We are proud to work with a large diverse community at UC Santa Cruz. People on and off campus have contributed to OpenLab projects, exhibitions, and workshops since 2010. We welcome and enjoy participation from all disciplines and are pleased to serve and contribute to programs across the arts and sciences with the general public. Join us in developing new opportunities for collaborative research aimed at growing the expanded fields of creative research that engage with critical issues around the world.
Professor Jennifer Parker, Founding Director of OpenLab
Parker investigates methods of Arts Integration in Higher Education by combining creative research practices with science, engineering, and technology. As an artist, Parker carves sites for collective entanglement between disciplines. Facilitating, identifying and determining the boundaries of complex, multi-dimensional space with the aim to develop (a sense of) community to encourage learning, and inform and develop the practice of its members.
Professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Co-founder and supporting Director of OpenLab
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz uses computer simulations to explore violent phenomena such as stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts and the accretion of material onto black holes and neutron stars. At 35, Ramirez-Ruiz is the youngest person to be inducted into the Mexican Academy of Sciences.
Gonzalo Galetto, Climate Action Lab Ph.D. Fellow FDM, 2024-2025
Gonzalo is an Argentine-American artist and filmmaker currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Film and Digital Media at the UCSC. His work and research explore contemporary artistic practices responsive to the current climatic conditions and propose a poetics of attention situated in place. He experiments with artistic methods from experimental film and music to create works and situations that engage the elements and the environment and in which the ecological becomes embodied in relation, re-imagining modes of being with more-than-human subjects. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, as a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab he is researching how the expanding field of environmental artistic practices engages with more-than-human and elemental discourses and how contemporary artistic practices can ask ethical and political questions in response to the changing climate from a situated perspective and in relation to land.
More information about Gonzalo can be found HERE
Layla Scott, UCSC OpenLab, Climate Action Lab Water Fair Executive Director
Layla has a passion for water and access to nature for BIPOC individuals sparked the drive to create an event to connect the Santa Cruz community. A water engineer in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at UCSC her research focuses on developing irrigation models and environmental education curricula for youth.
Water Fair 2024 at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Santa Cruz connects her research of water cycles and the environmental impacts to the systems caused by climate change that have occurred in the City of Santa Cruz. A platform to inform the public about water conservation and how they can help protect this natural resource. The water fair team includes Game Design Interns Dorothy Li, Derrick Lai and collaborations with Jennifer Parker UCSC OpenLab Creative Director.
Derrick Lai, OpenLab Undergraduate Intern, Climate Action Lab: Water Fair Game Developer, 2024
Derrick is currently a 3rd year undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. He is interested in the field of robotics and the many positive changes it can bring to the world. His interest also extends beyond the technicals, as he also enjoys game development as a creative outlet, such as designing gameplay and story elements to bring an immersive experience to allow people to see things from a new perspective.
Alexa Burrell, Visiting Artist, Climate Action Lab Fellow 2024-25 & "What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence" exhibition participant 2020-21
Alexa Burrell was born in San Francisco, CA. She is an experimental collage artist who weaves together field recordings, video composites, projections, animations, sculptures and archival materials to create lush fantastical and evocative narratives that compare the emotional and material, natural and technological, and scientific and spiritual.
Find out more HERE
Dorothy Li, OpenLab Undergraduate Intern, Climate Action Lab: Water Fair Game Developer, 2024
Find out more HERE
Hannah Jayanti, Climate Action Lab Ph.D. Fellow FDM, 2024-2025
Hannah is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her work centers process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction as ethical and political practices. Through this lens, she circles around questions of landscape, listening, memory, time, and interdependence. Her work as an educator is focused on mentorship and low-cost media training through nonfiction art spaces and community centers. Her organizing work includes co-creating spaces that model mutual-aid practices while creating surprising futures
More information about Hannah can be found HERE
Saul Villegas, OpenLab Graduate Student Fellow supporting UCSC Science Internship Program, summer 2021-24
Saul's passion for art and technology converged when he joined the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Where he discovered the limitless possibilities of image-making through digital mediums. His mastery of the craft, combined with a deep understanding of design principles and elements, caught the attention of the faculty, leading to his appointment as a Graduate Student Instructor.
More information about Saul can be found HERE
Raty Syka, Climate Action Lab MFA Fellow 2024-2025
Raty Syka (they/she), aka NUMPIE, is a graduate students in the Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. They are a comic artist and illustrator in with a background in sociocultural anthropology, folklore, and American Studies, Numpie makes comics and visual projects based on ethnographic research. Collaborative works highlight stories of agriculture in California - from the sustainable to the surprising.
