcripts buried beneath our tongues? How do we remember who we are and where we come from in these spaces? And how do we divest from the performative politics of multicultural recognition that the neoliberal university offers us and that drain our energies even as we work to resist the larger forces beyond the university that actively seek to kill us and dismantle our work? By creating ephemeral sites of freedom, play, healing, and transformation on campus, everything would have to change invites participants to collectively reimagine a different kind of university and call the decolonized university of the future into being through practice and intention.
Students: LIFT Grant Awardees
Fourteen $500 awards to support specific creative arts projects or arts research for undergraduate and graduate students, including workshops, conferences, performance costs, collaborations, materials, publication, or exhibition costs.
Eleni Berg
2nd year MFA – Art Practice
Eleni Berg is a multidisciplinary artist and lifelong Bay Area resident. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, where she specialized in ceramics. As a Guatemalan-American artist, Berg’s practice investigates the histories and systems that have fractured reciprocal relationships between humans, land, and nonhuman life. Her work is informed by an interest in vintage objects, textiles, identifying wild mushrooms and plants, and the cultural narratives embedded in everyday materials and domestic spaces, particularly their Westernized origins and transformations. Having worked with clay for over a decade, Berg uses the medium to create dynamic, detail-oriented compositions that invite close engagement and to question the viewer's senses of familiarity.
Project description: This grant will be used to purchase 500 lbs of clay and glaze materials essential to the production of a large-scale, site-responsive artwork for my MFA thesis show at BAMPFA in 2026. I will be creating a 10ft x 7ft ceramic mural inspired by ancient Maya stelae. I will use clay to question dominant narratives imposed by Western archeologists, which often frame Maya culture as a static relic rather than a living, evolving presence. My practice engages with Indigenous knowledge systems and the politics of representation, while challenging the ways we consume a culture from the perspective of an outsider. By drawing on the symbolic language of the stelae, I reimagine how histories can be inscribed in ways that resist colonial legibility and assert Indigenous sovereignty. The mural will incorporate soil from Antigua, Guatemala into its glaze, grounding the work materially in the land it attempts to reconnect with.
Ryan Gourley
7th Year PhD – Ethnomusicology
Ryan C. Gourley is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology working at the intersection of global music history, media archeology, and cultural mobility studies. Broadly conceived, his research focuses on the politics of music and territoriality in Far Eastern Siberia and Manchuria. He is interested in how media memory and cultural memory inflect our understanding of the past, and to that end, his research reimagines what it means to do collaborative ethnography and archival investigation. Since 2018, he has served as the Curator of the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco, where he has worked to catalog, preserve, and digitize over 3500 rare musical recordings.
Project Description: The Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco recently acquired several dozen exceedingly rare 78 rpm musical records, some of which date back to 1902. Several of the records were produced in Manchuria during the 1920s and 1930s, amidst intense geopolitical upheaval. The recordings represent a wide variety of genres, from foxtrots to traditional folk tunes, and there is good reason to believe that no one has heard these songs for half a century or more. My project encompasses digitizing the recordings for the first time, permanently rehousing them in archival sleeves, organizing a public listening event, and installing a new permanent exhibit at the Museum. I hope they will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and the public alike for many years to come.
Muffy Koster
1st year PhD – Performance Studies
Muffy Koster is a performance artist, intimacy choreographer, and UC Berkeley PhD student in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies department. Her work, performed and written, approaches the worksite, logistics, infrastructure, and the laboring body, using theatricality to draw out the surreal choreography embedded in the circulation of capital. Muffy was raised in the Sacramento Valley on unceded Miwok and Patwin land.
Project Description: This performance is the third in a series of pieces called Occupations, an ongoing study of labor and value via public imitations of professions. This iteration will feature logistics and delivery, staging a day-long delivery service for a fictional warehouse via public transit. The locations visited and the package delivered will invoke The Pacific Spike, a nearly 200 meter cargo ship built specifically to ship extra long railroad tracks between a manufacturing facility in Japan and The Port of Stockton. By pushing up against the limits of proximity available to a pedestrian observer of logistics, Occupations Part 3 will map what is usually an invisible set of boundaries between logistics and the people whose lives are made by it.
