Graduate Fellowships
Norris Center Art + Science Graduate Fellowships
Our annual Art + Science Graduate Fellowships are designed to support graduate students engaging with Art and/or Art + Science Collaborative projects that relate to Natural History or the Natural World. Each fellowship award of $2500 is made possible by the generous gifts of private donors to the Norris Center.
2024–2025 Fellows
Matte Hewitt (MFA, Film and Digital Media graduate student) faculty sponsor Irene Gustafson. Tyler Rai Abramson (MFA Candidate – Environmental Art and Social Practice) faculty sponsor Laurie Palmer. Kate Jaffe (Environmental Art and Social Practice graduate student) faculty sponsor Jonathan Jackson. Rodrigo Diaz Barriga Lopez (DMA, Music Department graduate student) faculty sponsor Ben Leeds Carson.
2023–2024 Fellows
Gonzalo Galetto (PhD Candidate FDM) faculty sponsor Jennifer Parker, Dima Mabsout (MFA Candidate EASP) faculty sponsor Laurie Palmer, Raty Syka (MFA Candidate EASP) faculty sponsor Enrique Leal, Jonas Banta (MFA Candidate EASP) faculty sponsor Jorge Menna Barreto, Alberto M Vazquez (MFA Candidate EASP). *not pictured is Jonas Banta’s collaborator Brooke Thompson (PhD Candidate Environmental Studies)
2023-2024 Norris Center Art + Science Graduate Fellow Projects
Ethograph (comics for a non-human narrative)
2024 Art + Science Graduate Fellow: Raty Syka, Faculty Advisor: Professor Enrique Leal
“I’ve been doing a lot of background theoretical reading that will inform some of the approaches I take (texts in posthumanism, anthropology’s ontological turn, and comics craft/theory). I have also been making pen and ink illustrations – basically, visual development work, trying different experiments about rendering narrative/sensory experience/behavior of coyotes in the comic medium. Essentially, that is my core research question: how to leverage the preexisting tools of comics to tell a non-human narrative? Where to depart from audio-visual comics tradition, and where to leverage it or modify it for a new purpose? I even tried embedding rabbit scent onto a drawing, but while my dog appreciated this, I was unable to smell it with my human nose. In the coming weeks, I’ll be using camera and video traps to gather further reference material from sites at the UCSC campus – places where I’ve made multiple sightings that inspired the focus on coyotes for this project in the first place. I’ll also continue the visual development work, and begin scripting and thumbnailing a draft to show to wildlife behavioral experts for feedback and further development. I have also updated the working title from Coyote Night to Ethograph (a transformation of the word ethogram, behavioral chart, + graph for the visual, but that also conveniently references ethnograph).”
Collective Landscapes
2024 Art + Science Graduate Fellow: Dima Mabsout / Alberto M Vazquez (Collaborative Team), Faculty Advisor: Professor Laurie Palmer
“Over the last months, we have been developing collaborative methodologies for immersive arts field research with groups of undergraduate and graduate students as we look to deepen the way we relate to and understand our place in the landscapes we inhabit. The fellowship has made possible two 3-day trips so far to natural reserves to Big Sur and Fort Ord, where we have been experimenting with approaches and initiating interdisciplinary collaborative research (such as with Gonzalo Galetto through fog explorations and Fort Ord director Joe Miller through sharing of socio-ecological knowledge). The approaches include workshops that awaken sensory perception and observation, a guided tour by ecological, socio-historical context of place, prompts that invite in curiosities and questions, and open research time that immerses participants in the experience. We believe that these gentle structures create fertile ground for new work to emerge. In the last trip to Fort Ord, on the campfire through the night, what emerged was a spontaneous and collective play with shadows of our hands and puppets, music and improvised storytelling. This initiated our questions on oral histories, narratives, storytelling as a form that carries and creates knowledge through and with communities. We intend to continue developing our workshops with more focus on methodologies of story-making starting at Fort Ord. There, we will deepen our research to understand the elements that surround us and how with this knowledge we can co-create narratives of place. Our work will prompt us to reach out and collaborate with researchers at Fort Ord, indigenous cultural workers and leaders that carry traditions of oral history, and Fort Ord as a cultural space that can incorporate surrounding communities.”
Visions of World Renewal: Cultural and Ecological Restoration Along the Klamath River
2024 Art + Science Graduate Fellows: Jonas Banta and Brook Thompson (Collaborative Team), Faculty Advisor: Jorge Menna Barreto
Funds provided through the Norris Center Art + Science fellowship have supported travel and materials for Brook and I to attend significant moments along the dam removal process. We have worked together to produce images and understanding which are already in use to support presentation and analysis of the restoration process. As working with salmon is season dependent, the current influx of fish, who will be accessing the full length of the river for the first time in a century, we will be visiting both with tribal fishers in the lower stretch of the river as well as returning to the sites of the now removed dams this coming week, from September 11th through 14th, with plans to continue visiting throughout the fall and winter as salmon and steelhead continue to arrive. In particular, I also hope we will be able to travel to above-dam tributaries and witness the first new in-migration of salmon and steelhead as they move up into “new” territory. Funding has supported access to these areas and sites, in particular because of their remote and distant nature, a feature common both to subsistence ecosystems and tribal communities. It is our hope and intent that the outcomes of our collaboration will visualize and communicate the many layers of significance in restoration and research that we witness and experience as indigenous people, researchers, and advocates.