More information about Raty can be found HERE
Sarah Bird, Climate Action Lab Ph.D Fellow FDM, 2024-2025
Sarah Bird's artwork focuses on relationships with trees in the more than human world at a time of ecological crisis. These relationships comprise spaces inhabited, stories told and remembered, and beings growing and dying. Thinking through methods for being in relation to the arboreal world drives her work. These include attunement to place, the role of awe and affect, and multiple temporalities. Materials include photography, drawing, animation, and film.
More information about Sarah can be found HERE
Lowen Hatano, Climate Action Lab, EASP Alum Artist-in-Residence 2024-2025
an artist who engages with embodiment.
who meditates on the delicate web of our internal and external environments.
through gestures of sensory activation,
to offer space for reflection and remembrance of our ancestral knowledge.
what is the rhythm/temperature of a collective breath?
Anja Ulfeldt, Climate Action Lab, Artist-in-Residence 2024-2025
An artist, educator, and curator with a hybrid practice that floats between installation, performance, and unconventional art facilitation. Anja grew up in Berkeley, CA, and earned her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2001 and her MFA from Stanford University in 2014. She’s a founding member of two artist-run alternative spaces in California, one a Mojave Desert based curatorial project and the other a floating venue for visual art, research and performance built atop a converted potato barge in the Sacramento River Delta
More information about Anja can be found HERE
The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, OpenLab 2021-2023 Virtual Artists-in-Residence
PLANETARY INDIGESTION is a multi-year series of conversations and performative lectures about food, ecology & biotechnology between the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG), UC Santa Cruz faculty and non-institutional expert guests.
More information about the series can be found HERE
Kate Jaffe, Climate Action Summer MFA Fellow EASP, 2023
Kate Jaffe is an educator, weaver, sheep-shearer, quilter, flower gardener, daughter, friend, and partner. Her material practice centers around cloth-making and basket weaving from local materials such as wool, tule, willow, English ivy, nettle, redwood bark, and Japanese indigo from her garden. Kate is the founding Director of Santa Cruz KIN (Kids in Nature), est. 2013, a grassroots, land-based education program which teaches elementary students about the natural and cultural histories of Santa Cruz, alongside social and emotional learning and skill building.
More information about Kate can be found HERE
Kevin Corcoran, Leslie Horwitz & Fernanda Rappa OpenLab Graduate Student Fellows, 2023-24
In their cross-species, cross-disciplinary, collaborative art project “Where Does the Cornfield End?” artists Kevin Corcoran, Fernanda Rappa, and Leslie Horwitz plan to engage in a number of artistic experiments. The project centers on the fate of a sick cornfield, rich with pathogens and parasites. At the site, in Grayson, CA, researchers are using eDNA to show the impact on biodiversity of creating a riparian buffer corridor around the industrially-farmed cornfield. Will this infusion work? We don’t know. We can only see fragments, in the language of DNA left over by generations of sex, death and rebirth. By studying how communities regenerate at the delineation of the two ecosystems, we can learn something about how to build bridges between emergent technologies and emergent strategies of community becoming. Through the languages of DNA, environmental sound, community engagement, and film, this project intends to demonstrate how translation is a transformative force that can talk back.
Simone Johnson, OpenLab 2022-2023 Emerging Artist-in-Residence
During her residency Simone Johnson will engage in a year long creative research project focused on her water futures practice, which explores water and its relationship to understandings of time/temporality/space-time continuums and sense of place, particularly within the context of the Lower and Upper Basins in the western United States.
More information about Simone can be found HERE
Jose Carlos Espinel, Art + Genomics summer 2023 visiting artist in residence from Madrid, Spain
Experimental and multidisciplinary professor, artist, and designer, with a particular interest in mixing emerging and traditional technologies. Currently, his research and creative practice is focused on environmental and social justice, as a founding member of The Algae Society, where he has been experimenting, designing and exhibiting work related to climate change and ocean acidification (www.algaesociety.org).
More information about Jose Carlos Espinel HERE
Jingtian Zong, OpenLab Graduate Student Fellow supporting UCSC Science Internship Program (SIP), summer 2023
Jingtian Zong is a multimedia artist interested in art's power as resistance and social mediation. In the forms of interactive installations, interventions, videos, and adapted objects, her recent work discusses surveillance, collective memories, displacement, and manipulated history in and beyond the contemporary People's Republic of China.