Cammie Lee
1st year PhD – English; pursuing Creative Writing Masters and Designated Emphasis in Film & Media
Cammie Lee is a writer and tea sommelier exploring non-optical theories of perception and wisdom rooted in the body. Drawing upon personal experiences of non-belonging and displacement as a diasporic Korean, she is interested in examining the recalibration of emotional, linguistic, and socio-sensorial registers in assimilation through rituals of tea and writing. She received her BA from Princeton University in 2022, where she concentrated in English and received certificates in Asian American Studies, East Asian Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Prior to beginning her PhD training in English at Berkeley, she was the recipient of a Fulbright teaching grant in South Korea and worked at Zone Books in Brooklyn.
Project Description: My project considers the relationship between scent/taste, memory, and subjectivity in migratory movement and dislocation. Drawing upon the Fluxus event score and the sociality of relational aesthetics, I will organize and facilitate “Happenings” that activate the sensorium of participants through tea meditations and invoke reflexive recollection in a Proustian sense. Steepings of familiar and unfamiliar teas will be accompanied by writing exercises that prompt the release of scent/taste memories, culminating in a group reading. Fragments from these gatherings will be compiled into a little magazine that will ultimately aim to anthologize writings on diasporic displacement.
Jose Miguel Alvarado Mendoza
4th year PhD – Comparative Literature
Jose Miguel Alvarado Mendoza is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. As part of his academic and creative practices, Jose Miguel engages forms of being and belonging that are transgressive, excessive, and fugitive. Crucial to this worldmaking otherwise, he argues, is Tijuana, Baja California, whose literature presupposes a diffractive, deeply implicated onto-epistemological aesthetics. He has presented his work at the UC Mexicanistas and Latin American Studies Association conferences, in addition to serving as a reader for Lucero, the academic journal of the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Berkeley. Most recently, he has collaborated with poets Omar Pimienta and Ruth Vargas Leyva, whose poetry he teaches regularly.
Project Description: My project consists of three interrelated (and intergenerational) short stories that engage questions of transnational worldmaking and migrant (inter)subjectivity, to adumbrate forms of being and belonging otherwise through the lives, travails and memories of a family from Los Altos of Jalisco as they journey to Tijuana, and then across San Diego to the rest of California in the early 20th century. With the support of this grant, I plan to publish these short stories in the form of two chapbooks, in collaboration with two small, independent presses from Tijuana and San Diego: Metaletras Editorial and Editorial Halfbreed. The first (and shorter) chapbook will consist of a single short story, and the second (and longer) chapbook will consist of two short stories.
Macyn Metten
4th year Undergraduate – Art Practice
Macyn Metten is a fine artist based in Sacramento and Berkeley, California engaged primarily in graphite drawing and oil paint. Much of her work explores existential themes of the discomforts of the human experience entangling both surrealism and realism. Her artwork aims to connect with viewers by offering a window into the connection that is shared among us through a diverse range of creative work. Her most recent work has shifted focus to identifying with femininity and monstrosity. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as the Crocker Art Museum, Axis Gallery, Pence Gallery, and most recently the ACCI Gallery in Berkeley. In 2023, she received an art grant from the Kingsley Art Club to financially support her creative projects. She is currently studying at The University of California at Berkeley to receive her Bachelors in Art Practice.
Project Description: For my senior thesis project, I am taking on the exploration of the monstrous feminine originated by Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. Kristeva and Creed both linked monstrosity to the feminine body and the fear of it. For my project, I want to address how the monstrous feminine is about reclaiming her body and representing it as “otherness.” This project would be a critique on patriarchal and misogynistic norms and ultimately questions the woman’s existential place in society. Instead of seeing the “monster” as a negative trope, I will explore its strength and reclaim the idea of the “monstrous feminine,” which has been used to demonize women, from its historical context of fear and reframing it as a source of power. A key aspect of this project is scale to have this installation looming over the viewer. It is absolutely essential to have this overwhelming presence.
Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán
2nd year MFA – Art Practice
Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán (b. 1999) is a disabled Chicano painter from South Berkeley, California. His work centers the lives of working-class Mexican American communities, merging personal and collective histories with Chicano and Mexican artistic traditions. Using collage, found materials, and saturated color, he builds layered compositions that honor memory, heritage, and place. After studying at Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design, he continued his practice independently before entering UC Berkeley’s MFA program. His exhibitions include Room 3557 Gallery, Marin MOCA, Pt. 2 Gallery, and the RISD Museum. His artist book Brown Eyes from Russell Street is archived at SFMOMA. Muñoz-Guzmán was a finalist for the Headlands Tournesol Award and nominated for the SFMOMA SECA Award.