Niebla Nocturna
2024 Art + Science Graduate Fellow: Gonzalo Galetto, Faculty Advisor: Professor Jennifer Parker
“ The fellowship has helped with the funding of trips to Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve where I tested specialized imaging equipment and experimented with camera and live projection techniques to produce participatory video performances with fog at night. The tests resulted in positive results implementing live video and sound feedback, and in creating participatory experiences where we sought to understand fog through its atmospheric conditions. The tests often required being responsive to the weather conditions, and at times, experimenting with the equipment in terms of imaging and audio recording and exposing them to the weather conditions during operation as well. The project is close to wrapping up for this fog season, but research will continue next season with new ideas for creating these mediated interactions. The footage recorded is presently being reviewed and beginning to be organized for editing and future exhibition.”
Past Art + Science Residency Graduate Projects
Mapping Sonic Futurities
2021 Art + Science Fellow: Alexander Wand (DMA Graduate Student), Advisor: Alex Jones (Manager UC Campus Reserve)
Mapping Sonic Futurities (MSF) combines sound art, experimental cartography, and ecological research to trace the present and future histories of local ecosystems. The project involves a series of 24-hour ‘sound vigils’ in outdoor spaces and habitats with tenuous futures. During these retreats, the keeper of the vigil commits to being in one location for an entire day and night. For each of the 24 hours, they dedicate time to acts of ecologically engaged listening and sounding. This involves making field recordings of the space, performing music that responds to nearby sounds, and/or sitting in meditation with a focus on different modes of listening.
Fire Followers
2021 Art + Science Fellows: Dav Bell, Advisor: Juniper Harrower
Dav Bell is an artist and independent arts organizer who founded and directs the Los Angeles artists’ project Visitor Welcome Center. He is interested in collaborating with kind people to cultivate tangible and creative connections. Through encounter, relationship building, and humor, he sees art as a possibility for truth and reconciliation. He participates in gift-giving and is interested in how storytelling, lyricism, and craft can flourish in gift economies. He is committed to finding more ways we, as humans and other sentient beings, can thrive together. Prior to making a life in the arts, he worked as a firefighter for the US Forest Service and as a park ranger at the Upper Tampa Bay State Park in Florida. He studied visual art at Metáfora School of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and holds a BFA from the University of California Los Angeles and is currently an MFA candidate in the Environmental Art and Social Practice program at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Finding Nemo Through a Queer Lens: This Time With the Correct Biology
2019 Art + Science Fellows: Paloma Medina (PhD Student, Biomolecular Engineering) and Jessie Kendall-Bar (PhD Student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
Finding Marla is a reimagination of Finding Nemo through a Queer lens. In reality and off the big screen, clownfish like Nemo and Marlin are sequential hermaphrodites and transform from male to female when the matriarch of their colony is removed, such as by death. Once Nemo’s Mother had left, Marlin, being the next biggest fish in the colony, would have transitioned to become the female matriarch. Through this residency, Ms. Medina and Ms.Kendall-Bar worked together to create the text and illustrations for the picture book Finding Marla. This book showcases the sexual diversity of the clownfish and gender diversity in nature.
Testing Flower-Pollinator Co-Evolution Using Printed Artificial Flowers
2019 Art + Science Fellows: Rossana Maguiña (PhD Candidate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), and Colleen Jennings (MFA student), Faculty Advisor: Kathleen M. Kay
The participants in this art/science collaboration explored how changes in plant floral traits shift from one pollinator group to other, a process plays a role in the formation of new species. They used the neotropical spiral gingers (genus Costus) as a study system in Costa Rica and Peru. In this plant group, hummingbird pollination has evolved independently from orchid bee pollination many times over a couple million years. Flowers pollinated by orchid bees and hummingbirds differ in several floral traits, such as flower length, the presence of landing platform, the presence of visually contrasting nectar guides and flower color. The goal was to determine which of these traits attract or deter bees versus hummingbirds in order to understand how natural selection by those pollinator types could drive these pollinator shifts and cause speciation.
To answer this question, Dr. Kay and doctoral student Rossana Maguiña worked with Ms. Jennings to manipulate the floral traits of 3-D printed artificial flowers to quantify pollinator responses. Ms. Jennings designed and printed the artificial flowers that individually alter traits, such as the flower length, the presence/absence of a landing platform, the presence/absence of nectar guides, and the pale versus red overall color. These flowers were exposed to natural pollinators in the field and they analyzed pollinator’s foraging behavior. Pollinators did not visit 3D printed flowers in the field but they visit them in a cage (a controlled environment). They will continue to modify the materials used to try to create more realistic flowers to and test the pollinator response.