Jingtian's research project for the SIP program examines the complex relationship between gender and cyberspace, following the early spirit of cyberfeminism. Inquiries include: Could we escape gender in a virtual space? How do gender and the Internet shape each other? How does contemporary technology enable and, sometime, hinder revolutionary changes? Drawing inspiration from historical and recent cyberfeminism theories and practices, the SIP interns will learn how to conduct research and address their own understanding of gender and cyberspace through web art, audiovisuals, and other digital mediums.
More information about the project please visit the site HERE
Talula Denison, OpenLab 2023 Summer Intern
During her high school internship, Talula worked with OpenLab to support art + science project development for k-5 grade curriculum as part of the Climate Action Lab initiative. Talula will attend the University of British Columbia, majoring in psychology in Fall 2023.
Annika Berry, OpenLab Graduate Student Fellow supporting UCSC Science Internship Program, summer 2022 & 2023
Annika’s work overlays fictional and documentary storytelling. Her practice fuses writing, animation, improvisation, performance, and collaboration with communities and individuals (in-person and online).
More information at https://art.ucsc.edu/people/annika-berry
Karina Molina, OpenLab Undergraduate Art/Film Student Intern 2022-2023
Fourth-year UCSC undergraduate student double-majoring in Art and Film/Digital Media. As a screenwriter, cartoonist, and multimedia artist, her art normally uses dadaist techniques to explore, deconstruct, and satirize tradition through deliberate irrationality. She hopes to use her experience in OpenLab to further support research and make it more widely known and accessible to general audiences.
Kim Ye, Art + Genomics visiting artist at greenhouse project June 4, 2023
Food, Fertility, and Boarder Control: a multi-sensorial performance through the recent history of East Asian labor and consumption in the US.
Kim Ye (all pronouns, b. 1984, Beijing, China) is a Chinese American multi-disciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video, installation, text, and social engagement. Their work engages gendered constructions around power, labor, and taboo by activating the artist/viewer dynamic to create situations of intimacy and exchange in public space.
More information about Kim Ye HERE
L Gilbert & Dav Bell, OpenLab Fellows GreenHouse Project 2022-2023
In collaboration with OpenLab and the Genomics Institute, The Greenhouse Project will host a series of conversations on GMOs and their complex role in organic and biodiverse farm/garden systems.
The Greenhouse Project is an intergenerational educational space that explores the relationship between art, food, and climate justice. Using a greenhouse as a metaphorical guide, where ideas can be seeded, tended to, and grow. The building of the space will be a series of workshops for students and the greater community to learn about sustainable building practices. The building sits on a 1-acre slope that will be a native grass and wildflower restoration site and a community garden, acting as another catalyst for hands-on educational workshops. The space intends to provide access to community and student-led teaching and learning experiences that center on the core themes of art, food, and climate justice. The site for the Greenhouse Project is the Center for Agroecology Farm at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is organized by Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA candidates Dav Bell and L. Gilbert.
More about their project can be found HERE
Elizaveta Sokolova, CITRIS Workforce Innovation Intern for OpenLab summer 2023
Liza's academic experience as an undergraduate at UC Sanata Cruz in Computer Science. She works with a multitude of programming languages and is familiar with and knowledgeable in computer science and mathematical theories. She is interested in robotics and its various applications, from automation to sensing and exploration of the world as they relate to climate change and the environment. |
Zahra Baxi, CITRIS Workforce Innovation Intern for OpenLab summer 2022
An undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying Human Centered Design aspiring to become a Video Game Designer. She hopes to use her skills and experiences from childhood in Animation and Storytelling with her current interests and work in User Experience Research and Design to create engaging video games for change. As an intern for OpenLab, Zahra researched algae related to climate resilience focusing on edible species around the globe by creating a series of fun facts as digital art for social media that will launch in Fall 2022.
More information about Zahra can be found HERE
Rebecca Ora/rora, OpenLab Graduate Student Fellow supporting UCSC Science Internship Program, summer 2021 & 22
Rebecca Ora/rora is a mixed-media artist, performer and scholar based in California whose darkly humorous socially-engaged work explores comedy, discomfort, conflict, and the limits of "appropriate" representation of trauma.