Project Description: I am an artist from South Berkeley creating work that centers the people, landscapes, and histories of the Bay Area. As one of the first in my family to graduate from high school and pursue higher education in the arts, I carry my family’s image and cultural memory into my practice with pride and purpose. My MFA thesis exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will feature a 6.5-by-12-foot painting on a painting tarp dedicated to my mother and her twin sister, forming a portrait of migration, resilience, and Bay Area life. Funding would support paints, brushes, archival materials, transportation, and videography, advancing my creative research by enabling large-scale explorations of family narratives and material processes within Chicano painting.
NAMI
4th year PhD – Performance Studies
NAMI (he/they/HER) is a fourth-year PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. They co-founded the Bad Asians Working Group, curating events that connect transnational artists, scholars, and community organizers. NAMI also has spearheaded “Abolitionist Futures, Rewriting Justice,” a speaker series on carcerality, race, and sexuality and revitalized Berkeley’s New Play Reading Series to support local Bay Area playwrights. NAMI’s own art practice has led them to create the East Bay site-specific performance "CELESTE" and work with survivors of gender-based violence to produce 4 entirely unique shows with the Gender Equity Resource Center. Their writing appears in MMUF Journal, with work forthcoming in Amerasia Journal. Their dissertation project, DISGRACE!, examines humiliation, not respectability, as a radical ethic for Asian American survival.
Project Description: Dolls of Paradise is a performance-based research project exploring trans and māhū drag as forms of resilience, cultural memory, and ecological care. Centering Pacific Islander nightlife as a site of knowledge production, the project examines how performance generates joy and testimony amid displacement and rising transphobia. Drawing from the bird of paradise plant—a symbol of the Aloha “State” entwined with South African colonial histories—NAMI connects questions of gender, diaspora, and environmental stewardship. The work culminates in a one-night drag and performance event in Honolulu during the 2026 Association for Asian American Studies Conference, featuring collaboration with filmmaker Jalena Keane-Lee and activist Pua Case. Together, they illuminate nightlife as both celebration and a practice of trans-Pacific survival.
Lorain Khalil Rihan
1st year MFA – Art Practice
Lorain Khalil Rihan is a visual artist, storyteller, memory worker and educator living and working on Ohlone land. Her practice is rooted in the remembrance of Palestine — in defiance of ongoing settler colonial erasure. Through printmaking, archiving, socially engaged practice and fiber arts, Lorain explores the intergenerational lived experiences of her family in the motherland and exile situated within a collective memory of Palestine. She is a first year MFA candidate in the Art Practice department at UC Berkeley
Project Description: Lorain is doing research on the historical weaving traditions from al-Majdal, a village located in the northern Gaza Strip. Majdal was once home to about 500 weaving looms. The tradition began to disappear in 1948 when the village was ethnically cleansed. The children of the weavers revived the tradition in the 1980s and 90s. However, in the current iteration of the genocide, the workshops in Gaza have been destroyed and the remaining weavers have fled to Egypt or have been killed. Lorain wants to learn how to weave on a floor, single treadle loom in the Majdalawi tradition as a form of preservation of cultural memory.
Irene Franco Rubio
2nd year PhD – Ethnic Studies; Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, Sexuality + New Media
Irene Franco Rubio (she/her) is a scholar-activist, abolitionist, and organizer from Phoenix, Arizona, and a first-generation Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies, with Designated Emphases in Women, Gender & Sexuality and New Media. Shaped by Arizona’s SB 1070 “show me your papers” era and the banning of Ethnic Studies, her work examines how multiracial coalitions resist immigrant detention, racialized policing, and state violence across the U.S. Southwest. Irene bridges creative practice, public scholarship, and grassroots organizing, collaborating with national justice movements and co-leading creative political education projects, including the #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast. Her research and creative practice center on community creativity as a tool for collective memory, merging scholarship and activism to make critical theory accessible and amplify the voices of communities at the forefront of resistance.
Project Description: Coalition-Building: Visualizing Multiracial Unity through Social Movements is a zine that explores how communities resist immigrant detention and state violence through cross-racial solidarity and creative expression. Combining visual art, storytelling, and digital engagement, the project documents how coalition-building functions as both a record and a catalyst for collective resistance. Rooted in collaboration with immigrant justice organizations and movement archives, the zine highlights how creativity becomes a shared strategy for survival and memory. By merging research, arts practice, and organizing, this project demonstrates how communities create new imaginings of belonging that transcend borders, cages, and criminalization. Distributed in partnership with movement partners and immigrant justice spaces, the zine circulates as a tactile resource for collective learning, solidarity, and abolitionist futures.