More information at www.rebeccaora.net
Annette S. Lee | Artist | Astronomer, OpenLab Faculty Fellow 2021-22
Strives to create transformative communities responding to and generating paradigmatic shifts at the intersection of art-science-culture. Currently Annette is a Professor of Astronomy & Physics at St. Cloud State University (SCSU), an Honorary/Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in the Centre for Astrophysics, an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a Professional Visual Artist.
Anya Chytrowski, OpenLab Undergraduate Art Student Fellow/Intern 2021-22
Supporting OpenLab projects including The Algae Society: Bio Art & Design Lab
Madison McCartha, OpenLab Graduate Student Fellow 2021
A poet, critic, and multimedia artist. FREAKOPHONE WORLD (Inside the Castle, 2021) is their debut book of poetry and visual art. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
More information at www.madisonmccartha.com
Danielle Siembieda, OpenLab Art/Sci In-Residence 2019-21
An Art Practitioner creating works in the intersection of technology and the environment. Her experience bridges the gap between arts marketing, curation and practice. Her portfolio of work spans out into Social Practice, Institutional Critique, Bio Art, Eco Art, New Media and Intervention Art and is the Senior Arts Manager for the City of San José
Dorothy R. Santos, Graduate Student Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence Exhibition 2020-21
A Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow.
Angélica Dass, Visiting Artist Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
An award-winning photographer born in Brazil and based in Spain. Her practice combines photography with sociological research and public participation in global defense of human rights. She is the creator of the internationally acclaimed Humanæ project—a collection of portraits that reveal the diverse beauty of humanity.
Amy Youngs, Visiting Artist Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
Creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines.
Avital Meshi, Visiting Artist Fellow UCSC DANM MFA Alumna '18, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
Meshi’s practice focuses on performance and AI technology. In her work she examines the influence of AI algorithms on our behavior and on our social environment. Following ideas of Posthuman Performativity, Meshi believes that agency emerges within the entanglement between the human and the non-human. She holds an MFA from The Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a BSc and an MSc in Behavioral Biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Gina Czarnecki, Visiting Artist Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
Ginas' art is about human form and function, developments in biotechnology, the intertwining histories of medicine, myth, history and ethics. Her work is a rich and deep tapestry of complex interwoven meaning combining the biological how we feel the world with far more personal and sensual observation of how we touch and express ourselves in it.
Paloma Medina, Graduate Student Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence Exhibition 2020-21
A queer Ph.D. student in biomolecular engineering & bioinformatics, working in a genetics lab. Paloma studied the ways in which sex chromosomes have evolved in different animals. Paloma found that sex chromosomes, just like any part of DNA, changes over time. The idea that sex chromosomes changed over time shifted the way they think about sex from something stagnant to something dynamic and diverse.
Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Visiting Artist Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
An artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
Natalia Spritzer, OpenLab UCSB Undergraduate Art Student Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence exhibition 2020-21
Her interests in applied psychology and education drives an investigative lens into transforming my experiences of childhood and trauma into visual works. Together, the digital and the analog methods I use allow me to integrate personal symbolic themes and juxtapose these with the narrative.
A.M. Darke, Faculty Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence Exhibition 2020-21
Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Art & Design: Games & Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games, XR, and new media.
Jessie Kendall-Bar, OpenLab Environmental Studies Graduate Student Fellow Data As Art Exhibition and What Makes Us Human:An Art & Genomics Convergence 2020-21
A scientist by training, Jessica's research has spanned a wide range of topics including oceanic geochemistry, octopus behavior, marine arthropod mating behavior, moray eel behavior, human sleep deprivation, and marine mammal neuroscience.
Silvana Moiceanu, OpenLab Undergraduate Art, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science Student Fellow '21 Winner of UCSC BioDesign Challenge
Aspiring UX Researcher & Designer with current goal of finding full time employment in HCI or Design with an emphasis on cognition + visual design. Through UX I aspire to develop tools that have a direct impact on comprehensively bettering peoples lives.
Juniper Harrower, OpenLab Environmental Science Graduate Student Fellow 2015-20
Specializing in species interactions under climate change, Dr. Juniper Harrower works at the intersection of ecology, art, activism and policy. She uses rigorous science methods and a multimedia art practice to investigate human influence on ecological systems while seeking solutions that protect at-risk species and promote environmental justice.
https://www.juniperharrower.com
Ivaylo Hristov, OpenLab Artist-in-Residence Fall 2019
A multidisciplinary artist and designer, from Sofia, Bulgaria. He always looks for something new and unexpected in his work. Especially interested and curious to combine and use different materials with traditional techniques of painting and drawing, often with scientific articles as part of his creative pursuits and extensive research on a chosen topic.
Leslie Thompson, OpenLab Undergraduate Art Fellow & Artist-in-Residence 2012-19
Artist, sculptor, fabricator and collaborator runs Santa Cruz StitchWorks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-thompson-a14a8582
Axelle Boyer, OpenLab UC Placemaking Graduate Student Fellow, History of Art & Visual Culture, The Collective Fabric Project 2018-19
Research interests: visual culture of Africa and its diasporas; French colonialism; memory and the archive(s) of slavery; performance; textiles, clothing and the body. The Collective Fabric project is meant to create a safe environment on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz for students and faculty to come together and participate in the creation of a collective textile. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/the-collective-fabric-project/
Karolina Karlic, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, Unseen California 2018-19
Unseen California is founded by Karolina Karlic, Associate Professor of Photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Karlic is creative director, curator, and a participating artist. Working along side with collaborator, Joseph Gallegos, Assistant Professor of Film at California State University Los Angeles, the two artists share the intent to engage diverse audiences and foster urgent dialogue between the arts and ecology specially to the California landscape.
Roxy Davis, OpenLab UC Placemaking Follow, Social Psychology Graduate Student, Preventable Deaths, Santa Cruz County Jail, 2018-19
Research includes criminalization of poverty and homelessness, coercive mechanisms in the court system (e.g. plea bargaining and pretrial detention), PIC abolition.
The research team for this project is composed of Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, Film and Digital Media professor Sharon Daniel, Sociology professor Jenny Reardon, and Sin Barras members Leslie Potenzo and Rebekah Mills.
Jails are spaces of exclusion where prisoners are rendered invisible to the general public. Their invisibility makes them vulnerable to neglect and subject to treatment that the general public would find unacceptable, if they could see it. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/preventable-deaths/
Bella Bobrow, OpenLab UC Placemaking Follow, Undergraduate in Architecture (individual major) and Neuroscience, Connecting People to Trees, 2018-19
Working at the intersection of in placemaking, face-blindness, wellness architecture, facial recognition algorithms, and how art can make science more accessible – not necessarily in that order. The goal of this project was to explore the emotional connections people have with trees. Especially on campus, trees are the primary markers of place and central to the community’s identity. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/connecting-people-to-trees/
Wes Modes, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, A Secret History of American River People 2018-19
A Santa Cruz artist focused on social practice, sculpture, performance and new media work. He is deeply involved with community life, collectively organizing and serving on commissions, review boards, and nonprofit boards. A Secret History of American River People is a project to build a collection of personal stories of people who live and work on the river from the deck of a recreated mid-century shantyboat over a series of epic river voyages.
Barbara Benish, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, SSPalo Alto Cement Ship 2018-19
An artist, curator, writer and farmer. She studied Ethnography & Art at the University of Hawai’i, and Painting at Claremont Graduate University, receiving a Masters of Fine Arts in 1988. Benish has also studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm (scholarship) and Academia del Bellas Artes in Mexico. Throughout the 1980’s Benish was engaged first-hand in the historical changes in Central Europe, culminating in an exchange exhibition of Czech and U.S. artists she co-curated in 1989, the first in fifty years. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/s-s-palo-alto-project/.
Enrique Leal, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, Santa Cruz Migrant Working Community Poster Project & M.U.R.A.L. (Making Urgent Radical Art League) and Faculty Fellow, What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence Exhibition 2020-21
A visual artist and Associate Professor of Print Media at the Art Department of the University of California in Santa Cruz. Originally from Recife Brazil, Leal has worked as a printmaker in the U.S.A. and Spain before receiving his B.F.A. from the Polytechnique University of Valencia, M.F.A. and PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla La Mancha (UCLM), where he established the Print Media Area as a professor and researcher from 1998-2014.
https://www.enriqueleal.org http://placemaking-uc.org/project/m-u-r-a-l-making-urgent-radical-art-league/
Yolande Harris, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, Melt Me into the Ocean 2018-19
An artist and researcher exploring ideas of sonic consciousness. Her projects consider techniques of navigation, expanding perception beyond the range of human senses, the technological mediation of underwater environments and our relationship to other species. Walking is central to her practice, creating sound walks that awaken our perceptions within both natural and urban environments.