Maria Silk
4th year PhD – Performance Studies
Maria Silk is a San Francisco-based artist, choreographer, drag queen, and DJ. Her work takes up queer nightlife’s felt sense of collectivity as choreographic material, creating experiences that invite audiences into the world of the queer underground. A 2017 danceWEB Scholar at ImPulsTanz and a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, Silk has shown work locally at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Cantor Center for the Arts, CounterPulse, Slash Art, and Southern Exposure as well as internationally at Fierce! Festival (Birmingham, UK) and Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia).
Project Description: LIFT funding will support a one-day gathering in San Francisco bringing together DJs, musicians, and queer nightlife performers. Open to the public, the event will honor the aesthetic and sonic practices of Bay Area queer nightlife. The event’s DJ sets and performances will be recorded and archived through a San Francisco internet radio station.
Bhavani Srinivas
1st year MFA – Art Practice
Bhavani Srinivas is an artist working in weaving, metalwork, electronics, and found material. Bhavani engages poetic double meanings and contradictory symbolisms to construct installations that shift between the registers of personal narrative, cultural phenomena, spirituality, and global history. Bhavani holds a BA in Art Practice from Princeton University and is currently an MFA candidate in Art Practice at UC Berkeley. They are a worker-owner of March April Studio, a community art and writing studio in Los Angeles, and she co-runs Corners cutoff, a small press publishing multi-lingual projects.
Project Description: My current project explores relationships to the religious and the pop cultural icon, drawing on multivalent perspectives, such as Hindu systems of materiality, cyclical time, and fan culture. I will create an installation with a handwoven textile that is rubberized to form a vessel for water. This water will circulate through a copper structure. This structure will connect to amplifiers and audio exciters to create a sonic feedback loop in the gallery space. The LIFT Grant will support the materials needed to develop the rubberized textile and test the sound components and fountain pumps of the installation.
Alex K Torrez
2nd year PhD – Sociology; Designated Emphasis in Gender & Women's Studies
Alex K Torrez (they/them) is a Chancellor’s fellow in Sociology. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, medical sociology, science and technology studies. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study. Alex currently holds a position with the University of California, Berkeley’s Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq) working under the Trans/nonbinary Campus Initiatives and works in collaboration with the transgender student wellness initiative (TSWI).
Project Description: As a transgender graduate student, once a competitive athlete in an extremely gendered sport, I lost access to my movement practice when I began medically transitioning. My physical and mental health was negatively impacted as I no longer felt welcomed in athletic spaces and became more alienated from my portrait photography practice as I no longer connected with the mass binary imagery I was once inspired by. I have now completed an ethnographic and interview based research project in the bay area. The preliminary findings demonstrate the hunger in our immediate community for (1) BIPOC-transfeminine representation (2) non-cis movement oriented spaces & places for those early on in their exploration and (3) somatic outlets entirely different from the gendered-movements we previously embodied.
Alder Wheeler
1st year PhD, Environmental Science, Policy and Management; Division of Society and Environment
Alder Wheeler is a disabled artist and PhD student in Berkeley’s division of Society and Environment. Alder is a member of Dr Sunaura Taylor’s Disabled Ecologies Lab, where they explore how disabled ways of knowing can transform land stewardship practice. Their work engages feminist political ecology, critical disability studies, horizontal pedagogies, and participatory action research to co-write with other marginalized land stewards about their experiences of exclusion in the environmental field, and their visions for liberatory stewardship practice. Alder approaches art-making as a practice of community and world-building, with methods spanning cut paper art, natural science illustration, songwriting, zine-making, and music therapy for the dying. They are excited to put their academic and artistic work in conversation with the support of the LIFT grant.
Project Description: Almanacs are annual calendars containing important astronomical data and tide tables, and more recently have been expanded to include anything from recipes to planting advice through place-based submissions from local contributors. The Disabled Ecologies Almanac is a call for disabled artists, writers, and organizers to explore the intersections of disability and environment. Conceived during a 2025 Disabled Ecologies Retreat, the almanac will gather illustrations, comics, photographs, essays, poetry, recipes, selfies, and manifestos from disabled and mad creators who celebrate disabled bodyminds and lands while simultaneously critiquing systems of disablement. Alder will edit and compile community submissions for a crip time-themed inaugural issue exploring porous connections between disabled bodyminds and impaired landscapes across the seasons.