Sophia Lev, OpenLab UC Placemaking Follow, Undergraduate Art Student, Preventable Deaths, Temperature Check, 2018-19
An interactive, collaborative performance and lecture/discussion series. She hosted monthly events on campus to ‘check the temperature’ of a given site as part of an ongoing collaborative performance that creates space for discussion and reflection about the relationships between students, natural space, and this institution. https://placemaking-uc.org/project/temperature-check/
Laurie Palmer, OpenLab UC Placemaking Artist, M.U.R.A.L. (Making Urgent Radical Art League) 2018-19
A. Laurie Palmer’s work is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Art Professors Laurie Palmer and Enrique Leal are supporting the M.U.R.A.L. (Making Urgent Radical Art League) project.
http://placemaking-uc.org/project/m-u-r-a-l-making-urgent-radical-art-league/
Gene Felice II, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media MFA Graduate Student Fellow and OpenLab Artist-in-Residence 2012-19
A hybrid artist exploring the intersections of interactive systems that bridge creative research and practice across Art, Science, Design & Education. Founding Director of Coaction Lab dedicated to the compulsive exploration of unstable relationships between organisms, environments and technology; examining site specific histories, stories and inspiration.
Kathleen Deck, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '19
An emerging artist contemplating science, art, the environment, and climate change in her work. Through her artistic research practice, she seeks to create work that challenges viewers to become actively engaged and educated in environmental issues with the hope that an informed public can help forge a more sustainable society.
Colleen Jennings, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow 2016-18
A multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on emerging relationships between technology and visual culture.
Ann Altstatt, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '18
An interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the geologic and non-linear time, the intersection of scientific inquiry and mysticism, and the hidden stories of everyday objects.
Mia Falch Yates, OpenLab Scholar-in-Residence '17
Investigates new methods and perspectives on disseminating art historical museum collections for a contemporary audience and especially for new user groups, or the current "non- users". With a focus on media and senses in the museum experience, it is the goal to discover new ways in which cultural history and heritage can be relevantly revisited by people and communities of today.
https://pure.itu.dk/portal/en/persons/mia-falch-yates(53f3a454-f2a6-4700-9361-5fdbd52e8246).html
Scott Tooby, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow 2016-17
A sound artist and musician synthesizing sound, music, and technology to explore new avenues of sonic expression and story telling.
Sean Pace, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow 2014-16
Sean Pace is an artist from Asheville, North Carolina with a background in kinetic sculpture and social activism. His interests have been in energy, social and cultural development, and personal exploration of mechanics with reappropriated found objects, often obscuring meaning with charged metaphors and playful forms of hearsay.
David Harris OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media MFA Graduate Student Fellow 2014-16
His research is on understanding the relationship between science and art through transdisciplinary collaborative processes.
Zach Corse, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media Graduate Student Fellow 2014-16
Specializes in computer graphics, physics, digital art, fabrication, and architectural design. What unifies all of these is my passion for everything geometric. I'm currently interested in projects that mix machine learning, physically-based simulation, applied mathematics, computational geometry, and fabrication. I'm happiest when prototyping new ideas and pursuing novel research that makes full use of my diverse background.
Timothy Furstnau, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '16
Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator based in Oakland, CA. He received an MFA from the Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC in 2016. His writing and text installations have appeared in many print venues and public spaces.
Andrea Steves, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media MFA Graduate Student Fellow '16
An artist, curator, researcher, and organizer currently based in Brooklyn. Her recent projects deal with museums and public history, monuments and memorials, and the complex legacies of the Cold War. Andrea also works in the collective FICTILIS and the Center for Hydrosocial Studies, and is co-founder of the Museum of Capitalism. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center For Capitalism Studies at The New School.
Sudhu Tewari, OpenLab Cultural Musicology PhD Digital Art and New Media MFA Student Fellow 2012-16
An electro-acoustic composer, improvisor, and tinkerer in sound, kinetic and interactive art. He has been called a professional bricoleur, junkyard maven and young audio-gadgeteer.
Nathan Ober, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media MFA Graduate Student Fellow 2014-15
An artist whose work crosses disciplines from installation and performance, to video and sound. His interdisciplinary works examine concepts of human perception and natural phenomena. Nathaniel’s current research is focused on astronomy and astrophysics, which deal with techniques of sonification and processes that attempt to expose our innate connection with the universe.
Kristen Gillette, OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media MFA Graduate Student Fellow 2014-15
Kristen Gillette is an artist-designer with a penchant for practical magic and results-driven mischief-making. This usually amounts to a mix of breaking down oppressive systems, challenging dominant narratives, time travel, and/or striving to reimagine and rebuild from multiple perspectives in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area and beyond.
Geoffrey Thomas, OpenLab PostDoc 2014-15
Creates interactive, multimedia experiences that entertain, inform, and engage. I've done this as a designer, artist, curator, teacher, and manager, imagining, designing, prototyping, developing, organizing, and analyzing creative projects.
Gabriela Espinal, OpenLab Undergraduate History of Art and Visual Culture and Feminist Studies Fellow '15
Support Oceanic Scales and Digital Arts and New Media MFA projects. Currently works as an experienced instructor, videographer, and social documentarian. Skilled in Curriculum Development, Cinematography, and Video Editing.
Andre Marquetti , OpenLab Cultural Musicology PhD Digital Art and New Media MFA Student Fellow 2010-14
Born in Ouro Preto, Brazil, musical studies included –Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (1991) –Stockhausen Summer Courses (1999-2001) –Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (2006-09) earning a Master of Arts in experimental composition (2009) and a Doctorate of Musical Arts (2015) at the University of California Santa Cruz (2009-15) algorithmic compositional track.
Dr. Aristea Fotopoulou, OpenLab Visiting Scholar 2014
Dr Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written about digital networks and feminism, and recently, on information politics, knowledge production, and digital engagement an currently is Principal Lecture (Associate Professor) in Media and Communication Studies, at the University of Brighton. She is the author of “FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND DIGITAL NETWORKS: Between Empowerment and Vulnerability”, published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Joel Dittrich, OpenLab Visiting Artist 2014
XR / Web Developer, main tools Unity / C# and React / WordPress. Based in Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Available globally – remote and on location.
Mircea Teodorescu, OpenLab Electrical and Computer Engineering-in-Residence 2014-15
Co-Taught the a couple of courses with Director Jennifer Parker as part of the OpenLab Mechatronic Collaborative Research cohort.
Zoe Manoguerra, OpenLab Undergraduate Anthropology Student Fellow 2012-13
Fabrication and electronics support for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-manoguerra-073a8a82
Alejandro Goena, OpenLab Undergraduate Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Student Fellow '13
Fabrication and technical support for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandro-goena-3a164246/
Jasmine Sien, OpenLab Undergraduate Computer Science Student Fellow '13
Programming, visualization, and fabrication for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.
Tyler Smith, OpenLab Undergraduate Computer Science Student Fellow 2013-14
Programming for an Arduino-controlled LED-based visualization of California oceanographic data for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.
Tyler Smith, OpenLab Undergraduate Computer Science Student Fellow 2013-14
Programming for an Arduino-controlled LED-based visualization of California oceanographic data for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.
Eve Warnock, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '13
A multimedia artist, working in film, performance, electronics, sculpture, and light. She is a concept storyteller who creates interdisciplinary teams that explore topical issues through research, social experiments, and community engaged artworks.
Terri Williams, OpenLab Scientist for Blue Trail 2012
A comparative ecophysiologist at the University of California- Santa Cruz. She is the Director of the Center for Marine Mammal Research and Conservation at UCSC. For the past 30 years her research has investigated the physiology of large mammalian predators.https://williams.eeb.ucsc.edu
Dr. Robin Dunkin, OpenLab Ph.D. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Graduate Student Fellow 2012-13
Research to improve more effective communicate with the general public about science, as part of a study on Latex balloons, a major cause of death in marine turtles. Since graduate, Robin has become an Assistant Teaching Professor at UCSC as a physiological ecologist and instructor for the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department.
John Matthias, OpenLab Visiting Artistin-in-Residence '12
A musician, composer and physicist. In 2008, he won the PRS Foundation New Music Award with Jane Grant and Nick Ryan for the development of a huge sonic installation across the UK entitled 'The Fragmented Orchestra'.
Nick Ryan, OpenLab Visiting Artistin-in-Residence '12
A high-end sound designer practicing globally, renowned for creating experiences that push the boundaries of listening and engage new audiences with audio.
James Guillochon, OpenLab Astronomy and Astrophysics Graduate Student Fellow 2010-2012
I worked primarily with Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Doug Lin, Erik Asphaug, and Stephan Rosswog. In 2013 I began my current stint at the ITC as an Einstein Fellow, and became an ITC fellow in 2016. In addition to my research, I designed Vox Charta, an astro-ph discussion website for astronomy and astrophysics departments, the Open Supernova Catalog, a complete catalog of supernova data, and the Open Tidal Disruption Catalog, a catalog of suspected tidal disruption events.
Uliana Popov, OpenLab Computer Science Graduate Student Fellow '11
Research Assistant for Scalable Scientific Data Management in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. Data visualization and analysis. Visualization Laboratory, Computer Science Department, UCSC, under direction of Prof. Alex Pang (UCSC) in collaboration with Dr. Katrin Heitmann (LANL) and Dr. Salman Habib (LANL).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/uliana-popov-bb08701/
Anahí Caldú Primo, Astronomy Research Intern OpenLab Student Fellow '11
Outreach officer - vSPL at Institut für Astrophysik, Department: Galaxies and cosmology Interstellar Medium and High z-QSOs, Universität Wien Mexico
Gabriela Espinal, OpenLab Post Undergraduate Student Fellow '11
A Public Outreach and Science Visualization Specialist for UC High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC). Currently a computer science PhD student at the University of Utah, studying Graphics and Scientific Visualization.
Noar Movshovitz, OpenLab Earth & Planetary Sciences Graduate Student Fellow '11
A postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research involves developing and applying numerical techniques to study the physical process affecting solar system bodies small (moons, comets, asteroids) and large (Jupiter and Saturn).
Joe Cantrell, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow 2010-11
Makes electronic feedback soundscapes using only discarded, obsolete and / or broken technology. It's a physical collaboration: the machines listen to themselves and and act accordingly. I offer suggestions to them and we make sound together. 2017 PhD, Music, Integrative Studies, University of California, San Diego
Elizabeth Travelslight, OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '10
A mixed race (Filipinx/White) artist with a research background in mathematics, feminist/postcolonial histories/futures of science/technology, and contemporary art. She serves as adjunct professor of Critical Studies (Math/Science) at the California College of the Arts, Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, and is a proud collaborator at IAFS, (it's a free school).
Drew Detweiler , OpenLab Digital Art & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '10
An interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of interactive video, performative technology, and interaction design. His work is informed by years of practical experience inspiring passive audience members into active participation through Theater of the Oppressed techniques. He is interested in finding new modes of engagement with technology that encourage social interaction in public space.
Jill Naiman, OpenLab Astronomy and Astrophysics Graduate Student Fellow '10
Research includes data visualization, scientific digitization with machine learning methods, image processing. Studied feedback in star clusters with numerical simulations, and later simulations of galaxy formation at UC Santa Cruz.
Professor Erik Asphaug, OpenLab UCSC Faculty Fellow '10
Research Interests include asteroid and comet geophysics, Mars surface evolution, planetary collisions of all kinds, and the origin of planets, satellites, meteorites and their parent bodies. I am also interested in spacecraft exploration of comets and asteroids, and zero gravity experiments to understand the rheology and petrology of small bodies and accreting planetesimals..
https://eps.ucsc.edu/faculty/Profiles/emeriti.php?uid=easphaug
Claire Dorman, OpenLab Astronomy and Astrophysics Graduate Student Fellow 2010-11
A machine learning scientist with a focus in recommender systems, committed to building science literacy and promoting technical careers. I have experience teaching children and adults; managing programs and teams; and organizing large career development events.
Professor Raja Guhathakurta, Astronomy & Astrophysics Professor 2010
Interested in galaxies as sites of chemical evolution where heavy elements are synthesized in stars. These heavy elements are directly related to the complexity, diversity, and richness of life on Earth.
https://www.astro.ucsc.edu/faculty/index.php?uid=pguhatha
Kyle Lane-McKinley., OpenLab Digital Arts & New Media Graduate Student Fellow '10
An artist and educator in Santa Cruz, California, where he lives with his partner, Madeline Lane-McKinley, and their daughter Tuli. Works as a Program Manager at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Jack O'Neill, OpenLab Undergraduate Art Student Fellow 2009-2011
An art student and designer, Jack O'Neill was instrumental in supporting and developing OpenLab contributing to the logo design, website development, adapting research spaces in both the arts and science, and creating the first exhibition catalogs with art student Amy Boewer. Both were key players in the development of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center bringing a wealth of student perspective and talent.
Amy Boewer, OpenLab Undergraduate Art Student Fellow 2009-2011
An art student and designer, Amy Boewer was instrumental in supporting and developing OpenLab contributing to the logo design, website development, adapting research spaces in both the arts and science, and creating the first exhibition catalogs with Jack O'Neill. Both were key players in the development of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center bringing a wealth of student perspective and talent.